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NEWS FROM THE USA: Inspiring Conference
146/Granville Williams
Granville Williams reports on the National Conference for Media Reform in St Louis, May 13-15 2005
7/7/05: Back in November 2003 I attended what still ranks for me as the most powerful and inspiring event on media reform I have been involved in. The event was the first Media Reform conference held in Madison, Wisconsin. Originally the organisers were planning an event for around 200 people, but the battle against the plans by the Federal Communications Commission over ownership energised and inspired people and 2000 people attended. The highpoint was a rally in the Coliseum Theatre, Madison at which Bill Moyers, then working for NOW (the highly regarded current affairs programme on PBS) spoke. But there were lots of other seminars and sessions where people learnt and shared experiences. By the end of the conference there was a definite sense that something significant had happened in Madison. A movement was born.
The conference in St Louis confirmed that. It had the phrase ‘Gathering Momentum’ under the conference logo on conference publicity, and it definitely is. 2500 people attended, and more wanted to come but the organisers had to close the bookings - there was no more room.
I was interested in who these people were, and why they were there. Of course the media activist groups were there: FAIR, Media Access Project, Media Alliance, and so on. Groups representing black and Hispanic media activism were also more strongly present than at the first conference. The big names were there too: Naomi Klein; Patti Smith and Sandy Perlman talking about the music industry; the two FCC Commissioners, Michael Kopps and Jonathan Adelstein who led the fight against the ownership rule changes; Amy Goodman from Democracy Now!; and Bob McChesney and John Nichols, the co-founders of Free Press. But the vast majority of the people there wanted to do something about a battered and discredited commercial media system, and the threat to public service broadcasting.
They made the connection between the state of the media and the state of America. ‘I’m just pissed off,’ was one woman’s response to my question why she was there, and she wanted to do something. Another couple were obviously comfortably off, living in a retirement community in Phoenix, Arizona, but the Iraq war and e-activism around MoveOn.org had spurred an interest in the media. They began to read voraciously, do university study courses on the media. The wife put it very simply: ‘There’s talk of the draft coming back. I have a 27-year old son and I don’t want him going to Iraq.’
One criticism of the first conference was that there was not enough space for people to talk about issues of common interest, and to exchange experiences of successful initiatives. This time there was.There were caucuses for specific interest groups such as lawyers, artists and musicians, educators. I attended one for journalists, convened by Linda Foley of the Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America. It was packed out, with many of those present from the mainstream media. There were action clinics, including ones on media monitoring, online organising, lobbying, starting a media activist network in a local community. And you could take away with you a wallet, the Free Press Media Reform Tool Kit, full of information about the media and what activists can do to change it.
In the final conference session John Nichols described ‘a perfect storm’ that was coming. The Telcommunications Act of 1996 is due for revision in the next couple of years; censorship, whipped up by the religious right, is now threatening broadcasters; and public service broadcasting is under attack. The policy choices were simple he said: ‘Wall Street or Main Street. The White House or your house.’
Bill Moyers, now retired, decided to come at the last minute to address the conference and the power of his speech and the revelations in it, provided a dramatic finale to the conference.
The Threat to Public Service Broadcasting
‘Republicans are pursuing an aggressive strategy to destroy the spirit of public broadcasting while maintaining the shell of a system that calls itself public broadcasting. And it is working. We believe the dramatic decline in viewers and contributors reflects an erosion of support from core viewers.’ This is the view of Jerry Starr, founder of Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting, speaking in a session on Public Broadcasting at the conference.In the same session Charlie Cray, from the Center for Corporate Policy, made a contribution which highlighted how creeping commercialisation is also influencing the content of programmes. A joint news release from KVIE (PBS Sacramento) and the American Farm Bureau proudly announced ‘a new weekly public television show that celebrates the miracle of American agriculture and the farm and ranch families that help make it possible….’ It went on, ‘The magazine-style, half-hour program will focus on our national love of the land, our fascination with food and the bedrock American values of family, hard work and independence that make our agricultural system the finest in the world.’
The sting in the tale is that Monsanto is also supporting the programme, along with the Farm Bureau. This will inevitably result in biased information about genetically modified food and an absence of any serious investigation about legitimate scientific and consumer concerns about GM food.
Bill Moyers’ Free Press conference speech
We print a section of it below. For the full text go to: www.freepress.net/conference“…PBS asked me after 9/11 to start a new weekly broadcast. They wanted us to make it different from anything else on the air - commercial or public broadcasting. They asked us to tell stories no one else was reporting and to offer a venue to people who might not otherwise be heard…and in that spirit, we went about reporting on Washington as no one else in broadcasting - except occasionally 60 Minutes - was doing. We reported on the expansion of the Justice Department’s power of surveillance. We reported on the escalating Pentagon budget and expensive weapons that didn’t work. We reported on how campaign contributions influenced legislation and policy to skew resources to the comfortable and well-connected while our troops were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq with inadequate training and armour. We reported on how the Bush administration was shredding the Freedom of Information Act. We went around the country to report on how closed-door, backroom deals in Washington were costing ordinary workers and tax-payers their livelihood and security. We reported on offshore tax havens that enable wealthy and powerful Americans to avoid their fair share of national security and the social contract.
