Free Republic

Media types often have a habit of masking their true beliefs in their online blogs in attempt to maintain the fiction that they are "unbiased." One such blog that comes to mind is the Daily Nightly blog of Brian Williams in which he attempts (not always successfully) to hide his liberal bias to an extent that it comes off as quite inane. In fact, your humble correspondent has labeled the Williams blog as the Daily Dully. In stark contrast to the Williams ennui is the new John Stossel blog of ABC News, John Stossel's Take, which began less than two...

Glenn Beck is an American hero. Considered a buffoon at best by his liberal detractors, Beck is in fact a showman par excellence who draws on the passions of a small and alienated minority to create a television program that has done more to keep Americans safe than 10,000 public-service announcements. And for that, he deserves a medal from the Department of Homeland Security. DHS, you might recall, issued a report in April on the threat posed by right-wing extremists, a report that many conservatives angrily denounced as a crude smear. Michael Savage, a radio host known for his scabrous...

What are the twitter names and facebooks that are carrying the news out of Iran?

Thirty years ago, the Ayatollah Khomeini used audio cassettes and videotapes to spread his message of dissent and Islamic revolution across Iran. The old theocrat and his followers knew how to exploit the audio-visual media available to them to stoke rebellion. A generation later, young Iranians have again taken to the streets, this time to protest the "landslide" re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a vote that his reformist opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, insists was rigged. But this is a very different media environment. The Iranian government can ban and restrict the professional journalists who are trying to cover the demonstrations....

NEW YORK — Google and Facebook have rushed out services in Farsi. Twitter users have changed their home cities to Tehran to provide cover for Internet users there. Others have configured their computers to serve as relay points to bypass Iranian censorship. In the aftermath of the disputed Iranian election, Internet companies and individuals around the world have stepped in to help Iranians Twitter delayed a scheduled maintenance shutdown so that people could continue to access the microblogging site while scores of Americans set up remote proxy servers so Iranians could access blocked Web sites from inside their country. All...

In Chicago in 1968, anti-war protesters chanted "The Whole World Is Watching." They were talking about television cameras that showed police beatings on the evening news. More than 40 years later, with a massive movement aimed at reversing election results and possibly even toppling a regime in Iran, online networking is instantly sharing protesters' actions. And the whole world is watching. "That wasn't true in Chicago," Clay Shirky, a consultant and New York University instructor who focuses on the social impact of the Internet, said of the slogan. "Now, it's true." From the moment Iranians took to the streets of...

NY- The Internet is by far the most popular source of information and the preferred choice for news ahead of television, newspapers and radio, according to a new poll in the U.S. But just a small fraction of U.S. adults considered social Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace as a good source of news and even fewer would opt for Twitter. More than half of the people questioned in the Zogby Interactive survey said they would select the Internet if they had to choose only one source of news, followed by 21% for television and 10% for both newspapers...

CAIRO – Iran clamped down Tuesday on independent media in an attempt to control images of election protests, but pictures and videos leaked out anyway — showing how difficult it is to shut off the flow of information in the Internet age. The restrictions imposed by the government made such social-networking sites as Twitter and Flickr more prominent — with even the U.S. State Department calling on Twitter to put off a scheduled shutdown for maintenance. Iranians were posting items online, but it wasn't known how much of that information was being seen by others inside the country. And although...

Clinton: "I wouldn't know a Twitter from a tweeter" & Iran Protests US Meddling June 17, 2009 5:54 PM ABC News' Kirit Radia reports: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is fighting for Iranians' right to tweet, but by her own admission she knows little about how the micro blogging site works. "I wouldn't know a Twitter from a tweeter," she conceded this afternoon at a press conference with her Israeli counterpart. Despite her acknowledged novice, Clinton recognized that the website has played a role in allowing Iranians to bypass official filters and organize against what many in the Islamic Republic...

