Stephen Colbert likes to talk about "truthiness" --  opinion that is not necessarily based on any facts. OpentheGovernment.org is a coalition in which Common Cause participates that really wants to substitute truth for truthiness.

The coalition consists of a wide variety of journalism, transparency, environmental, labor, and other public interest and democracy groups concerned about the increasing propensity of the Bush Administration to keep important information hidden from the American public.

The statistics about what the government is hiding from us are pretty depressing.  But the flash video the coalition has put together is not. Coalition director Patrice McDermott said that its purpose was to remind Americans of their heritage of openness.  "Our democracy is indeed in jeopardy but the public can join Ms. Public, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and others in fighting the foes of secrecy," McDermott said.  "It is a fight we can and must win."

Take a look, and pass on to a friend.  It will make you laugh, and hopefully inspire you to do more to support the fight against truthiness.

www.openthegovernment.org  

Donald Vance may not have a face you would pick out of a crowd.  Of medium height and unassuming, the most distinguishing feature is his eyes.  They speak both of sorrow and intensity.  Vance on April 4 was honored in Washington for his courage, and for his speaking truth to power, despite the consequences.

Washington is a city of awards luncheons and dinners.  People are honored for all kinds of reasons, some justifiable, some not.  But of all the capitol's awards events, the event that honored Vance is exceptional.  The Ridenhour Prizes are given to honor "the spirit of courage and truth," bestowed on those who "perservere in acts of truth-telling that protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society."

The awards were named after the late journalist Ron Ridenhour, who, while serving in the U.S. Army in Vietnam, had heard rumors of a massacre in My Lai.  He followed up on these rumors, and in 1969, wrote a letter to Congress and the Pentagon about what he had uncovered.  Ridenhour, who went to become an award-winning investigative journalist, died suddenly in 1998 at the age of 52.

If Vietnam was the war that propelled Ridenhour's act of courage, the Middle East was the leitmotif for this year's awards.

Vance certainly deserved this year's Ridenhour prize for truth-telling.  A Navy veteran, Vance was working in Iraq for a private security contractor. When he suspected wrongdoing by his employer, he became an unpaid F.B.I. informant, helping investigate whether his security firm was dealing in illegal arms sales.

Instead of being rewarded for his whistle-blowing, Vance found himself imprisoned by the Army, in a notorious U.S. prison in Iraq, held in isolation, enduring extreme cold and sleep deprivation.  "My family did not know if I were alive or dead," Vance said.  When, after three months, he was let go, Vance came away with a troubling conclusion.  "If the government could do this to me, an American citizen, a Navy veteran, someone who voted for Bush, twice," what was happening" at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and all other prisons where U.S. armed forces are operating in secret?

Vance secretly kept notes of his ordeal, and told his story to the New York Times in December 2006.  He remains incredulous that the security firm on whom he had blown the whistle continues to do business with the Army, albeit under a new structure but with the same executives in charge.  His experience taught him, he said, that for many corporations that are doing business in Iraq, "profits take precedence."

Blogging is funny.  Sometimes you feel passionately about something, write a blog, and nobody seems to notice.

Other times, what you write seems to hit a nerve.  Earlier this week, I blogged on the scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.  My blog took mainstream media to task for not picking up on the ill treatment of wounded soldiers by the Army bureaucracy much sooner.  Smaller media outlets like the online magazine Salon, had started running stories in 2003.  And in 2005, there were congressional hearings that looked at some of these problems, problems also explored by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).  My point was that investigative reporting that could have dug into this issue sooner was stymied by a powerful consolidated media that valued profits over good journalism, and that cut reporting jobs, and failed to give journalists the time and resources they need to do enterprise reporting that uncovers such abuses.

What I wrote got quite a bit of attention in journalism blogs, including www.poynter.org and www.grumpyeditor.com. And then the editor of www.TheNation.com asked me to write a column on the same issue.  That attracted three responses from readers so far!

Two of the respondents agreed with me about the impact of consolidated media, but felt that no one could do anything to change its impact, and that we should be grateful when good stories ever got reported.

One journalist sent me an e-mail that tore into my argument, contending that it is only when big media like The Washington Post report a story does the story gain any real attention.He also said that is was "easy to blame the media" but that Salon's readers were responsible for not reacting to Salon's report.

I'd love to hear from our Common Cause audience on this.  Are you concerned about the future of fact-based investigative journalism?  Should reporters have uncovered the problems at Walter Reed sooner?  Do you think we "blame the media" for our own failings as citizens?

