Old Media Giving Way To The New Web Media

GOODBYE PRESS CORPS… HELLO WEB CORPS
Obama Holding Online Chat On Economy

Picture from HuffingtonPost

President Brack Obama kicked off a first-of-its-kind Internet era Town Hall at the White House on Thursday, by taking questions posted on WhiteHouse.gov by online readers. In opening remarks to kick off the virtual Town Hall Obama said the precedent-setting online town hall meeting was an "an important step" toward creating a broader avenue for information about his administration.

The AP is reporting on a near avalanche of newspapers that are either closing down their print operations or making severe cuts. Apparently things aren't looking up for old media:

The pall looming over U.S. newspapers grew even darker Monday as Gannett Co. informed most of its employees that they will have to take another week of unpaid leave this spring, while a Michigan daily unveiled plans to close its print edition after 174 years.

And The Plain Dealer, Ohio's largest newspaper, also ordered pay cuts and 10-day furloughs for nonunion employees Monday to cut costs as advertising revenue drops.

The moves were just the latest sign of the distress afflicting newspapers across the country as they try to cope with a dramatic shift in advertising that is forcing publishers to figure out how to survive with substantially less revenue.

The report is overflowing with newspapers across the country that have been forced to implement more and more drastic cost saving efforts in order to stay afloat. Now, its been clear for quite sometime that the newspaper industry has been hurting but it seems that the situation continues to worsen:

Like most businesses, newspapers have been hard hit by the deepest recession since the early 1980s. But the blow has been especially devastating for newspapers because they were already losing readers and revenue to the Internet, where news can be easily found for free and the advertising rates are substantially lower.

The Internet's allure, coupled with the punishing recession, have caused annual advertising revenue to shrivel by 20 percent to 30 percent at some newspaper publishers since 2006.

Not surprisingly the AP skips over an important factor in these papers' collective downfall. That factor being their obvious and undeniable bias for the conservative message and against the progressive message. While it is certainly true that old media's failure to quickly adapt to a new media world has been one of the main causes of their struggle it is equally true that their bias toward uncritically forwarding the talking points of the far right conservative message machine, which often denigrates any left-of-center message, has left their former readers, who are increasingly turning away from conservative ideology, looking for other information sources. Obama very wisely continues to take advange of that trend.

Touch Screen Voting Systems Used In Collin Co. Flawed

Collin County voters have been voting on Diebold Election Solutions DRE touch screen voting systems, like the machine pictured left, since the March 4, 2004 primary election. (Following a year-long failed attempt to sell its e-voting subsidiary, the parent Diebold company renamed its wholly owned election system subsidiary "Premier Election Solutions" and gave the business unit its own management team and board of directors in August 2007.)

The newer version voting machine pictured right was used for the first time in Collin Co. during early voting for the November 2008 general election. The older version of the same voting machines used in Collin County since 2004, were used on Election Day 2008.

Premier (Diebold) Election Solutions admitted in a California state hearing Tuesday that the audit logs written by its voting system software miss significant events, including the act of someone (election clerks, judges or other) maliciously or accidentally deleting votes on election day.

The company acknowledged that the problem exists with every version of its GEMS tabulation software prior to GEMS v1.18.24 used nationwide. (This then would include the Premier (Diebold) election system used in Collin County, Texas as well as six other Texas counties.)

The revelation confirmed that a problem noted in a report released two weeks ago by the California Secretary of State's office, has widespread implications for election jurisdictions around the country that use any version of the company's Global Election Management System (GEMS) software to tabulate votes.

The GEMS software is used to tabulate votes cast on every Premier/Diebold touch-screen or optical-scan machine, and is used in more than 1,400 election districts in 31 states. Collin County use Premier/Diebold systems exclusively, therefore the GEMS software counts every vote countywide.

The audit log system on Premier Election Solutions' electronic voting systems fail to record the wholesale deletion of ballots, even when ballots are deleted on the same day as an election. That's the statement made by Justin Bales, Premier's Western Region manager, at a State of California public hearing on the possible decertification of Diebold/Premier's system in California.

