Category: Media

By Colleen Cochran

It was 1975. My parents got the bright idea to escape the Philadelphia winter by taking the kids on a two-week California trip. This vacation wasn’t well-planned and cushy like the times we stayed at the Greenbriar, the Waldorf, or those hotels in Italy. The California vacation was an impromptu, free-wheeling, down-and-dirty road trip. Maybe that’s why I liked it so much.

It was an ambitious, almost insane, venture. Parents and five kids, ages toddler through pre-teen, crammed ourselves into a rented station wagon and winged a sight-seeing tour in which we drove from San Francisco all the way down into Tijuana. We stayed at whatever cheap hotel would have us.

Editordude: San Diego Free Press has announced it will suspend publication after Dec. 14.

I started writing for the San Diego Free Press with almost their first edition. One of the the nice things about writing for it was that I was limited in my writings for the OB Rag, because at that time all of the articles and restaurant reviews were about “goings on” in the neighborhood. I could write for the SDFP and cover more restaurants, more ideas, and more of San Diego County.

As I became more and more familiar with the editors and contributors, my respect for the online paper grew. The knowledge of the authors was tremendous.

By Geoff Page

I was on a road trip in October and somewhere in Northern California I tuned into a public radio station interviewing a journalist who had written a long piece in the New Yorker about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. The piece is titled “Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?” and it was written by Evan Osnos. They began to discuss the 2016 Presidential election and I was blown away by what I heard.

Here is the part that turned me off to Facebook.

Facebook offered to “embed” employees, for free, in Presidential campaign offices to help them use the platform effectively. Clinton’s campaign said no. Trump’s said yes, and Facebook employees helped his campaign craft messages. Although Trump’s language was openly hostile to ethnic minorities, inside Facebook his behavior felt, to some executives, like just part of the distant cesspool of Washington. Americans always seemed to be choosing between a hated Republican and a hated Democrat, and Trump’s descriptions of Mexicans as rapists was simply an extension of that.

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By Bob Dorn

By the late 1970s, I was brought back into the newsroom to do general assignment reporting, a kind of sideways move. I could handle breaking stuff, and innocent features (like my seven-day case of hiccups) but the editors might have figured I offered too much trouble on the beats — police, higher education and investigations.

Once again on the day shift, I made it to journalism’s summa cum laude, or maybe just the magna version.

On September 25, 1978, a fully-loaded PSA liner crashed into a private Cessna in

By Bill Adams / Urbdezine

Fox News has recently engaged in a coordinated attempt to intimidate and derail the Special Counsel investigation of President Donald Trump. Fox commentator Judge Jeanine Pirro has gone as far as accusing Special Counsel Robert Mueller of attempting a coup d’état and suggesting he and his investigatory team should be taken away in handcuffs.

Rupert Murdoch was born an Australian, the son of a newspaper magnate. He is the owner of the News Corp., which has massive media holdings, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and the largest cable news company, Fox News.

There may be a period of time when our site appears to be down. Rest assured it will be temporary but it could last anywhere from a few hours to a full day. Word needs to spread across the globe about where we are located. When you arrive at the new host there will be a welcome sign.

If you feel like it’s been too long for us to be out of commission try doing a hard refresh of your browser window by holding down the Control key and pushing the F5 key. If that doesn’t work, you can do a DNS flush. Since everyone is using a different operating system go to Google and search “flush dns cache” followed by your operating system. For example: flush dns cache windows 10.

We’ll see you soon!

So, today – Wednesday, July 12th – is Net Neutrality Day. Now what? The short little video clip below is a reminder of what is at stake. If you haven’t yet sent your message to the FCC and your legislators, click here.

We at the OB Rag love watching all kinds of video. Those short visual stories entertain, inform, and agitate in a way completely different from the written word.

Since our platform is about expressing ideas and ideals instead of cash flow, clicks, or the commercialization of media, we have the freedom to include a wide range of topics and formats that might not work elsewhere. We don’t need or want text links articles, paid for content, promotional materials, or story lines designed to please donors.

. . . and conservative journalism isn’t news journalism

By Bill Adams / San Diego Free Press

Mainstream news media has long been accused of having a “liberal bias.” Some studies have supported this belief. “Liberal bias” may be inherent in news journalism for reasons that aren’t flattering to conservatives.

Defining Liberal and Conservative. While political views are neither immutable nor binary, certain characteristics have remained relatively consistent. Broadly speaking, liberal policies support labor, equality and a strong social safety net, strong public institutions, progressive taxation, diplomacy and the avoidance of military conflict, and protection of the environment.

By Ron Bonn/ SanDiego350

You could say I was present at the creation.

Looking back in our lives, we rarely know exactly when something started. But regular television news coverage of man-made climate change, with all it implies, started on New Year’s Day, 1970.

The staff of “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite”: producers, writers, technicians; a couple dozen of us in all, were sitting around the newsroom waiting for something to happen—because nothing happens on New Year’s Day—when the man himself stormed in. “Goddamn it,” he said to us, “we’ve got to do something about this environment story.”

The San Diego U-T just gave the forerunner of the online OB Rag, the OB People’s Rag, a plug in a travel log-type piece on Ocean Beach in the Business section, entitled “Ocean Beach: the neighborhood the ’60s never forgot, where parrots fly free“. The piece is currently in the online version of the newspaper only, and is due out in paper on April 10th.

Along with “landmarks” and “things to do” in OB, is a section “Did you know?” where the original Rag – and current one – are mentioned, along with the 1966 World Surfing Championship and the FX drama “Terriers” history of OB.

Back in June of 2014, a Yahoo account that I used for personal matters as well as for OB Rag business and communications was hacked. I lost thousands (at least 2300) of email address that I had gathered over the years as my contact list. I wrote about the hack and the loss. Here is part of what I said then:

Yes, it is true, and at first, I sort of laughed it off, as I went ahead and changed my password to the email account that was hacked on Thursday, June 19.

But then I realized all 2300 of my email contacts were gone ! – stolen by the hacker. Hundreds of those were my OB Rag email accounts. (It was my personal yahoo email account that was hacked – not the OB Rag gmail account.)

Last Tuesday night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow did an extensive report on how Russians used information warfare during the 2016 presidential campaign to undermine the Hillary Clinton campaign. And, she said, they are still using those cyber tactics to this day.

One of the main ways the Russians worked to throw sand on the Clinton electoral machine, was to sow discord among Bernie Sanders supporters and divide them from pivoting after the Primary to give Clinton their donations and volunteer hours.

The primary example Maddow used when she was drawing attention to the Russian information warfare effort against the United States was a fake Bernie Sanders supporters Facebook page that appears to be part of the Russian game plan. It’s called Bernie Sanders Lovers, and despite what the home page says about it being from Vermont, it’s actually out of Albania.