You would have to be dead on our the moon to not have heard about the appalling living conditions and Byzantine red tape that dogs wounded veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Two weeks ago, a two-part series in the Washington Post documented the plight of soldiers harmed in battle who, after discharge as inpatients, find themselves in a medical limbo, living in buildings plagued by mold, peeling paint and rodents, and waiting endlessly for medical appointments and for government paperwork that will help them get their lives back in order.  The series provoked huge coverage from other media outlets and prompted House hearings, and caused the firings of the top brass at the Medical Center, leading to the resignation of the Secretary of the Army.

The series has been hailed as a testament to the power of a free press.  And it does demonstrate what happens when a powerful newspaper like The Washington Post takes on an issue.

The two-part series in Sunday's and Monday's Washington Post was riveting.  But like the missing limbs of the soldiers so ill treated at Walter Reed Hospital, the Post's series also was missing a limb.  It explained the WHAT of the story - the bureaucracy, unfeeling paperwork and meaningless rules that kept soldiers badly wounded in the Iraq War from getting the care and respect they deserved.  But the series largely failed to get to the why of the story.  The series was still worth doing.  The day after it was published, the Army announced it was renovating the patient building on the sprawling Walter Reed campus that most needed fixing up.

And a second Post story reported that an investigation was being launched into the possible unethical conduct of a Walter Reed official who, critics charge, was so preoccupied with founding his own soldiers relief foundation, that he neglected his duties managing a system that was supposed to match up soldier families to donors wishing to help. And Walter Reed is increasing staffing to better deal with the flood of the wounded, a flood that the anticipated "surge" in Iraq will only make worse.

Cross-posted on the Working Assets blog.

You may have heard that President Bush wants to cut about $145 million from the budget of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). That's the agency that distributes federal funding to public radio and TV stations.

That's small potatoes in a federal budget of nearly $3 trillion, and maybe you're even thinking we have more pressing problems. And that is precisely why this is a critical issue now.

Consider what's going on: We're debating how to proceed in Iraq and many other difficult domestic and foreign issues. We're entering into another presidential campaign. It is especially important that Americans have access to the diverse viewpoints and hard-hitting journalism that public broadcasting provides.

Public broadcasting was founded about 40 years ago to provide quality commercial-free programming. The idea was that without having to depend on ads for their revenues, the shows could be free to speak truth to power.

We need that today too.

Please join us in urging your representatives in Congress to restore funding for CPB and to preserve its editorial independence.

I belong to the Committee of Concerned Journalists, and last night attended a preview of "News War: Secrets, Spin and the Future of News" that Frontline will begin airing on PBS at 9 p.m. tonight. I can't tell you much about the series, because Frontline opted to show us a very small slice of the series, which will be aired in four segments this month and next.  What I can tell you is that the panel discussion to promote the series reminded me once again, of why I left mainstream journalism.  The panelists seemed totally oblivious to the huge fight to totally corporatize our media, including the Internet, and its implication for diversity of viewpoint, freedom of expression, and innovation.

Indeed, when I asked a question about net neutrality -- the right of individuals to access any information and use any lawful application on the Internet without the interference of an Internet Service Provider -- the panelists were almost totally unresponsive.  Dana Priest, a very big-time Washington Post reporter, asked: "What's net neutrality?"  The fact that she asked the question truly is an indictment of her own newspaper, which continues to cover media issues as business stories, and buries them in the business section of their paper.

But far more disappointing was the response of Scott Moore, vice president for Yahoo! News, who explained net neutrality to his colleagues on the panel, but then claimed it was "a tempest in a teapot," offering the bogus argument that in a competitive media marketplace, any company that withheld content that people wanted would find those individuals choosing another cable or broadband provider.  Of course, that argument is so fraught with inaccuracies, it is pathetic.  First of all, everyone knows that when a consumer contracts with a cable or telephone company for a bundle of services, it is extremely difficult to switch services.  Secondly, companies are not going to cut off access to information, they are just going to make some information way more difficult to get to.  You won't be able to find www.commoncause.org on a search engine, or when you try to access us, it will take far longer to reach us.

It is no secret that cable and phone companies want to make the Internet a vehicle for selling things and entertainment, a replica of cable with all its lack of choice and big profits.

Chances are you have never heard of James B. Steele and Donald Barlett.  They are not bloggers, or pundits.  They rarely appear on television.  They are, in the best sense of the word, investigative journalists who spend months crafting painstakingly written and researched articles and books on subjects ranging from corporate welfare and the inequities of federal tax law to what's wrong with our health care system.  

That reporting has garnered them two Pulitzer Prizes and two national magazine awards, and countless other journalism citations.  At annual conventions of Investigative Reporters and Editors, the two were mobbed like rock stars.  Indeed they are so revered that just last month, Arizona State University  created the Barlett and Steele awards to honor outstanding investigative business journalism.

However, their careers are a very good parable about an increasingly profit-driven mass media and its ebbing commitment to fact-based investigative journalism.