The Iranian government has made it increasingly difficult for citizens to use the Internet, but tweets — and constant “retweets” — about violence and protests can still be found. The most closely watched Iranian accounts include persiankiwi, who is posting updates about the “Sea of Green” protest march (green is the color used by presidential candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi), and Change_for_Iran, who has tweeted information on the uprising among students. Others, such as Raymond Jahan, who tweets under StopAhmadi, are posting photos of protests in Tehran. Another user, IranRiggedElect, posted links to an image of a resistance flyer and a...

The U.S. State Department doesn't usually take an interest in the maintenance schedules of dotcom start-ups. But over the weekend, officials there reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12. Twitter moved the upgrade to 2 p.m. P.T. Tuesday afternoon — or 1:30 a.m. Tehran time. (Read "The Iran Election: Twitter's Big Moment.")When Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone founded Twitter in 2006, they were probably worried...

"Iran Elections," "Iranians," "Tehran" and "Mousavi" (also spelled "Moussavi") were the trending topics on Twitter for a whole day on Tuesday, June 16. When four out of ten trending topics are all about the same issue, you know the world is focused. This blog is testimony to how the social media tools of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube can help fight back censorship in the 21st Century. According to NY Times article, it was noted that Twitter was aware of the power of its service in this regard. Acknowledging its role on the global stage, the San Francisco-based company said on...

NEW YORK (Reuters) – MySpace, the social network owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, said it will cut 30 percent of its staff to lower costs as it struggles to stay popular in the face of rising competition. MySpace will be left with about 1,000 employees, it said in a statement released on Tuesday. The company declined to say how many people work at the service, but the percentage suggests that about 400 people will lose their jobs. The cuts, which were presaged in several blog reports in recent weeks, are the biggest move so far by new management at...

iranianphoenix: @fashionpirate now you know why the American ancestors gave their descendants 2nd amendment - protect 2nd amendment! #IranElection less than 20 seconds ago from web

Tehran's authoritarian leaders clearly were caught off-guard. They had managed to take down the telephone system opposition supporters used for texting but for some reason were slow to eliminate other social media. As open defiance of the election results broke out, citizen journalists used new media to spread the word. And the whole Web was watching.

TWITTER has cancelled a "critical" maintenance operation today to stay online as protesters in Iran use the site to get their stories out. The Iranian Government has managed to shut down most forms of communication with the outside world since Friday's disputed election win by incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

When thousands of Iranian citizens flooded the streets to protest the controversial results of last Friday’s presidential election, news viewers in the U.S. rushed to Twitter to protest what they saw as a lack of coverage of Iran on CNN. Their complaints caused an explosion in the use of a new Twitter hashtag, #CNNfail, which became one of the top ten trends on Twitter on Saturday and continued on Sunday. Snarky tweets included, "Dear CNN, Please Check Twitter for News About Iran," "The revolution started on the weekend, people! Give them a break. ," and "Howie Kurtz:’It was middle of...

If you are following the amazing events currently unfolding in Iran in the wake of their turbulent election, then YouTube will give you a much better sense of what is happening than the mainstream media. Yesterday, while the dramatic protests were unfolding, CNN held an extended forum on healthcare. The other cable news channels weren't much more enlightening in their coverage of events from Iran. Where does a web surfer go to find out about the turbulence taking place there? For me, and a lot of other people, the natural gathering place for a video view from Iran is YouTube...

Yesterday is the day when Twitter thoroughly beat CNN. Badly beat CNN. Embarrassingly beat CNN. And most other USA-based media too.Over on friendfeed we’ve been talking about this for the past 12 hours. Here’s one thread on CNN’s horrid news judgment.This second thread is interesting because of the number of interesting news sources linked to by various people. Don’t miss the photos and videos. Great examples of photojournalism.ReadWriteWeb wrote a good post to CNN.I’ve been clicking “like” on the best items about Iran that have come through friendfeed. The photo above I found on TwitPic here. Pulitzer Prize winning material.