Public Opinion

On July 28, 1932, at the command of President Herbert Hoover, police and soldiers led by Gen. Douglas MacArthur attacked and destroyed the camp of the Bonus Army, a group of thousands of World War I veterans and their families and allies who had spent the spring and summer protesting the unemployment created by the Great Depression. The violence, in which two veterans were killed and dozens of people were injured, shocked the American public and helped to ensure the victory of Franklin D. Roosevelt over Hoover in that fall’s presidential election.

Last June, Khaled Said, a twenty-eight-year-old Alexandrian, suffered a vicious public beating at the hands of Egyptian police. Several witnesses documented the assault with cell phone cameras. Said apparently died from his wounds, but the police claimed he had choked to death on illegal drugs. Outraged Egyptians posted contrary evidence on Facebook pages and on YouTube.

On Sept. 6, 1791, a government worker named Robert Johnson rode his horse through a Pennsylvania forest. An unlucky man, Johnson. He was assigned to collect the first domestic tax ever imposed by the U.S. government--a whiskey tax designed to help pay down the nation's mounting debt.

Irrespective of your personal feelings about WikiLeaks, the model it pioneered has challenged traditional journalism models and serves as a harbinger of change for 2011. WikiLeaks-esque tools supporting a new generation of whistleblowers are facilitating fundamental changes in the relationships among sources and journalists. These tools can disseminate exceedingly large amounts of information within remarkably short time frames and challenge journalists, who necessarily must utilize new technologies to vet, manage, source, and expose the needles in the haystack.

When Sarah Palin used the term “blood libel” to describe purported attacks on her and the Tea Party movement in the wake of Saturday’s tragic shooting in Tucson, some were left wondering why the former governor would use a phrase historically associated with anti-Semitism.

Judging by the last two weeks, being an enemy of Julian Assange is only marginally less stressful than being Julian Assange. Amazon, PayPal, MasterCard, and Visa, which all moved to cut ties with Assange's WikiLeaks after the site's release of diplomatic cables, have been the targets of distributed denial-of-service attacks from a group that calls itself "Anonymous." There is nothing fancy going on here. DDoS attacks simply aim to send more traffic to a target site than it can handle, slowing it down or making it temporarily unavailable.

To protect the national heritage of a country and to promote cultural expression—it sounds like a daunting and impossible task.

Recent policy discussions, technological advancements, and transnational discussions beg for some sort of authoritative viewpoint on how to go about doing this. From European opposition to the latest draft of the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) to threats of Quran burning in a Gainesville, Fla., church, the intersection of culture and public policy is ripe with unanswered questions.

Originally published at the Center for Media Justice’s Media Action Grassroots Network.

Minneapolis, MN — From a Latino leader in South Minneapolis, to a Seneca Nation elder, to a South Minneapolis hip-hop artist and organizer, to a rural newspaper editor, more than 700 Minnesotans demonstrated that the future of the Internet matters during an August 19th, 2010 Townhall with FCC Commissioners Copps and Clyburn—while 1,100 more watched online through a live feed by the Uptake MN.

The string of acronyms in the headline translates to “vote for New America’s panels for this year’s 2011 SXSW Interactive Conference.”