Be The Media

Unfortunately, the other two speakers had little to offer by comparison. The opening speaker of the session, John Arnold, is a former talk radio host. He certainly had the pleasing trained voice of a radio host, with a smooth delivery, even when his facts were scanty. Mr. Arnold went back to school for a PhD. in comm as a result of an awakening to media consolidation. However, his thin observations and platitudes about the state of media ownership sounded like someone with less than a semester of Political Economy under his belt.

His gloss of the Fairness Doctrine was thin, as was his overview of the 1996 Telecom Act. Frankly, I'd be surprised if half the room wasn't more knowledgeable about these topics than he.

I went to this session hoping to learn about what the specific items of contention and negotiation would be for the Telecom Act in 2006, and Mr. Arnold provided no information on this, and certainly no new information for anyone with even a cursory education of media law an policy in the US. There must be several dozen other PhD. students wandering the halls of the conference who could speak with more precision and authority on the subject than Mr. Arnold who could have filled in for him. Which begs the question of why he was on the panel at all.

My review of Lauren-Glenn Davitian is somewhat less scathing, since I do see why she was on the panel, though I do not think she spoke to her strengths. She started off by telling us that she was going to summarize 4 months of research into the Telecomm Act in five minutes.

Four months of research? Frankly, from a session like this, I'm hoping the speakers have put in YEARS of research, because I, and many others in the audience, certainly have.

Ms. Davitian's background is in organizing around community and public access TV, and she did emphasize the importance of local community organizing as a force of change. She also emphasized the need to have long-term institutional organizing, not just single-issue organizing. It's this that she seems to have the most experience with and could speak most valuably about. Unfortunately, it only came up at the end of her talk, and not nearly to the depth that I would hope.

Mark Cooper very clearly laid out particular points that are important to see addressed in new Telecom legislation. I hoped that Ms. Davitian would have been able to speak more specifically about how to organize local communities around these issues.

Rather, she spent most of her talk giving us a hackneyed gloss history of telecom legislation in the US, that it seems she has only recently gotten any handle on.

The point that Ms. Davitian was trying to get at and emphasize is that the battleground for regulation over broadband services will be fought over whether it is to be regulated as common carrier or as media. But her point was clouded and late in her presentation. I think it would have been clearer and more effective had she ditched the attempted overview of Telecom law and simply started with this premise.

I think what she wanted to convey was communities want their broadband providers regulated more like telephone companies and less like media companies, and they should organize to achieve this. That's a very keen observation and then she could have focused her talk on telling us how we might do that.

In fairness, she did speak more directly to the question of organizing in the Q&A after the speakers' presentations. Mr. Arnold, however, did not redeem himself in this portion, at one point stating simply, that there is little hope for reform. Then why be here?

Frankly, Russ Newman, who was the Free Press moderator for this session, in just his introductory remarks demonstrated a clearer understanding of the elements at play with a new Telecom act than either Mr. Arnold or Ms. Davitian. I was hoping to walk away with more information that I don't already have, and Mr. Cooper did make sure that this was true, though it's too bad that it didn't extend to all panelists.