I was busy yesterday--went to an R.E.M./Modest Mouse concert in Raleigh (very hot in open-air pavilion, but loved it). Anywho, got home to see that I'd received the email announcement that ProPublica has gone online!  I looked back to see if anyone mentioned it here and couldn't find it in a diary title (maybe it's mentioned in comments somewhere, but there are too many to read 'em all.

Considering the behavior of the MSM, I am very excited to have this new source of news:

http://www.propublica.org/

I'm hoping that this independent, non-profit will be a wonderful source for everyone who cares about getting down to the nitty-gritty, and will provide great fodder for discussions on sites like MyDD.

If you're not familiar with ProPublica, see below to read what they have to say in their Welcome letter (sorry, I don't quite get how to do blockquotes properly):

Crossposted at Ich Bin Ein Oberliner.

Time Magazine's Joe Klein got his undies in a bundle when a commenter on his group blog, Swampland asked him to discuss the nature of his military sources. The commenter wrote:

Of course, it is very likely that Joe Klein's sources include many of the retired generals mentioned in the NYT article - the ones who spread disinformation to United States citizens over the public airwaves. And there is no reason to expect them to be more truthful to Joe Klein than they were on the air. So what about Klein's other sources? I am not asking him to name them, rather I am requesting that he engage us in a short discussion about how he views the information being fed to him in light of the recent verification of a program that many of us have suspected for a very long time. I realize that one must trust somebody in order to form an opinion so lets talk about how that trust is established.

(More after the fold)

Chris Matthews, host of the MSNBC political show "Hardball" doesn't know how to keep himself from getting into trouble.

Matthews fired a salvo at the Clinton campaign this morning after both he and his MSNBC colleague Shuster were privately and publicly rebuked for recent comments deemed misogynistic or inappropriate.

Appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe, the Hardball host went off on the Clinton press shop, calling them "knee cappers" who were "lousy" and delve in the business of "intimidation."
This man has become a total disgrace to the media networks, and his bias towards Clinton is rampantly evident. I think the time has come for Matthews to be censured for his insensitive and inappropriate comments, and the network needs to set an example with all journalists that work for their organization, that these type of comments have no place in the news and media framework of journalistic broadcasting.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/15 /matthews-calls-clinton-pr_n_86812.html

Please join me in voicing your concerns by submitting your comments to the executives of MSNBC and the General Electric Corporation that owns NBC and its affiliate news network.

Send your comments to: Letters to msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10285339/

You can also write to:
MSNBC on the Internet
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052

NBC News
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10112

I'm watching MSNBC right now. Or not really watching, but it's on in the background as I'm working on my laptop.

The anchor goes live to a town hall in Wisconsin with Chelsea Clinton, where she is taking questions at Marquette University.

Whenever I write about progressive TV, I inevitably get a healthy dose of criticism in the comments from folks who think that progressive TV should be dispassionate, non-partisan, objective, and truth-focused - essentially, a recreation of PBS.  (In fact, the last post featured a commenter who asked why more progressives don't just support PBS.)  I also get a reasonable amount of pushback every time I suggest some variant on the notion that progressives should develop a mirror image of Fox News - a hyper-partisan, foaming-at-the-mouth progressive channel.

For the record, I don't think that creating a mirror image of Fox News is a good idea, for several reasons.  One, I don't think progressives react well to that style of news, and a progressive channel that can't do well within the progressive base is a non-starter.  Two, I think Fox News isn't so much a conservative channel as a Republican Party establishment channel.  As Eric Boehlert pointed out earlier this week, Fox's cozy relationship with the Republican Party is now putting its audience share at risk, and I'm not sure I want that kind of future for a progressive TV channel.  Finally, I think the core tenet of progressivism - "we're all in this together" - simply doesn't have room for Fox's aggressive, divisive, insipid style.

On the other hand, I firmly disagree with the notion that progressives need to build their own PBS.  Many progressives seem to think that it's possible to build a TV channel which trades in fully objective journalism, and that doing so would benefit the progressive movement as much as Fox has benefited the conservative movement.  I think that it's both impossible and non-beneficial for the progressive movement besides. Follow me across the flip for details.

Yesterday while at a campaign stop in SC, Governor Mitt Romney had a "heated" exchange with AP reporter Glen Johnson. The video can be found here.