And always - because what people know depends on who owns the press - we kept coming back to the media business itself, to how mega media corporations were pushing journalism further and further down the hierarchy of values, how giant radio cartels were silencing critics while shutting communities off from essential information, and how the mega media companies were lobbying the FCC for the right to grow ever more powerful.
The broadcast caught on. Our ratings grew every year. There was even a spell when we were the only public affairs broadcast on PBS whose audience was going up instead of down….Strange things began to happen. Friends in Washington called to say that they had heard of muttered threats that the PBS reauthorization would be held off ‘unless Moyers is dealt with.’ The chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, was said to be quite agitated.
I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn’t meet with me. I tried three times. And it was all downhill after that.
I was naive, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that’s what Kenneth Tomlinson has done.
On Fox News this week he denied that he’s carrying out a White House mandate or that he’s ever had any conversations with any Bush administration official about PBS. But the New York Times reported that he enlisted Karl Rove to help kill a proposal that would have put on the CPB board people with experience in local radio and television. The Times also reported that ‘on the recommendation of administration officials’ Tomlinson hired a White House flack (I know the genre) named Mary Catherine Andrews as a senior CPB staff member. While she was still reporting to Karl Rove at the White House, Andrews set up CPB’s new ombudsman’s office and had a hand in hiring the two people who will fill it, one of whom once worked for … you guessed it … Kenneth Tomlinson.
I would like to give Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t. According to a book written about the Reader’s Digest when he was its Editor-in-Chief, he surrounded himself with other right-wingers - a pattern he’s now following at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.There is Ms. Andrews from the White House. For acting president, he hired Ken Ferree from the FCC, who was Michael Powell’s enforcer when Powell was deciding how to go about allowing the big media companies to get even bigger. According to a forthcoming book, one of Ferree’s jobs was to engage in tactics designed to dismiss any serious objection to media monopolies…
It’s not likely that with guys like this running the CPB some public television producer is going to say, ‘Hey, let’s do something on how big media is affecting democracy.’ ”
LINKSFreepress conference report
Last modified: Monday, August 15, 2005
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Notices
Events & Announcements
World Press Freedom Day
More reporters are currently imprisoned in Turkey than in any other country in the world. Only a matter of weeks ago lawyers failed to persuade a Turkish court to release a 76-year-old journalist from a Turkish internet news station.
World Press Freedom Day on Friday May 3, 2013 is being marked in Britain by a rally to highlight the dangers facing journalists in Turkey and in this podcast, Nicholas Jones speaks to Barry White, Organiser at the Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, and Sam Bamford, the TUC's policy officer for Eastern Europe and Africa about the importance of a campaign to highlight international press freedom.
The World Press Freedom Day rally is being staged by the National Union of Journalists at the NUJ head office, Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1 on Thursday May 2, 6pm-8pm.
DATELINE: 27/4/13
UK launch of EU media campaign
DATELINE: 13/3/13
The UK launch of a 'European Citizens' Initiative' calling for EU rules against concentration of media power will take place on Thursday March 21 from 11:00am – 12:30pm in Committee Room 4A at the House of Lords, London. Guest speakers will include actor and activist Hugh Grant (pictured), media consultant Claire Enders, Professor Steven Barnett, Barry McCall (President of the NUJ) and Marc Gruber (Director of the European Federation of Journalists).
A European Citizens' Initiative is an official petition, like a Downing Street petition. If it succeeds in gathering a million signatures across the EU, the Commission is obliged to respond.
This petition calls for the EU to act to protect media pluralism and press freedom.
CPBF Annual General Meeting
DATELINE: 1/3/13
Make a note in your diary
Saturday 13 July 2013 from 10.00am
NUJ HQ, 308/312 Gray's Inn Road, London WC1.
Leveson, media ownership, CPBF future work.
DOWNLOAD FREEPRESS NOW
DATELINE: 26/3/10
Download Freepress in PDF, ePub or mobi format. Issue 194 now available.
MEDIA FOR ALL CONFERENCE
DATELINE: 26/3/10
Papers from the Media for All Conference
MEDIA MANIFESTO
DATELINE: 26/3/10
The media’s job is to inform and entertain us but we rely on them too to tell us what our rulers and representatives are up to. In the run-up to the Iraq war the government used spin and disinformation in the media to create panic and mislead people. The truth is coming out now, but we need stronger, more independent media to be able to scrutinise governments and make informed choices.
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Previous stories
Public Service Broadcasting
CPBF Response to Green Paper
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BBC Cuts
PLATFORM - Replacing the BBC Licence Fee
EU Commission gets tough
Latest from BBC Charter Review team
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Staff unions invited to talks with BBC at ACAS
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NUJ announces date for BBC strike
May's BBC Charter Review report is out
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Model answers for BBC charter consulation
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Leading broadcasters to speak on Future of the BBC and ITV
Unions to strike over BBC job cuts
BBC cuts will be devastating, says IFJ
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Protecting public service broadcasting
Replacing the BBC licence fee...
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Green paper is good in parts, says CPBF
BBC governors to go, its public service role to stay
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Governance of the BBC: Social Market Foundation event
