Rosen

Today the Washington Post finally digs into what the DSM reveal about the UK's doubts about the path towards war.

I'm not sure if Jay Rosen's recent Pressthink pleas helped the Post decide to do a front page news analysis of the DSM, but it looks like there is a growing movement to reanalyze the build-up to war in Iraq -- which is good news for The Echo Chamber Project.

During the build-up, the US media largely ignored many of the controversial details of the proposed intervention that were coming in from the overseas press. But now that the war is becoming more and more of a political liability for our allies, we're starting to see a lot more dissent and leaks that are reintroducing a lot of questions about the purpose and intent of the war.

The Post distances itself from the "He Said / She Said" debate over the DSM documents by starting two paragraphs with allegations from both sides -- "Critics of the Bush administration contend" & "Supporters of the administration contend." The Post then discloses the intent of their article:

But beyond the question of whether they constitute a so-called smoking gun of evidence against the White House, the memos offer an intriguing look at what the top officials of the United States' chief ally were thinking, doing and fearing in the months before the war.

There was a lot of lively political discussion about the DSM over in the comments section of Rosen's post -- and in the last comment Rosen speculates

I think the Brits and getting them on board was a substitute United Nations for the Bush war planners & strategists. Bush was prepared to go without even the fig leaf of the UN. They figured that America plus one was coalition enough, and the British were the one.

I think Rosen's speculation is probably right, and that the historical record of US documents would bear this out if any of it is ever leaked or formally declassified. But there's already enough evidence for this by connecting the dots of the Bush Administration's rhetoric and behavior towards the UN leading up to the war...

Rosen also asks, "Put that way, how much choice did Tony Blair really have?"...

I didn't attend the BloggerCon III conference back on November 6, 2004, but I was able to listen to the Journalism session because IT Conversations recorded the entire conference and made it available online for anyone in the world to hear.

Rosen's comment at the end of the session jumped out at me because I think he has an important insight for how blogs may be a more natural way for how people consume information. Blog readers start from the opinions of the bloggers they trust, and then they read the factual details if there's some type of conflict or argument -- or if they're interested in learning more.

Yesterday, Dr. Cline posted his analysis of The Echo Chamber interview with Jay Rosen.

He also posted a blog pointer to this site and gave an ECP plug in his latest podcast, which sent a spike of activity my way.

We had some good follow-up discussion about a number of points that Dr. Cline brought up. Dr. Cline is already starting to pick up some of the same themes after analyzing two interviews. He makes the following two claims:

Claim: The press experienced the emotion of inevitability in regard to the build-up to war because of its structural inability create a debate independent from civic institutions (e.g. Congress) and powerful civic actors (e.g. President Bush).

Analysis
Open-source project: The Echo Chamber
Interview: New York University Journalism Professor Jay Rosen
Running themes [tags]: 1. Perceptions of the danger Iraq posed to the U.S. and the Middle East. [danger]; 2. The voice of debate: who was covered; who was ignored. [voice]; 3. Motives of political and journalistic actors as portrayed by those actors. [motive]; 4. Arguments for war as given and portrayed. [argument]; 5. Journalistic practice in regard to covering political and journalistic actors. [practice]; 6. Relationship between the public and television news. [public/TV]

Dan Gillmor points to Lance Knobel's lecture titled "Nullius in verba: navigating through the new media democracy." The Latin phrase comes from the Royal Society which translates to "Don't trust in anyone's word."

Since we shouldn’t trust any one person's word, then is there a way that we can trust the Swarm Intelligence contained within the Wisdom of Crowds? And is there a way that we can somehow extract this swarm intelligence through a technological tagging mechanism such as del.icio.us?

I'm going to the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC next week, and the more that I look at the line-up of A-List bloggers and other movers and shakers, the more I'm thinking that it would be a good idea to take along my GL-1 miniDV camera and shotgun & lapel microphones to some conduct some impromptu interviews with the panelists and conference participants.

So my networking strategy could be to interview some of the A-listers for my film and produce a short video piece to display my sensibility for videography and content. I've donned the photojournalist hat at a number of film festivals like Sundance and SXSW in order to network with the indy film world's big wigs, and it seems the fashionable thing to do these days.

June 29th, 2004
Transcription by Volunteer Citizen Journalist Ted Sawchuck

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Why don't you introduce yourself here and the role here at NYU?
JAY ROSEN: Well, I'm chairman of the journalism department and professor of journalism here since 1986, and I write about the press.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay. And your name is?
ROSEN: Jay Rosen.
ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: Okay, can you do that just one more time with your name?
ROSEN: My name is Jay Rosen, and I'm chairman of the journalism department. And I've been teaching here since 1986. And I write about the press.

I have a lot of ideas for how to create a new model for journalism, but it doesn't seem like the newspapers are in any rush to fundamentally change their business practices. Jay Rosen comments "No R & D rush. No large investment in the future. No siren call to find the new model."

I've been independently doing this R&D work through the process of making my documentary on the failures of the mainstream media leading up to the war in Iraq. I hope to provide a proof of concept of these models through the production of my film. I submitted the following comment to Rosen's site in the hopes that I can gain more awareness and institutional support for what I'm doing. I'm working on an implementation roadmap.

I've been getting up to speed on the latest and greatest web technologies, and one of the most promising finds that I've made so far is with CivicSpace Labs.

When I interviewed PressThink's Jay Rosen last June, he had mentioned that his nephew Zack was an open-source programmer who was working with the Dean Campaign. DeanSpace was the community-building platform built on top of the open-source content management platform of Drupal. DeanSpace has continued development as CivicSpace and has an impressive range of community-building and collaboration tools that should come in real handy for managing a decentralized volunteer labor force.

David Weinberger gave a speech at the Harvard Blogging conference last week about tagging and taxonomies.

Weinberger eloquently described the dilemma of losing meaning during the quantization process by explaining how the Dewey Decimal Classification system's religion category gives 88 full numbers to Christianity and only one number each to Judaism and Islam -- a disproportionate number of slots were given to one religion over these others due to a cultural bias and a finite number of available categories.