Johnson interrupted Governor Romney's pontification on not having lobbyists "running" his campaign. Johnson observed that Ron Kaufman is a lobbyist and is a Senior Adviser to the Romney Campaign. Romney defended his point, not contesting that Kaufman was a lobbyist (he undeniably is) but saying that if Johnson had listened he said that there were no lobbyists "running" his campaign, citing his campaign manager and deputy campaign managers were not lobbyists. Romney later continued the confrontation and his staffers told Johnson that he should "Be Professional".

And they're right, Romney was mid-sentence when he was interrupted saying, "I don't have lobbyists tied to my..." and there are any innumerable ways that sentence could end.

Yesterday, as we all know, the Washington Post saw fit to elevate a whisper campaign to the front page of the newspaper.  The Post quoted extensively from charges about Obama's background without bothering to call them false or to refute them.

CBS featured the Post article on its website with the headline "Obama Dogged by Muslim Rumors."  As Greg Sargent put it:

Look -- Obama is not "dogged by Muslim rumors." He is the victim of a smear campaign based on lies. These two things are not the same. And incidentally, to whatever extent Obama is "dogged" by these rumors, surely this will only be facilitated when news orgs like WaPo fail to make a serious effort to knock them down before printing them.

The Washington Post tried to defend itself yesterday.  The author, Perry Bacon, sent out this email:

I thought the facts that 1. these falsehoods persist and 2. Obama make mentions of his time living in a Muslim country on the campaign trail as part of his foreign policy were both worth remarking. I think the story makes clear, including in the candidate's own words, he is a Christian.

This is precisely the problem.  Nowhere in the Washington Post story, of course, are these stories called false. 

The Post quotes the "candidate's own words" and nothing but the candidate's own words.  It does absolutely no reporting as to whether one side or the other is speaking the truth, even implying through its quoting of multiple sources of the smear that the charge has some basis.  And the Post calls Obama's words "denials," as Steve Benen puts it, "as if the attacks might have some merit."

Second, Bacon essentially blames Obama for the smear campaign against him, citing Obama's mentions of his childhood in Indonesia, as if they provoked and justified the response.

The Columbia Journalism Review slammed the article last night, calling it "the single worst campaign ‘08 piece to appear in any American newspaper so far this election cycle." 

Yesterday, Jeff Jarvis announced that he's been awarded a two-year, $100,000 grant to fund entrepreneurial journalism.  Jarvis is a journalism professor at CUNY, and has many years of experience in media and media criticism, having worked at Entertainment Weekly, TV Guide, the Chicago Tribune, and a whole host of other venues.  This semester, Jarvis is teaching a course on entrepreneurial journalism; his students design entrepreneurial projects meant to shake up the world of journalism.  The $100,000 grant will go to seed some of the top ideas from the class.

Jarvis should be commended for his project on entrepreneurial journalism, and I think this grant soundly affirms the importance of the project.  Entrepreneurial journalism attempts to find new ways to make journalism sustainable and relevant in our cultural and economic climate.  This idea is incredibly important to the progressive movement.  After all, the present crisis in media is really the combination of two troubling trends: one, the increasing militancy of conservatives in bullying and taking over purportedly objective media; and two, the decreasing number of resources devoted to high-quality journalism, partially the result of the media conglomeration of the 1990's.  These are monumental problems for progressives, as they immeasurably contribute to the strength of the conservative movement.

Indeed, journalistic entrepreneurialism has a very comfortable home in the progressive movement.  Every progressive blog, to some degree or another, is an exercise in journalistic entrepreneurship.  Innovative projects like ePluribus Media, Assignment Zero, and Real TV were started by progressives or have goals explicitly focused on spreading progressive ideas through journalism.  As interesting as some of these projects are, I suspect that Jarvis's students will come up with still more ground-breaking sustainability mechanisms for full-time journalism, and I'll be very interested to see the results.

For tonight, I'd love to hear about other projects I haven't listed here.  What have progressives been doing to create new, sustainable, entrepreneurial ways of doing journalism?  Some of the most obvious sustainability mechanisms - volunteer power and donations (ePluribus), crowdsourcing (Assignment Zero) and subscription-based journalism (Real TV) - have already been tried, with varying degrees of success.  What other ideas can we drum up?