Be The Media

Panel 2 10:45
Naomi Klein, John Nichols, Phil Donahue

Phil:
Gives a little background on himself, he’s turning 70. Got his first job in 1959 as news director at WABJ radio in Michigan – director because he was the only person in the dept. Began to appreciate power of journalism – he could stop the mayor in his tracks at just 22. It was an opportunity to learn how the city works, how journalism works. There are no radio stations like this anymore.

Computerized, canned and pureed music. You can’t get the score of the local high school football game – how many stations do this anymore? Students who are here today won’t have this AAA farm team opportunity to work their way up in media.

In the early 60s talk radio hit, so he arranged to have the telephone company install the equipment so he could have remote guests like Bobby Kennedy. They could be on because they didn’t have to come to Dayton, OH. The ratings went through the roof and he was asked to do the same thing on TV – 1967 the Phil Donahue show went on the air. 2 cameras, no desk, low budget. He was up against Monte Hall’s Let’s Make a Deal. He knew that to make it fly they’d need issues. So they booked Madelaine Murrary O’Hair the atheist, which brought in the audience.

He found the audience, mostly women, were asking better questions than the host, so that’s why he decided to go into the audience to have them ask. Sexism and bias was huge then. Women were supposedly only interested in dishes and knitting, game shows and soap operas. And then they put their first OB/GYN on the air, not long after the pill had been introduced, and the phones were off the hook.

Their first full year on the air was 1968 and he had a platform for discussion with his name on it. Everyone should have that opportunity.

Then Jane Fonda came on the show in a tie-dye t-shirt and there were a lot of kids, flower children, but people of conscience. And women were asking, “why does she do this? She’s embarrassing her father.” Bob Evans, the sausage king, sent a letter saying he wouldn’t sponsor any program that tore down America. But the show had become the 800 lb. Gorilla, doing great in the ratings. A station in Arizona wouldn’t carry a show that had Dick Gregory, but if they cancelled in Peoria they’d still be on in Indianapolis. If somebody cancelled they could go across town to the other station.

After nearly 6000 shows, the most often featured guest was Ralph Nader, who also drew a very big crowd. He talked about the second crash that children experience rattling around in cars with dashboards with protrusions, saying it could be avoided with seat belts. And now seat belts advertise cars, they help sell them.

Phil went back to cable TV because he couldn’t believe the cable media support for the war in Iraq. He says we’re looking at a pretty naïve guy, who’s spoiled by getting to do just about anything he wants. So he goes to MSNBC thinking this will be something different, we will feature dissent, this is America.

By the time the troops were marching into Baghdad we were gone. MSNBC is having ratings problems, and though he hadn’t reached the power of the old show, their ratings often led the whole network. He says their ratings did not warrant cancellation – they could have been the tent pole of the network.

Then a management memo was leaked that said the anti-war stances on Donahue would not help MSNBC in the face of the flag-waving of FOX.

The president of CNN, Walter Issacsson, upon getting his job ran to Tom Delay and Newt Gingrich to exclaim that they’re not liberal. Management view is that liberals are wimps, they’re not patriotic, they don’t support the troops, they support unions. So if they think we’re liberal, they’re not going to watch us. If they support unions, then they’ll want more pay, which reduces our bottom line and our stock.

This same dynamic applies to politics. We will never take money and corporations out of politics if we only have two parties. That’s why Phil was on the bus with Ralph Nader. Why does the NY Times own the Boston Globe? We need competition, that’s the point of the 1st Amendment. If we have a large crowd, then there’s somewhere in the middle recording the truth.

But today we have fewer companies unwilling to look under the tent to see what the people in power are planning for us. Here we have the media beating the drums for this war.

He met a soldier who was shot and paralyzed in Sadr City, and then saw Laura Bush at the White House Correspondent’s dinner, cracking them up. There’s so little distance. Maybe that’s why it’s difficult to get the nation to see what it has done with this unconstitutional, unwinnable war. With a nation that is sitting here largely mute watching the bombs drop on TV, bombs dropping on old people and children in Iraq.

He says it’s great to be sitting here surrounded by people who agree with me, starts to choke up, and passes the baton.

Naomi:

It’s a wonderful honor to follow Phil Donahue. She had an incredibly naïve thought on Sept. 11 which she made the mistake to publish, which appeared in the LA Times. It was called Game Over, the end of video game war. He wrote that seeing the reality of actual war in such stark contrast with the video game war of the first Gulf War, that we couldn’t continue with that. As we know, that hasn’t been the case, and there’s been a lot of effort to make sure that wouldn’t be the case.

