A few weeks ago NPR's Planet Money team contacted us with a pretty simple inquiry: What happens at congressional fundraisers? But as their most recent podcast shows, getting to know what goes on at these events is not that simple.

Sunlight Editorial Director Bill Allison joined Planet Money reporter Alex Blumberg checking out a few fundraisers happening on a busy night in Washington, DC. Party Time indicated there were at least 20 events scheduled but gaining access was more challenging than a night club's velvet rope.

Why the secrecy and closed doors? Listen to the podcast to learn more.

And check out Party Time to know when and where Congress and the presidential candidates are fundraising. Say for instance tomorrow's Jay Z - Kanye West concert or a weekend retreat with the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Have any invites to share? Send us an anonymous tip.

A blogger with an actual name--Andrew Breitbart--posts an edited video that leads to the firing of an employee at the U.S. Department of Agriculture--Shirley Sherrod--due to the constant media pressure from Fox News and other mainstream television outfits.

When the full, unedited video came to light, Sherrod was vindicated. Despite this, Breitbart refused to apologize, constantly shifting his rationale for releasing the edited video. All of this happened and now CNN talking heads are calling for a "gatekeeper" to watch over anonymous bloggers. They want to regulate anonymous blogging:

"There are so many great things that the internet does and has to offer, but at the same time, Kyra, as you know, there is this dark side," Roberts said. "Imagine what would have happened if we hadn't taken a look at what happened with Shirley Sherrod and plumbed the depths further and found out that what had been posted on the internet was not in fact reflective of what she said."

But Phillips replied that the mainstream media "can't always do that."

"There's going to have be a point in time where these people have to be held accountable," Phillips said. "How about all these bloggers that blog anonymously? They say rotten things about people and they're actually given credibility, which is crazy. They're a bunch of cowards, they're just people seeking attention."

...

Phillips wanted to go even further, asking if "there's going to come a point where something's going to have to be done legally" about anonymous bloggers.

"There has to be some point where there's some accountability. And companies, especially in the media have to stop giving these anonymous bloggers credit," she said.

So, first things first: Andrew Breitbart isn't an anonymous blogger, he has a name and he's on television all the time. If Phillips believes that the media should stop giving bloggers who commit factual errors credit, she has the power to do that.

Second, why can't the media check out allegations posted to blogs, online news sites--anonymous or not--all the time. Aren't they supposed to be checking the facts before reporting? Obviously they feel like they need to waste our time reporting on Lindsay Lohan and who was or wasn't invited to Chelsea Clinton's wedding instead of spending time fact-checking.

Third, we have a legal process called defamation. Sherrod could file a defamation suit against Breitbart, but, believe me, it is --ing impossible to win one of those in America. (BTW, I wonder how the media felt about this the last time this happened and wound up in court.)

So, let's wrap this up:

No anonymous bloggers: check

CNN anchors attack anonymous blogger strawman: check

CNN anchors call for regulations to punish anonymous blogger strawman: check

CNN anchors ignore the fact that they gave credence and credibility to claims without checking them: check

Go back to sleep America, your media is in control.

From the super smart David Weinberger. Reposted in full:

Transparency is the new objectivity

Posted on July 19th, 2009

A friend asked me to post an explanation of what I meant when I said at PDF09 that “transparency is the new objectivity.” First, I apologize for the cliché of “x is the new y.” Second, what I meant is that transparency is now fulfilling some of objectivity’s old role in the ecology of knowledge.

Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration, and even that aspiration is looking pretty sketchy. The problem with objectivity is that it tries to show what the world looks like from no particular point of view, which is like wondering what something looks like in the dark. Nevertheless, objectivity — even as an unattainable goal — served an important role in how we came to trust information, and in the economics of newspapers in the modern age.

You can see this in newspapers’ early push-back against blogging. We were told that bloggers have agendas, whereas journalists give us objective information. Of course, if you don’t think objectivity is possible, then you think that the claim of objectivity is actually hiding the biases that inevitably are there. That’s what I meant when, during a bloggers press conference at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, I asked Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Walter Mears whom he was supporting for president. He replied (paraphrasing!), “If I tell you, how can you trust what I write?,” to which I replied that if he doesn’t tell us, how can we trust what he blogs?

So, that’s one sense in which transparency is the new objectivity. What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.

This change is, well, epochal.

Objectivity used be presented as a stopping point for belief: If the source is objective and well-informed, you have sufficient reason to believe. The objectivity of the reporter is a stopping point for reader’s inquiry. That was part of high-end newspapers’ claimed value: You can’t believe what you read in a slanted tabloid, but our news is objective, so your inquiry can come to rest here. Credentialing systems had the same basic rhythm: You can stop your quest once you come to a credentialed authority who says, “I got this. You can believe it.” End of story.

We thought that that was how knowledge works, but it turns out that it’s really just how paper works. Transparency prospers in a linked medium, for you can literally see the connections between the final draft’s claims and the ideas that informed it. Paper, on the other hand, sucks at links. You can look up the footnote, but that’s an expensive, time-consuming activity more likely to result in failure than success. So, during the Age of Paper, we got used to the idea that authority comes in the form of a stop sign: You’ve reached a source whose reliability requires no further inquiry.

In the Age of Links, we still use credentials and rely on authorities. Those are indispensible ways of scaling knowledge, that is, letting us know more than any one of us could authenticate on our own. But, increasingly, credentials and authority work best for vouchsafing commoditized knowledge, the stuff that’s settled and not worth arguing about. At the edges of knowledge — in the analysis and contextualization that journalists nowadays tell us is their real value — we want, need, can have, and expect transparency. Transparency puts within the report itself a way for us to see what assumptions and values may have shaped it, and lets us see the arguments that the report resolved one way and not another. Transparency — the embedded ability to see through the published draft — often gives us more reason to believe a report than the claim of objectivity did.

In fact, transparency subsumes objectivity. Anyone who claims objectivity should be willing to back that assertion up by letting us look at sources, disagreements, and the personal assumptions and values supposedly bracketed out of the report.

Objectivity without transparency increasingly will look like arrogance. And then foolishness. Why should we trust what one person — with the best of intentions — insists is true when we instead could have a web of evidence, ideas, and argument?

In short: Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links. Now our medium can. [Tags: objectivity transparency journalism media knowledge epistemology jay_rosen science everything_is_miscellaneous ]