E-Media Tidbits

frist.senate.gov Senator Bill Frist lauded citizen journalism yesterday.

Yesterday, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist announced that the Senate passed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (S 2590).

I was intrigued to see that Frist specifically credited "bipartisan citizen journalism" in part for the success of this legislation.

Wrote Frist: "Without the efforts of ordinary Americans empowered by the Internet, including many hardworking members of the iFrist Volunteers, this legislation might easily have been successfully obstructed. Instead, the unprecedented synergy between online grassroots activists and Senate leadership provides a new model for participatory democracy in action."

...OK, it's just political posturing, I know -- and it seems that Frist is lumping citizen journalism and online activism together. Still, I'm intrigued to see a prominent legislator demonstrating such a high level of awareness of, and support for, citizen journalism. I suspect that for a lot of people, pronouncements like this will be the first time they hear of citizen journalism.

The Center for Citizen Media has been following this citJ example -- specifically the effort to discover which Senator had secretly tried to derail this legislation earlier. (It was Ted Stevens.)