She recently learned that during the invasion of Iraq, the TV networks were embedded deeper than the embedded reporters. They were part of the war planning way ahead of time. She just finished reading the war strategy book Shock and Awe, which sees war as a type of mass torture. It’s a psychological strategy more than military. You bombard the enemy with such tremendous force that it breaks down their ability to resist – they are demoralized by your force – called achieving rapid dominance. When the video results are broadcast worldwide on CNN the impact on coalition support will be positive. The idea was to incorporate the 24 hour news network into the strategy to project demoralizing images onto the people being attacked.

She is always struck by the willingness of the cheerleaders of capitalism to break the rules of capitalism, profit, in order to suppress dissent. There is a tremendous willingness to block out popular voices because of the larger program to keep these people out.

There is a tremendous potential at events like this to make media a political issue. Part of the problem is that the issue is too big, and that it comes off like griping. The other problem is that we’re so hyper-mediated ourselves, we can only see action through media.

There’s a real untapped potential out there in military families and returning solidiers. We’re seeing a turning point in the media where Iraq is turning into one of these intractable ethnic conflicts, and something we can tune out. The violence is utterly decontextualized from the fact that the US is the instigator of this conflict. We need to hold onto the narrative and not turn into another incomprehensible ethnic conflict or civil war.

The most powerful people to speak to this are parents of soliders in Iraq who tune into to CNN to get news about what’s happening to their children, but instead get news about Michael Jackson, Terry Schiavo and the Pope. We should think about how to build bridges and a campaign of returning soldiers and military families, saying “tell us the truth about the war.”

She is going to talk about abandoning print to do documentary filmmaking. She finished a film about Argentina where workers took over their factory to create a workers’ cooperative, which is happening all over the country. We see a democratic movement sweeping across the continent, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, throwing out neo-liberal governments, demanding political and economic rights. They inherited debts rung up by their dictators, held by the World Bank. With all due respect to Hersh who last night said the World Bank doesn’t kill people – it does, it’s policies and support for dictators does.

In Argentina they went through a quick series of 5 presidents, it looked like a revolution. But the people didn’t have a new person to put in power – their slogan was “All of them must go.” This is late 2001 – it was an amazing moment.

After losing 5 presidents, there was a moment of “what do we do know.” She arrived shortly after the uprising, and around Buenos Aires there were clusters of a hundred or so people voting and deciding what they were going to do, which is where the factory cooperatives came from.

She is driven by the need to find something other than the negative truth. She doesn’t think we’re confronting deeply enough the psychology that makes change possible. There is so much bad news, corruption and violence, yet so removed from accountability and consequence, as the solider filmed shooting an Iraqi who just got off. The impunity that we’re seeing is part of the show “we can get away with anything.”

She doesn’t believe that all this bad news is catylyzing. We need to show stories of how change happens. We are so hypermediated that we see change in these video moments: the wall falls, then communism collapses. We see this in the narrative about bringing democracy to the middle east – Saddam’s statue falls, then the people of the Middle East will see it, a media managed tsunami where everyone sees the same thing at the same time.

The project of this documentary is to show how change happens. How did factories turn into worker-managed cooperatives. They followed it through meetings, fights with police, the lives of the people involved. They wanted to demystify the process. At showings of the film, they see these effects that TV used to have and harness but has abdicated. Documentary film is at the moment filling this gap. We’re not just going to the theater to see what we’re not learning on TV, but it’s also that people are enjoying the process of gathering together. They showed their film on TV in Canada – it was commissioned by the CBC – but they much preferred the experience of showing it publicly and having discussions afterwards. Why aren’t we taking unoccupied land and turning it into community gardens?

Watching, talking, acting, is an incredibly powerful combination. Talk shows with a town hall aspect can approach that. Instead we have programs like Extreme Makeover where the narrative is that everything about you sucks, so we’ll bulldoze and start over.

This is the power in stories. It’s a power to show us how to make change and to heal us from shock. Therapists call it narrative therapy – it’s completely accepted that if you’ve been through a traumatic event, the only way to deal with it is to put it into a story, a narrative that makes sense to you. Journalists talk about stories, but they don’t use the tools of storytelling – just a sequence of facts.

When we are sane we are powerful.

John Nichols:
He says he loves Naomi Klein. So he’s going to take a long time after this speech to reconcile the notion that when you are sane you are powerful with George Bush.

Those of us who talk a lot write speeches, but then somebody else says something interesting and you have to riff off that.

Taking off of Naomi’s discussion of Argentina. He was reading USA Today the other day – he calls it a weather page wrapped around the dead rotting fish of the news – and looked at the editorial page. The headline on the lead editorial was “Latin American Democracy Stumbles,” and they discuss everything Naomi was talking about. All the examples in the info box was that there was an election in Uruguay, Argentina and Venezuela but they elected the Left. Elections were examples of the stumbling of democracy, because they’re electing the wrong people.

