Great story about the closing of the Idle Hour and the end of an era ("Closing Time," Oct. 28). Old Nashvillians tell me that there used to be many old bars in the music row area, best song written about these bars or mentioning them was "To Beat The Devil" by Kris Kristofferson. Bobby's Idle Hour is the last of not just a bar but of a historical time.
William C. Carter
over99per@wans.net (Nashville)
Web of truth
Your editorial on the revolutionary possibilities of the Internet to alter the way news is reported and consumed in this country was quite positive overall ("Every Man a Reporter," Oct. 28). My only question, though, is this: where have you folks been for the past two years. Already, in the United States, there's a large and consistently growing community of fairly accurate and reliable blogs and independent sites that routinely cover stories that most of the media choose to de-emphasize or ignore altogether. And, more and more, Americans are catching on to this online resource every day.
Indeed, the premiere example of this phenomenon is www.dailykos.com. At the beginning of summer, it was getting approximately 200,000 hits a day. Today, it's getting over half-a-million hits a day, making it the most popular blog on the Internet, and its proprietor, Markos Moulitsas, is constantly having to buy more servers to keep up with his exploding traffic.
The amazing thing about these resources is the way that they have "broken" stories ahead of the mainstream media, including the remarks that Trent Lott made about Strom Thurmond and the retaliatory disclosure of the identity of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame by the Bush administration.
More and more, the American people are waking up to the way the corporate media (including the Scene) routinely lie, distort, edit, ignore and/or manipulate the facts to serve their various agendas and conflicts of interest. If trends continue, soon the popular realization on the part of large segments of the American people will be that no one can or should trust the corporate media—just like in the former Soviet Union, where so many people knew that Tass and Pravda were really no more than propaganda mouthpieces for the elites of that society.
I remember Bruce Dobie's editorial that attacked Howard Dean, in which Dobie said he was a regular watcher of CNN's Inside Politics. In doing so, he seemed to be admitting that he trusted and relied on that source in terms of getting his view of the political events going on in our country.
I'm sure I speak for more than just myself when I say that upon reading that confession of Dobie's, I laughed in derision. One of the reasons I laughed was that I realized that he had not yet caught on to and made the Internet his primary source of news and information. Indeed, when in that same editorial, Dobie called Bush "honest," I really saw how misinformed and misled he had become by a corporate media that had spent most of the previous four years covering up for the lies, crimes, corruption, incompetence and travesties of George Bush and his administration. You folks are way behind the curve. But, as they say, better late than never.
Phillip Giannikas
rootdr@ispwest.com (Nashville)
Just a citizen correcting the mainstream media
I just read your latest editorial on citizen reporting and OhmyNews ("Every Man a Reporter," Oct. 28). It appears you have information that's at least a year old. Wired and the San Jose Mercury News were some of the first to write about OhmyNews, but since that time, The New York Times, Guardian, Newsweek and others have written about it.
OhmyNews is currently operating with 36,000, not 26,000, citizen reporters, and back in February it started an English-language International edition (english.ohmynews.com), which seeks to replicate the success of the Korean site. It now has 100 global correspondents from such countries as Iran, Colombia, Morocco, India, Germany and more.
Todd Thacker
Editor, OhmyNews International
todd@ohmynews.com (Seoul, South Korea)
