The word of the week is “transparency.”  No, this isn’t the vapid hopey-changey wordage that the Obama campaign and administration has been using for the past two years, rather the transparency I’m speaking of here involves the literal process of revealing truths, exposing potentially negative material and providing a fair playground on which lovers of rational thought can explore and determine reality for themselves.  At the end of the day, transparency is all about providing access to information and ideas, while shifting power to the people to subsequently formulate conclusions.  This week, two transparency medals of honor should be given out – one to the Sunlight Foundation and the other to Andrew Breitbart (naturally).

First and foremost, in a bid to once again outdo itself in the categories of “way too cool” and “ultra useful,” The Sunlight Foundation has created a timely democracy tool that offers the American public a first-hand look into the opinions and past work of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan.  The new project, called “Elena’s Inbox” takes Kagan’s public e-mails from her Clinton administration years and organizes them in an easy-to-view format, thus providing unprecedented access and perspective.  In an e-blast from Sunlight yesterday afternoon, Jake Brewer wrote,

All of the emails sent and received by Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan during her time in the Clinton White House were recently put online… [We] built a site to take Elena Kagan’s emails and make them readable…While we’re in the middle of Kagan’s hearing for the Supreme Court, it’s fascinating to get a sense of her through her public emails.

In the past, I’ve voiced concern over Kagan’s take on the first amendment, so I personally plan to sift through her e-mails to gain a better sense of her worldview and how she’ll function on the Supreme Court. This website couldn’t have come at a better time, as the American public (and Congress) learns about the woman who might very well partially shape American law for decades to come. (more…)

Who knew that George W. Bush had such powers over the natural world? According to some pundits, Hurricane Katrina was Bush’s fault, as was the tsunami in Indonesia and now – if you believe James Ridgeway in Mother Jones – that Bush’s policy is responsible for the devastating effects of the 7.5 earthquake that decimated the poor country of Haiti.

But during the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, we could depend on such ridiculous musings as Mr. Ridgeway displayed. I haven’t done enough research to determine if Bush was the most reviled president in our nation’s history – that might well have been Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican President — but it’s not that hard to figure out that his coverage by the media was historically the most relentlessly hostile.

I first started writing my op-ed columns during the Clinton administration and while I may have disagreed with most of his policies I never stooped to the insulting, vitriolic language routinely leveled at President Bush. What also amazed me was the lack of outrage by the president and his administration officials. There is always the possibility that I might have missed their fury because the mainstream media was unlikely to report anything other than leftist propaganda. But I was a columnist for the only New York newspaper that covered Bush honestly and without bias from 2002 to 2008, when we died as a print publication. (more…)

As a scientist, I have long been troubled by the way the mainstream media covers science in general and the environment in particular. Long before “global warming” became a watchword and Al Gore started burning tens of thousands of gallons in aviation fuel to lecture people around the world about their profligate energy use, journalists routinely butchered scientifically-focused stories so badly that it would make a high school physics teacher cringe. While many people have been shocked to learn how close the ties between leading global warming alarmists and some environmental reporters are, the only surprise for many of us in the scientific community is that it has taken this long to reveal those connections. For the truth is that global warming coverage in the mainstream media is merely a symptom of a larger disease.

The latest boil to burst forth upon the body of environmental journalism began to fester on Thursday, January 7, when the USEPA announced that it was proposing the latest, greatest and most-badly- needed-ever smog standard. (Officially the pollutant is “ground-level ozone”, but we’ll stick with “smog” for convenience). Mainstream media outlets everywhere fell over themselves to heap praise on the EPA for imposing a standard that administrator Lisa Jackson described as “long overdue.” This lead, from the Chicago Tribune’s lead environmental reporter/head Sierra Club cheerleader Michael Hawthorne’s January 8 story, was typical:

“Chicago and other urban areas across the U.S. would need to clamp down harder on air pollution under tough smog limits proposed Thursday by the Obama administration, which scrapped a George W. Bush-era rule that ignored the latest scientific advice.”

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Andrew Breitbart has already welcomed you all to Big Journalism. Now I’d like to add my voice to his.

As you can see from our logo, Big Journalism will be a throwback in spirit to the freewheeling moxie of the glory days of American newspapers, long before a “school of journalism” was a gleam in some college provost’s eye, and before reporters got hired more for their telegenic qualities than their writing, reporting or critical-thinking skills.

So let me be blunt:  we’re not here to compete for Pulitzer Prizes, to sit on committees, to scratch each other’s backs on the weekend television wagfests or to conform to some arbitrary code of ethics cooked up in the days when the mainstream media was the only game in town, and had already begun to cozy up to the government and the establishment, thus abandoning its constitutional mission of keeping a finger on the pulse of America, and an eye on the crooks:

Listen, I spent 25 years working in the MSM, beginning at the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, where a young pianist fresh out of the Eastman School of Music was turned into a pretty good police reporter in three months flat.  I made friendships there that have lasted a lifetime, worked with colleagues who went on to become important editors at outfits like Knight-Ridder, the AP and USA Today, as well as national sports columnists and star magazine writers.  I moved on to the San Francisco Examiner where, even as the paper’s classical music critic, I had a front-row seat for some of the biggest stories in recent American history, including the Peoples Temple disaster and the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk.  And then I moved to Time Magazine in New York City, where I spent 16 years writing about music and reporting from locations all over the world, particularly Berlin, Eastern Europe and the old Soviet Union.  It was a great life, and I don’t regret a minute of it.

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