Water on stone, water on stone

Lots of media comments today, and some of them are even encouraging!

One. The second Annual Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis this weekend was a smash success. Sold out, with 2,200 people in attendance and a barnburning keynote address by Bill Moyers, the conference has now officially morphed into a movement to restore the voice of democracy. Maine's Chellie Pingree called it "a fight about everything we care about... a fight we cannot afford to lose, and we are not going to." Read a great analysis of the event here, and check below for things to do.

Two. Editor & Publisher thinks the Downing Street Memo is gaining traction in the US press, and it's true we've made a start. The LA Times and Washington Post finally published lengthy analyses this week, and my hero (forever!) Paul Krugman weighed in Sunday. The first American print publication to publish the memo in full will be the New York Review of Books in their June 9 edition. In part we can thank Media Matters, FAIR, and the DailyKos readers who rained thousands of letters and emails in a sustained three-day attack on the Post to get them to acknowledge the story. Now in the crosshairs: the New York Times.

Three. Sydney Schanberg at the Village Voice thinks he sees the first stirrings of life in the Washington press corps - welcome news indeed. And you must, simply must, must must read the gaggle's hilarious grilling of Scotty "The Protocols We Had In Place Were Followed" McClellan on the President's Excellent Bike Ride the other day while 30,000 people were being evacuated from the Capitol and somehow nobody thought to tell the Commander in Chief. Please, if you do nothing else today, read this post. I am begging you.

Four. Get your Gannon/Guckert update from ePluribus Media, the people's source for investigative journalism. Evidently, recent statements coming out of the White House and the Secret Service on the movements of our mysterious "Talon News" reporter/gay porn hustler in and out of the White House don't quite match up. Did he have security clearance attached to those day passes, for which he applied 43 days in a row? Yes! No! We don't know! (But then, what about all those times he didn't check out, or check in, or wandered around when there were no press conferences.... Was he doing sleepovers? If so, with whom? And shouldn't he have security clearance for that?)

Five. Here are a few things we can do about the media right now:

1. Write the New York Times and ask them to cover the Downing Street Memo at least as well as the Washington Post did and PDQ, too. You'll find all the info you need here.
2. Sign the petition asking the Bush Administration to account for the discrepancies between their account of the war and that contained in the Downing Street Memo.
   
3. If you belong to an activist organization, join in the effort to promote the Media Bill of Rights.
4. Sign the Free Press petition to save PBS from partisan operatives.
   

We have to keep after them day after day. With our relentless, steady pressure, we are making a difference. Like water on stone, water on stone.
UPDATE: we are really making a difference on that memo!