C4FCM Blog

Dayna Cunningham: Thank you for reminding me that we are talking about institutions and cultures and politics and that media are nothing more than tools within these contexts. We need social organizations, not just technology. Drat. I was hoping for a quick fix.

Let us hope that this will apply to all aspects of media coverage...
Hopefully this review is a good sign.

Gates orders review of policy barring military-coffin photos

By The Associated Press
02.11.09

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Robert Gates ordered a review yesterday of a Pentagon policy banning media from taking pictures of flag-draped coffins of U.S. military dead, signaling he was open to overturning the policy to better honor fallen soldiers.

At least two Democratic senators have called on President Barack Obama to let news photographers attend ceremonies at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and other military facilities when military remains are returned to the United States. Obama told reporters at his Feb. 9 news conference that he was reviewing the ban.

"If the needs of the families can be met, and the privacy concerns can be addressed, the more honor we can accord these fallen heroes, the better," Gates told reporters at a Pentagon news conference yesterday. "So I'm pretty open to whatever the results of this review may be."

Gates said he initially asked for the ban to be reviewed a year ago, and was advised then that family members might feel uncomfortable with opening the ceremonies to media for privacy reasons or pressure to attend them despite financial costs.

"I think that looking at it again makes all kinds of sense," Gates said. "And we will do so, and I've put a fairly short deadline on that effort."

Shortly after Obama took office, Democratic Sens. John Kerry and Frank Lautenberg also asked the White House to roll back the ban that was put in place in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush.

However, some exceptions to the policy were made, allowing the news media to photograph coffins in some cases, until the administration of President George W. Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a Feb. 9 letter to Obama, Lautenberg said the Pentagon should develop a new policy to allow "respectful" news coverage while protecting the privacy of the victims and their families. Generally, the remains in the caskets are not publicly identified.

"I respectfully urge you to work to bring an end to the misguided policies of the past that seek to hide the sacrifice of our soldiers and the public recognition and pride that should accompany it," Lautenberg wrote.

He said the Bush administration "effectively censored images of flag-draped caskets from appearing in media coverage."

A leading military families group says the policy, enforced without exception during the Bush administration should let survivors of the dead decide whether photographers can record their return.

John Ellsworth, president of Military Families United who lost a son in Iraq in 2004, said the survivors should be able to decide whether the coffins should be photographed.

I personally have my doubts on the merits and sustainability of obsessive focus on the local, and worse, on the latest born of 'cool' beats, the 'hyperlocal'...

But the World Economic Forum's proposal for "a new global, independent news and information service whose role is to inform, educate and improve the state of the world," to quote its report, leaves me with plenty of questions. To start with, about its independence, as a quick look at who is on its Council on the Future of Media may prompt one to raise such questions...

Here is the link to the WEF's 4-page proposal, entitled "Future of Media," which starts on page 180:
http://www.weforum.org/pdf/globalagenda.pdf

followed here below by a review of the WEF's recommendation based on a report by Cliff Kincaid of of Accuracy in Media, much of which I agree with.
What do you think?

For lack of GOP message guru Frank Lutz, it was a project with no name. And yet it was one of the (many) precedents set during an historic election. Commissioned by Obama for America campaign, GIS consultant Karsten Vennemann used opensource components, including OpenLayers, to map voter registration in battleground states. By combining millions of public voting records with daily updates from on-the-ground troops, these interactive map helped organizers priori to map voter registration in battleground states. By combining millions of public voting records with daily updates from on-the-ground troops, these interactive map helped organizers prioritize canvassing efforts. Used in about 12 battleground states, the opensource maps proved to be a progressive tool in an already progressive campaign.

In the wake of an ESRI proposal for NationalGIS, we take a moment to reflect on how and why opensource components came to be part of the Obama mapping stack.

Wired posted this article about the many expanding uses of Twitter...including many examples of inanimate objects (lights, washing machines, computers) and living organisms (plants) triggering an auto-twitter to a recipient:

We are proud to announce the next release of the bilumi platform and website. Have a look and let us know what you think!

How can consumer concern about business practices be leveraged for systemic change? Progress may require us to speak the language of industry; to provide detailed reports describing what customers will pay for improvement.
Rahala Alam begins her internship with bilumi.org today. She is investigating how companies value the concerns of their customers. That [...]

Don't you go and think that Obama is the only political figure who recently engaged his country's youth in the political debate successfully. His now Russian counterpart, President Dmitry Medvedev, just like before him Vladimir Putin, is at the top of his game in this area too - as the MT story here below shows.

Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia's few remaining independent newspapers, is burying this month its fifth murdered journalist in the past eight years. [see AP and Moscow Times stories here below].