An election system's audit logs are meant to record all activity during the system's actual counting of ballots, so that later examiners may determine, with certainty, whether any fraudulent or mistaken activity had occurred during the count. Diebold's software fails to do that, as was recently discovered in Humboldt County, CA, and later confirmed by the CA Secretary of State.

When election officials in Humboldt County tested the reported audit failure by intentionally deleting more than two dozen batches of ballots from their system during the November general election, the Premier/Diebold logs did not show that ballots had been deleted. The flaws, built into the system for more than a decade, are in serious violation of federal voting system certification standards.

BradBlog further reports:

In addition, the software was discovered to have a "Clear" button which, when pressed, would actually delete the contents of an audit log without even asking for confirmation from the user. That, despite repeated federal and state testing and certification of the software which failed to notice the egregious programming flaws in violation of federal voting system standards requiring indestructible logs to track all system events.

The flaws should have kept the systems from receiving certification at all.

Premier, formerly Diebold, Election Solutions is headquartered in Allen in Collin County, TX.

Read more at:

• BradBlog: Diebold Admits Audit Logs in ALL Versions of Their Software Fail to Record Ballot Deletions
  
• Wired Magazine: Diebold Admits Systemic Audit Log Failure; State Vows Inquiry
• California Secretary of State's report (.pdf) on the audit log problem

Obama Enlists OFA In Fight to Pass Budget

President Obama will kick off an all-out grass-roots effort today urging Congress to pass his $3.55 trillion budget, by calling on the Organizing for America (OFA) network of supporters to help "win the debate between those who marched in lockstep with the failed Bush economic policies and now have no new ideas versus the Obama agenda which will help us manage the short term economic crisis and puts us on the path to long term prosperity." David Plouffe, who was Obama's campaign manager and is now an adviser to OFA, and Mitch Stewart, Director of Organizing for America, sent e-mails to the OFA mailing list over the past several days signaling the ramping up of the campaign for the president's budget.

"In the next few weeks we'll be asking you to do some of the same things we asked of you during the campaign -- talking directly to people in your communities about the President's ideas for long-term prosperity," Plouffe wrote in his email.

An accompanying OFA website page asks the 13-million-strong supporters receiving the emails to either "Call Congress" or "Join a Canvass."

Read more about this story in the Washington Post:

Voter ID Bill Passes Senate On Party Lines

After a marathon all-night session that lasted more than 24 hours, the Texas Senate, convened as the Committee of the Whole, passed Senate Bill 362 requiring that voters present a photo identification to vote on a party line 19-12 vote on March 11.

While proponents of Texas voter ID legislation argue that it's needed to combat voter fraud, there is no evidence that widespread fraud has occurred at any point since records have been kept.

Voter Fraud is the claim that large groups of people knowingly and willingly give false information to establish voter eligibility, and knowingly and willingly vote illegally or participate in a conspiracy to encourage illegal voting by others.

Any claim that voter fraud is rampant in Texas is false.

Texas voter ID legislation, called SB362, might be better named for its true purpose: The Voter Suppression Act of 2009. As Glen Smith, a fellow blogger, put it so well:

Republicans will force Texas citizens to go through multiple contortions just to exercise their right to vote.

People who may be blocked from voting include:

• A recently married or divorced woman whose last name or address isn't matched up.
• A college student whose permanent address is different from voter registration address.
• A person whose had their identity stolen (and had their social security number frozen).
• A person whose driver's license has expired and who doesn't have a social security card -- or a birth certificate to get a duplicate.
• A person whose utility bill isn't in my name.
• An older person who has stopped driving and allowed their driver's license expire.

The only answer to these bureaucratic snafus is that voluntary election judges will be given the discretion to decide. For the first time since the Voting Rights Act, a local volunteer will be able to deny someone the right to vote based on appearance. For instance, if you've dyed your hair or look a little older than your ID picture.

Any Election Judge could refuse to allow a person to vote, based on the Judge's subjective opinion that the voter doesn't look like their Driver's License picture.

Read More:

• Click to play Texas Voter Twister.
• Burnt Orange Report: TX House Elections Chair Todd Smith (R) Finds Public Anger on Voter Id Law at Bedford Town Hall
• Dallas Morning News: Texas Senate committee approves voter ID bill, will face tougher test in House