I. Newspapers in an Electronic Social Media Era and II. New Facebook Tools to Advance Your Own Politics

Part I

Newspapers continually struggle to remain relevant in this age of Facebook, Twitter, OpEdNews, and other electronic media, but the best newspaper are totally adaptive and use the social media tools to further their efforts to get at the truth. Granted, the electronic media has displaced a lot of the need to advertise, or so most retail operations have concluded.

It is clear from my explorations in American presidential politics that Facebook gets lots of information rapidly all over the nation to like minded people, but have you noticed that the best posts usually involve a newspaper as the original source?

Facebook's tool, Bernie Friend Finders, allows you to identify who are your friends who like Bernie who are living in California or Pennsylvania, for example, and the campaign suggests that you contact all of them to remind them to vote, as if that were even necessary, but also reminds the Facebook user when the deadlines to register are in the remaining primary states. The best thing of all for me was when I discovered that I had 55 friends who are from New York, and about 40 who are from Pennsylvania, out of my 4000 friends, at least 90% of whom are Bernie supporters to begin with.

But on the right side of that Friend Finder screen is another choice: who are the Friends of your Friends who like Bernie? This turned into high hundreds and even in one, thousands of friends of friends. This is incredibly useful, if you have information or requests or offers to join a group like my Facebook group started March 16 [Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win!]. For those ideas that you want to share far and wide, and rapidly, to boot.

According to WIRED magazine, March 1: It's just the unfortunate name for the latest strategy Bernie Sanders' online army is using to get out the vote in key states. It's essentially the next evolution of traditional phone-banking, a voter turnout technique for a world in which no one answers the phone anymore--least of all the legions of millennials who have been largely responsible for Sanders' rise this election cycle."

I recall something similar being around in the 2008 Obama campaign but then Facebook for reasons unknown to me put an end to this.

According to WIRED, last year, Facebook cut third parties off from this data, frustrating political campaigns and dooming startups that depend on that information. Sanders volunteers have essentially revived this strategy while cleverly skirting this restriction. The Friend Finder tool doesn't ingest anyone's data or share it with the campaign. Instead, the webpage uses Facebook search to let Facebook users filter their own friend networks."

So try Bernie Friend Finders on Facebook to locate your friends and friends of friend in the remaining primary states!

How prescient was that famous quote by Thomas Jefferson in a letter to the US Ambassador to France! "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter."

Part II

New York politics is decidedly a more bloody spectator sport than in most other states, particularly in a Presidential election when we have 3 out of 4 candidates who are either born in New York or moved their to be a US Senator.

With all of the talk about how much experience Hillary has, I cannot point to one single accomplishment legislative in her tenure in the Senate.

Here in New Mexico, I have a friend who is from Chile with a Ph. D. in Astronomy, who was quite horrified when he and his lady heard what Hillary said in that debate. Kissinger, to a Chilean, was the guy who destroyed the life of Salvador Allende, the first duly elected President of Chile, Salvador Allende, toppling that nation into a horrible period of repression by the military government of General Pinochet, that directly which led to 30,000 Chileans as Desparecidos, or the "disappeared ones."

To him and his lady, and to me, this signals that this unmitigated war-like hawk Secretary of State would precipitate more of this deposing of heads of states and governments that Wall Street and American corporations didn't like and wanted to get rid of. We had quite enough of these kinds of grudge matches and endless and needless wars during the Bush years, and I believe that Hillary was more of a cause of the bombings in Libya than Obama ever even thought about.

As OpEdNews Founder Rob Kall put it so succinctly in an article a while back: "Hillary would be a War President." [click here]

If you add up all the years spent in Congress by John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton, you come up with 26, the same amount of time Bernie has been in the Congress. I am sure he knows his way around Congress, and also that he would appoint the best possible Cabinet members and the best possible legislative liaisons necessary to achieve his agenda. Bernie's real agenda is all about at its core about returning the government to the people instead of banks, Wall Street, and mega corporations. That is why they are fighting back so viciously!

Newspaper across America are being asked by their readers to consider endorsing Bernie Sanders for the nomination. He is consistent, truthful, and creative, and he wants to the nation in long overdue directions. Critics say without Congress' cooperation, he won't get anything done, or that old line about "socialism is fine, till you run out of money."

To endorse Bernie means that a newspaper in the remaining states demonstrates its true leadership, that that the newspaper thus remain supremely relevant, and that they would, quite simply, be doing the "right thing." Ask some of them to do so, please!

When Bernie wins the nomination, the very same people who read and publish your short letters in the next six months will almost always be the ones who write the endorsements in the general election.

What if your primary has already been held? That is all the more reason to write to the papers in California, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, Kentucky, North and South Dakota, Indiana, Delaware, and my own beloved Land of Enchantment, New Mexico.

Respectfully,

Stephen Fox

Founder, New Millennium Fine Art 121 W. San Francisco St. Santa Fe, NM Facebook Group, Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win!