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OpenCongress: Making citizens the "insiders"

The Sunlight Foundation has taken yet another big step in making government information more accessible to the public. This week, Sunlight launched OpenCongress, an exciting sister project of Congresspedia aimed at providing citizens with a user-friendly avenue to follow the nitty-gritty details of Congress. OpenCongress will track legislation, committees, member fundraising, and what the mainstream media and bloggers are saying about Congress. We believe the project is a great complement to our own project, as providing this wealth of data will help the citizen journalists on Congresspedia do more effective reporting. Together the narrative, citizen-generated content and the hard data combine to give the fullest picture of what Congress is up to.

Here’s the Sunlight Foundation’s Executive Director Ellen Miller to further explain the new project:

University of Virginia Gets an "F" in Tobacco Industry Studies

On February 9, 2007 the University of Virginia [http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=1469http://www.virginia.edu/uvatoday/newsRelease.php?id=1469# announced] its acceptance of a $25 million gift from cigarette maker Philip Morris to support biomedical research and "business leadership." In its press release, UV said the gift created a partnership between PM and UV "in a number of key areas in which they share a common interest." A medical school finding common interest with Philip Morris is somewhat of a stretch. It strikes me as a conflict of interest for a medical school to profit from a product that [http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2004pres/20040527a.html kills 440,000 Americans annually]. Moreover, tesearch on tobacco industry documents published in [http://www.news-medical.net/?id=5839 October 2004 in the medical journal Academic Medicine] shows that funding research, and particularly biomedical research, is how the tobacco industry buys legitimacy. Author Nathaniel Wander said that he found "PM wanted to be seen to contribute to medical research to counter the image of harm caused by its cigarettes." The exposure of Philip Morris' internal PR strategies notwithstanding, UV glowed over its new-found partnership with a tobacco company found [http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=The_U.S._Government%27s_racketeering_case_against_Big_Tobacco guilty in federal District Court last August] of participating in a massive 50-year scheme to lie, conspire and defraud the public about the dangers of smoking. Maybe UV hasn't read its medical journals. Academicians have known for some time about the [http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/reprint/53/5/261.pdf covert influence of the tobacco industry on research]. It is also well established that making grants to carry out external biomedical research been long the centerpiece of the tobacco industry's decades-long propaganda campaign to keep the public confused about the health hazards of smoking and, more recently, the hazardous effects of secondhand smoke on nonsmokers.

Embracing Wikis to Turn College Students into Public Scholars (Using Congresspedia)

Under the old, "broadcast" model of journalism and academia, undergraduate students were generally limited to consuming the scholarship of others while their own research and writing was largely confined to practice exercises. Now Congresspedia is engaging students in the new, participatory model of media and society by publishing their writing on the wiki rather than having it collect dust in a file drawer somewhere. As part of this project (our Student Editor Program), I met last week with the students of Prof. Phil Tajitsu Nash's Asian Pacific Americans and American Public Policy class at the University of Maryland. Prof. Nash's students are engaged in a fascinating research project on the movement for redress for Japanese Latin Americans who were put in internment camps during World War II. Despite enduring similar conditions to US-based Japanese Americans, they were exempted from the redress bill President Reagan signed in the 1980s.

Participatory Democracy: Rate Your Senators' and Representative's Web Pages

The Sunlight Foundation, the Center for Media and Democracy's partner in Congresspedia, has been doing some really interesting participatory journalism lately. Their current project is to get citizens to rate the websites of their members of Congress for transparency and accountability. So far 294 members have been rated and, in the wake of members like Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) posting their daily schedules online, the bar is getting higher for what citizens expect. The best part is that when the results are all in, we're going to post them on every member's Congresspedia profile so it can become part of their permanent record.

Here's the Sunlight Foundation's Bill Allison to explain the effort and how you can participate:

Is Philip Morris Driving the FDA Regulation Train?

Philip Morris (PM) is a sophisticated company that runs at least ten years ahead of public health authorities in devising strategies to shape its destiny and preserve its future markets. PM knew that sooner or later push would come to shove and public pressure would make the U.S. government try to regulate its products and corporate behavior, especially after the U.S. Department of Justice found PM guilty of 50 years of conspiracy to defraud the public about the dangers of its products. True to form, in 1999 PM started an internal project called the Regulatory Strategy Project to enact Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations on the company's own terms. During the project, in 2000, PM generated a "Privileged and Confidential" document listing what the company would require in what it sees as "sensible" FDA regulations.

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