Be the Media! at the National Conference on Media Reform

Becoming, Reforming and Transforming the Media: One Weekend in Madison, WI

Media scholars, reporters, and activists -- including many Z Media Institute graduates -- converged in Madison, WI from November 7 to 9. The big draw was the National Conference on Media Reform, organized by Free Press (www.mediareform.net) and UW-Madison’s A.E. Havens Center. As Free Press cofounders Robert McChesney and John Nichols repeatedly stated, the turnout of more than 1,600 far surpassed their initial estimates of a few hundred attendees. But the national conference wasn’t the only game in town. A free parallel meeting and marginalized voices at the national conference greatly enriched the conversation. In all, three not mutually exclusive visions were advanced: be the media, reform the media, or radically transform the media.

Be the Media
Concerned by the national conference’s registration fee, emphasis on big names, and focus on “reform,” Madison Indymedia, Infoshop, and WORT community radio organized a free parallel meeting called Be the Media!

Be the Media! opened Friday evening with the film “Independent Media in a Time of War” by the Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center, and a discussion with Juan Gonzalez, Jeremy Scahill, and Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Although many in the packed auditorium likely came to see Amy Goodman, local activists also spoke. Volunteers at the community access TV station warned of a threat by city council members to cut their funding (a cheap political stunt which, fortunately, failed). El Salvador and Palestine solidarity activists gave updates on their work. “Being informed is only the first part,” Madison-Arcatao (El Salvador) Sister-City Project member Marc Rosenthal stated. “We also need to organize!”

Saturday was devoted to hands-on, action-oriented workshops, on subjects ranging from making bilingual media to starting a microradio station to performing political theater. Attendance was on the small side, though participants included national conference attendees and local activists. Workshops assumed knowledge of the issues and a desire to put information gained to use with local media projects and in the streets -- assumptions which seemed pretty accurate.

In the same DIY spirit, and correctly guessing that “any corporate media coverage of the conference will be perfunctory (if at all),” activists launched a Be the Media! Blog (www.wisconsinite.net/bethemediablog) to report on the weekend’s events. The Bloggers also pulled off the impressive feat of webcasting many national conference events with “less than a month’s worth of planning, a budget of $0, a handful of volunteers and a whole lot of donated time/ resources.”

Reform the Media
The National Conference on Media Reform’s stated aims were to strengthen grassroots and national coalitions, develop unified plans for immediate and long-term reforms, and generate policies and strategies that will structurally improve the media system. Though it was impressive in many respects, the conference, in my opinion, failed to meet two of its goals.

Perhaps because of the overwhelming participant response, the conference relied on an “expert” to audience one-way flow of information. Only one hour at the end of the conference offered a more interactive structure. These “issue salons,” on issues including hypercommercialism, media ownership, and democratic governance, used a speed dating format in which people talked in small groups for six minutes, and then changed groups. It was fun, but any in-depth discussion was impossible.

In the plenary sessions and workshops I attended, little time was devoted to policies, strategies, or plans. Instead, well-known people talked about topics which, for the most part, media reformers could safely be assumed to already be familiar with. “Big media is invested in the socioeconomic status quo...” “We have underestimated the impact of media control on our [wider social justice] struggle...” “How are we different from a society where [images of war] are banned?”

Although it fell short of its admittedly ambitious goals, the conference did an excellent job at building community among independent journalists, policy activists, nonprofit leaders, and even some policy makers. The large turnout and all-star speaker roster, including Naomi Klein, Ralph Nader, Bill Moyers, and FCC commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein (who played a mean harmonica during Saturday night’s performance), were exciting. The energy and camaraderie generated will be important to the long-term David and Goliath struggle for media reform.

Transform the Media
There was only one workshop which discussed media and communities of color, and it stood in stark contrast to the rest of the national conference. “We ain’t fighting to take back the media, because we never had it in the first place,” stated one of the media justice presenters.

Groups organizing in communities of color, working with youth of color, and women of color media collectives are working together under the banner of media justice. One core principle is that access to media is a human right. Another is that mass media, through its racist, sexist, heterosexist, and classist language and images, is an instrument of genocide.

The media justice approach “depends on base-building and community organizing -- not lobbying.” Another presenter highlighted the media reform/media justice divide with an anecdote: Philadelphia organizers door knocking to register people in opposition to the FCC plan relaxing media ownership rules encountered many people of color unwilling to give their names and addresses to any government agency.

Realizing that they had almost completely ignored issues of race, class, and gender, Nichols and McChesney asked the media justice coalition to speak at the closing plenary -- 10 minutes before it started. Malkia Cyril took the opportunity to inform the audience that “we won’t stay at the margins of the media and events like this much longer.” The coalition is planning its own conference in 2004; see www.mediajustice.org.

The best evidence from the weekend that the media democracy movement is thriving is that there was no single event or single answer to the question of what needs to be done. Hopefully the conversation will continue, with an increased awareness of and respect for the range of strategies and actions.

Indy Radio Report from Nov. 7

On Friday, Nov. 7, John and I did a live call-in to my radio show, mediageek, on community Radio WEFT in Champaign, IL. We discussed the web streamining effort, and the events of the first day of the Conference up to 5:30 PM CST.

Click here to download and listen in mp3 or ogg vorbis -- broadcast quality and low bitrate modem quality files are both available.

Panel Musings: Corporate Media's Impoverished Journalism

I hadn't planned to go to this one, but it was scheduled to be webcast and I needed to be there. Perhaps it was the long night before; maybe it was the early start time (9am) Saturday; I'm not sure, but I pretty much found it pointless.

As paul has mentioned previously, having four folks sitting on a stage or above the crowd panel-pontificating does not do much for dialogue or reciprocal skill-sharing. As this was being held in an auditorium, there wasn't much getting around that.

But what bothered me even more was the fact that it felt like we were being talked down to. The panelists (Jeff Cohen (FAIR), Linda Foley (The Newspaper Guild), Sam Husseini (Institute for Public Accuracy), & Salim Muwakkil (In These Times)) identified themselves as being qualified to sit up there because at one time or another they had dealt with the corporate media as part of news coverage (seemingly as (paid) pundits).

Then followed the bitching about how the corporate media sucks. You've heard it all before.

Conference coverage from independent media

The most-detailed and interesting coverage about this past weekend comes, of course, from independent media. In addition to the coverage from the Chicago IMC noted below, there is a short report posted on the Twin Cities IMC, another article discussing some issues covered by the conference posted on the Madison IMC, and a longer feature about both conferences from the Rochester IMC.

More independent coverage comes from a conference recap at GNN, a detailed reader commentary mostly about Saturday's keynote from BuzzFlash, and some blog entries (Nov. 10 and Nov. 11) by Danny Schechter, the News Dissector. The earlier entry discusses solely the conference and Schechter's impressions of it, along with his thoughts that the conference "is impressive not only because so many people and organizations have payed their own way to come, but also because concern for the media is what brought them."

Coverage from the Chicago IMC

A center panel of the Conference, and Be The Media, has been posted on Chicago Indymedia:

http://chicago.indymedia.org

There are links to photos and a small essay about the November 8 Indymedia caucus from its moderator.

Enjoy.