Liberals Sponsor Tin Foil Hat Contest

[DKW 86 7,437]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_kos

Daily Kos (IPA: [koʊs] in an American accent) is an American political weblog aimed at Democrats and liberals/progressives. Run by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, (Kos from the last syllable of his first name, often mispronounced) a young United States Army veteran, it has an average weekday traffic of 530,000 visits[1], and often reaches over 5 million unique visits in one week.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/blogs/content...th_calling.html

Earth Calling

By "Scott Shepard" | Sunday, June 11, 2006, 12:52 PM

For all the bashing of the mainstream media at the YearlyKos convention, the bloggers in attendance clearly wanted to be taken seriously by the reporters covering the convention. Their blogs frequently quoted from mainstream newspaper articles, and they tried to have their photographs taken with the likes of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

But some started to worry about the image they were projecting outside the blogosphere on Saturday when some bloggers started an unusual contest - making the most original tinfoil hat. As dozens of bloggers donned their creations with delight, television crews and newspaper photographers descended on them. “Oh, no. This is going to be the B-roll on TV tonight,” said one dismayed blogger.

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From Amazon.com

Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Paperback)

by Jodi Dean

Book Description

In recent decades, media outlets in the United States-most notably the Internet-have claimed to serve the public's ever-greater thirst for information. Scandals are revealed, details are laid bare because "the public needs to know." In Publicity's Secret, Jodi Dean claims that the public's demands for information both coincide with the interests of the media industry and reinforce the cynicism promoted by contemporary technoculture. Democracy has become a spectacle, and Dean asserts that theories of the "public sphere" endanger democratic politics in the information age.

Dean's argument is built around analyses of Bill Gates, Theodore Kaczynski, popular journalism, the Internet and technology, as well as the conspiracy theory subculture that has marked American history from the Declaration Independence to the political celebrity of Hillary Rodham Clinton. The author claims that the media's insistence on the public's right to know leads to the indiscriminate investigation and dissemination of secrets. Consequently, in her view, the theoretical ideal of the public sphere, in which all processes are transparent, reduces real-world politics to the drama of the secret and its discovery.

http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/audio_li...d/od_021024.ram

Gretchen: "...the search for and disclosure of information has become a sort of substitute for politics."

Jodi: "...the public has a right to know and people have a duty to act."

Valarie: "...representative democracy and in and of itself...opens up room for secrecy."

Jodi: "...better ways to strengthen accountability that would enhance action, and people's responsibilities for action, and less emphasis on particular information and opinion."