Robert Novak, shameless mudslinger

Josh Marshall explains why Robert Novak is a profoundly dishonest reporter. (Novak, you'll recall, is the same reporter who outed a CIA spy in violation of federal law.)

Republican convention blog aggregator

Here's a page aggregating blog coverage of the Republican National Convention.

Will CNN play fair?

David Brock of Media Matters asks CNN for balanced treatment of the Republican Convention. We'll see.

Grassroots and big media coverage of today's protest march

The Los Angeles Times has a wonderful photo gallery of today's protest march in New York, which drew between 120,000 and 500,000 peaceful demonstrators.

The New York Times' account of the rally is here.

It's the biggest protest march in New York City in decades -- and not a word of it on Google News's front page until a few minutes ago.

Meantime, Matt Haughey rounds up some examples of grassroots media: people reporting on the event without the mainstream media's filter.

all Flickr photos tagged with rnc, rncwatch.typepad.com, Technorati search for New York City ("rnc" was too short to search), Buzznet's No RNC photostream, rnc convention bloggers, WeSeeRNC moblog, all del.icio.us links tagged with rnc, Indymedia's RNC coverage, and Google News search for rnc.

It's like rolling your own newspaper.

From the Public Be Damned files

Jim Zellmer visited Philadelphia's new National Constitution Center this weekend. He found their presentations very well done and started to take some non-flash photos. He was quickly told that photos were forbidden.

On a related note, BoingBoing notes that Michael, a Rice University Ph.D. candidate, filed a Freedom of Information Act request the the Justice Department to get it to release a movie called "The Public's Right to Know."

And from the Memory Hole: Justice Department Censors Supreme Court Quote.

Safeguarding the election process

Will Doherty, executive director of VerifiedVoting.org and Verified Voting Foundation, tells what you can do to help out up to and on Election Day to ensure a safe and secure election:

• TechWatch is a program for technologists to assist with election protection efforts by poll watching, poll working and observing pre-election voting technology testing. About 1,300 volunteers have already signed up.

• The Election Incident Reporting System enables voter protection organizations to receive reports and respond rapidly to all kinds of election day problems, as well as tracking a variety of other useful data.
The Election Protection Coalition, consisting of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, People for the American Way Foundation, and more than 60 other organizations, will be running a production test of the system during Tuesday's Florida primary election. For November's election, they'll open the system up to incident reports from the public. In the meantime, call 866-OUR-VOTE to report election problems.