Journalist uses power of the Web to check media
by Po Li Loo
The Gazette

CEDAR RAPIDS " After 25 years of being a journalist, Judy Daubenmier laid down her notebook and, because she was disillusioned with the state of national journalism, began a career critiquing the industry
she knew so well.

Daubenmier's first book, Project Rewire,'' was released in October ( William, James & Company, $15). It's a compilation of critiques on the media by bloggers " people who write for Web logs " and by journalists, including an essay by Daubenmier, who grew up in Waterloo.

She was back in Iowa recently to visit family and to watch the Hawkeyes play.

The 56-year-old reported for The Gazette from 1973 to 1979 and was the paper's Des Moines bureau chief from 1981 to 1988. She worked for the Associated Press from 1979 to 1981 and from 1988 to 1997.

Now, she writes to provoke the media into taking their roles as watchdogs seriously. Instead of watchdogs, they were lap dogs,'' she said.

Daubenmier holds a doctorate degree in history from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she lectures part time. She now lives in Brighton, Mich. She is involved with MoveOn, a political activist group, and helped research Outfoxed,'' a film that critiques media empires, especially Fox News.

After the film was finished, Daubenmier and other Outfoxed'' researchers started a blog, www.newshound.us, that monitors Fox News. She said the blog, which is updated five or six times a day, gets about 20,000 comments every day.

Before starting Newshound, Daubenmier said she didn't even know what a blog was. But now, she believes they encourage a more transparent, quicker flow of information than what people can get from
traditional media.

One of the articles in the book is a blow-by-blow account of how a blogger confronted Fox News about a story one of its reporters allegedly made up about 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry.

It helps the reader connect better with the news-gathering process, so they know how news stories come about,'' she said. It's not just handed down and slapped into print.''

Mainstream media usually refrain from criticizing each other because they live in a glass house,'' she said. Blogs are a place where people can criticize the media openly. It prods them to do a better job."