personal democracy forum

"The sources are voting with their leaks," notes Jay Rosen of New York University's school of journalism. If the watchdog press was doing its job, wouldn't leakers be going to mainstream news outlets like the New York Times and the Guardian directly, instead of to WikiLeaks first? Meanwhile, Emily Bell, formerly of the Guardian and now at Columbia University's journalism school, says that whether we like it or not, WikiLeaks is the new face of journalism. Rosen and Bell were part of a symposium this past weekend, hosted by the Personal Democracy Forum, on WikiLeaks and Internet freedom. GRITtv was there as well, and today we bring you excerpts from that event, with journalists, academics, activists, and others talking about the impact of the leaks site on our political and technological systems. Distributed by Tubemogul.

"We do not have the Internet we think we have," says Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or Be Programmed. What we think of as a free and open Web is actually highly controlled by corporations and cash flow. We saw one example of this when WikiLeaks found itself without server space or fundraising ability when Internet service providers, including Amazon.com, cancelled their services and PayPal and MasterCard and Visa refused to process their transactions. And what can we do about that Internet? CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis proposes one solution: an Internet bill of rights. Rushkoff and Jarvis discuss in this selection from GRITtv's coverage of the Personal Democracy Forum's symposium this weekend on WikiLeaks and Internet freedom. Distributed by Tubemogul.

In 2008, CNN and YouTube paired up to pose citizen questions to presidential candidates through YouTube videos. But, Daniel Teweles of the Personal Democracy Forum notes, the questions were still selected by journalists and presented in a typical debate format. This time around, the Personal Democracy Forum has a new project, 10Questions, where citizens can pose questions to candidates in their local races, and the candidates post video responses on the Web for all to see. Daniel joins Laura in studio to talk about the project, and ways that new media technology can improve our elections. They also check in with Dr. Martin Michaels, a physician from Georgia whose question about childhood health was answered by the candidates for governor of Georgia. Distributed by Tubemogul.

With the election of Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy's former Senate seat, Democrats in DC seemed to give up on getting any major legislation passed. 59 votes (well, 58 and Joe Lieberman) was just not good enough. The blame has been flying -- it's Obama's fault, Rahm Emanuel's, Harry Reid's -- but what if the problem simply is the Senate? What can we change? Would eliminating the filibuster -- the so-called "nuclear option" back when Republicans were suggesting it -- be enough, or is the Senate, with its two-Senators-per-state-regardless-of-population mandate, just too fundamentally undemocratic? We ask the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, author of OBAMANOS!: The Rise of a New Political Era, Lawrence Lessig, Harvard professor and author of a new Nation cover story on the subject, and Nancy Scola of the Personal Democracy Forum.