These are the kinds of things that get him angry. He grew up in punk rock and new wave. One of his favorite bands was Dexy’s Midnight Runners. They’re first hit had a guy running through the radio dial, they hear Deep Purple, Margaret Thatcher. Then a guy says, “tear it down.” That’s how he feels about our media now, tear it down.

He didn’t start that way. At age 10, in Union Grove, WI, population 900, he went to the publisher and said that he’d read the constitution and declaration of independence and that he was reporting for duty. The publisher told him to go cover the school board, and he did, getting $10 a story. At age 11 he interviewed Hubert Humphery who was campaigning. He had practiced journalism ever since.

When he hits a town, he picks up every paper he finds, which stack up as he crosses the country. And yet, this craft is indefensible today. We’re the guards in the prison, the people doing the most awful imaginable work. He wants to talk a little about what should be.

The biggest lie that is told is that the press was always bad, and always a disaster. It’s made mistakes, but we had a better media system in this country. He was told back in Madison that some lawmakers would read his paper and write legislation to address problems covered in the paper.

What happened?

What’s happening right now is recent history. The last 25 years are the times we should look at. It’s during this time that media corporations entered the field as a lobbying force, a full-time permanent lobbying force. In Washington DC if you took the whole right to life lobby, pro-choice lobby, the NRA and the anti-gun lobby, and put them together, they wouldn’t come close to equaling the media lobby. When you start to unlock the power of big media as a lobbying force.

They don’t want deregulation, they don’t want a free market. If you want to test this, throw up a radio signal right on top of another one – you’ll see that we have a highly regulated media system. We have decisions made behind closed door by our FCC and Congress without informing us.

In 1989 the FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine. What does this mean? It used to mean that if someone said “Phil Donahue is a communist and a thug” on the air, he had the right to respond.

A guy started his radio show in 1989 named Rush Limbaugh, and he could say anything he wanted, and nobody had to give the right of response. It opened up talk radio as we know it. It redefined the role of the FCC. It became solely the role of deciding between two companies – who gets what license, what territory.

Then comes the Telecom Act of 1996. Clear Channel owns 40 stations nationwide, you can only own 2 stations in a town. Less than a decade later they own 1200. The day after Sept. 11 they send a memo to their stations that says there are songs that they shouldn’t play because it will stir up listeners, like John Lennon’s Imagine, a song about peace.

These changes have created the most consolidated, formatted and dumbed down media system ever. Let’s call the question, “Can freedom of the press survive media consolidation?” No, it cannot. It’s not about freedom of the press, it’s about democracy. The founders put it in the 1st Amendment because they believed it was important for democracy.

We have wonderful alternatives, Amy Goodman, Indymedia, but the fact of the matter is that it does not begin to rival the power of the major corporate media, which gives most people the information on questions like whether we go to war. Let us remember the coverage leading up to the war in Iraq, the hyperpatriotism, the flag waving and flag pins. A guy on FOX complained that the people on ABC weren’t wearing their flag pins anymore.

All of this obvious deceit by the government, why didn’t we report? The foreign press got it. The Friday after the war stared, he was watching Aaron Brown on CNN, he announced they were going to show a troubling image. They went to aerial overhead view of a peaceful anti-war demonstration in Chicago. A couple of minutes later they went to Baghdad and showed images of bombing in residential neighborhoods along a river – no warning, no announcement that this might be troubling.

This war is tragedy.

The election of 2004, the biggest issue is what John Kerry did in 1969, not what Kerry might do in 2005. We had no debates, no discourse. We had an empty vacuous campaign.

The American people are experiencing what Madison warned us about: tragedy, farce or both. What are we going to do about it? Come on down to the media reform conference – we are taking on this media system, it must be torn apart and fundamentally changed.

He suggests that the task is no more daunting than the founders of the country took on to fight England, than a civil war to end slavery. But it is every bit as necessary as those struggles. If we do not fix the broken media system, we will not pass on a democracy to our children.

Questions from the audience.

Q: On the issue of multiplexes and indpendent theater. She’s the manager of the independent theater in the town. What about independent distribution? It’s great that these films get made, but how do they get out?

A: Nichols answers, it’s the old fight, the powerful elites vs. everybody else. He thinks we overfocus on news, often at the expense of culture. Musicians understand what’s happened to music. It’s all the same situation with film and books – we’ve dumbed everything to the lowest possible price. When we talk about media reform, it’s shorthand. The way we want to break things up is we want people to go to their home town to pressure politicians, but also support local independent media. Give them your business, but also get on Zoning boards – block multiplexes – and get on your cable commission.

The other truth of the matter is that people like Naomi are making these films.

Naomi answers: her’s was a mainstream film in Canada on TV and in theatrical release in Canada, italy and elsewhere. Because there’s a policy of setting aside the space for films like this in these countries.

*had to go, so missed the last few questions*