Fast, fair Internet in U.S.

U.S. falling backward on broadband access and Internet speed.

There's a digital divide in our country whereby middle-class kids like my daughters grew up with computers in the home, but kids in poor rural areas and inner cities don't have access to computers or fast Internet. Here are videos of rural Southerners asking the government in 2009 to step in and help folks get broadband.

Big Internet providers such as Verizon, Comcast, AT&T DID NOT APPLY for any of the billions in stimulus grants for building out broadband infrastructure, according to the Wall St. Journal, because recipients of our tax money had to agree to respect Net Neutrality or Internet Non-discrimination.

Last August, the now-defunct Olbermann show on MSNBC (now owned by Net Neutrality foe Comcast) did a strong segment on Net Neut.

Beware: "Drudge Exclusive"

Perhaps Matt Drudge should stick to aggregating content from elsewhere (with revved-up headlines) rather than "report" -- as demonstrated by this 1999 "world exclusive."

And as demonstrated by his 2007 "exclusive" in which he accused CNN reporter Michael Ware of "heckling" Republican senators during a news conference in Iraq and "laughing and mocking their comments." Drudge's evidence-free charge -- based on an anonymous "official" -- was picked up by rightwing blogs and the Washington Times.

It wasn't just Fox News and TV news. . .

...that conveyed BigGovernment.com's false impressions about ACORN, leading to the group's demise. The NY Times "Public Editor" laughably tried to defend an aspect of that paper's bogus coverage.

Video distortions by bogger (and later, MSM)

US Dept of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod was fired last July by the Obama White House soon after BigGovernment.com posted a 1 minute/40 second video excerpt purporting to show that, during a speech to the NAACP, Sherrod boasted about discriminating against a white farmer while she was a federal agriculture employee during the Obama administration. Actually, she was describing events in the 1980s when she was Georgia field director for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a nonprofit that had grown out of the civil rights movement to help Black farmers; she was not a federal employee at the time.

MORE IMPORTANTLY, a fuller version showed that Sherrod told the story to illustrate how she had overcome her racial hostility toward whites and ultimately helped the white farmer save his farm.

BigGovernment is headed by Andrew Breitbart, a former DrudgeReport staffer.

Months earlier, other selectively-edited tapes distributed by Breitbart's BigGovernment.com (played repeatedly on Fox News and elsewhere) helped put the anti-poverty group ACORN out of business. Rachel Maddow dissects the distorted presentation that doomed ACORN.

What if...

...twitter existed at time of Civil War? (H/t Taylor & WashPost)

...new communications technology existed at time of Woodstock Music Festival in 1969?

You want a glamorous career as a journalist?

Cute video on launching one's journalism career. (H/t Carly & Carly's mom)

2008: Mayhill Fowler of HuffPost 'Off the Bus'

Mayhill Fowler says she didn't hide that she was recording ex-President Clinton's angry words about a Vanity Fair reporter, while he greeted voters in public as he campaigned for his wife in June 2008. BUT Clinton obviously did not know Fowler was a HuffPost "citizen journalist." Should she have ID'd herself? (She clearly got a more honest take from Clinton than if he'd known she was a journalist.)

Should public figures know nowadays that anything said -- especially rants (or racism) -- in public will be recorded and on record forever? Example A, example B.

Mayhill Fowler's earlier reporting scoop that launched "Bittergate" uproar.