Be The Media

Jonathan Rintels, Creative Voices in Media
Thrilled to see so many people here. Founded center 2.5 years ago. He is a screenwriter, though after doing this for 2.5 years, he's really a former screenwriter. We try to look at media concentration issues from the perspective of people who make media. Most of the people on our board of advisors are well known names like Warren Beatty, Sissy Spacek, and lot of other people. We come at it from a commercial perspective and are trying to broaden it to a noncommercial perspective.

We had a wonderful media reformers retreat that Common Cause put on, and we talked about the media we'd like to see, and talked about pushing that forward in Washington with concrete action. We came up with creating a media bill of rights that would lay out a set of principles that would guide us and policy makers in the way they look at media.

It was kind of easy to come up with this since in his spare time he was noodling with a media declaration of independence, which was entirely negative -- it was about what they don't like. When he was tasked to be the lead drafter of the bill of rights, he turned it around to be all postiive -- nondiscrimination, artists creative rights being respected. He wants to confess something here, he actually voted for Republicans in the past.

In terms of the rhetoric I wanted to bring to this, it's a mainstream rhetoric that would appeal to Democrats and Republicans, conservatives as well as progressives. America is a country built on vision, so visioning is important -- it's in our constitution, bill of rights, supreme court decision. His thought in doing this was to place the media reform movement in this tradition. Put the vision that underlies those documents into this, and have it be the outgrowth of how that vision applies to the media reform movement.

It's a way of saying we're on the right side of all of this. We can trace these principles through American tradition and legal precedence. The other side, that favors consolidation, is outside that tradition and has hijacks. Efficiency and expediency don't show up in any part of the tradition.

Some people from the original committee noted that I'd left things out, since I was from a commercial media background. So we put it out to broader realm of media groups and found that I'd left a lot out.

We've come up with something that does lay out a lot of principles, a kind of wish list, that we can take to place in the debate with policy makers in Washington, and not be seen as off the wall or radical, or outside the mainstream American political tradition.

I know we're going to speak in this room about if we've left other things out. This is a process, this isn't something that's come down from the mount. The way to get the broadest basis of support is to get as many perspectives in the document as possible. This is our vision document. Whether it's lpfm, free wireless, or network neutrality.

Alice Myatt, media consultant.
She's new to the coalition and hasn't yet participated in a meeting, though she's seen a lot of emails on the listserv. She started out always wanting to make television. Went to school for masscomm in the late 60s when it wasn't popular. Went to school in Boston, worked in production, then development, then strategic planning. Has worked in public and commercial media and has moved back and forth.

Was program officer for media at MacArthur foundation, moved onto PBS until 2 years, when the institution was taking such a drastic turn that she felt she could not longer be productive there. She moved to consulting nonprofit organizations.

One group she's worked with has been the Center for Digital Democracy and Jeff Chester. Their work is tied to the bill of rights, in the subsector of public media. The Bill talks about media as a whole, but they think public media has a particular place -- it's more than NPR and PBS, more than municipal wireless and community radio.

The question is, what is public media and it's role in society? These are the big questions we're asking of individuals and institutions, and we're going to ask you. We hope over time you give them some good consideration, and hope you'll reask those questions and ask them of friends, family, neighbors and elected representatives.

We hope will come up with answers that will collectively serve our nation, and have a construtive dialogue about public media.

First the questions:
1. what is public media and how does it serve society?
What should a sustainable public media econlogy look like>
How can it encompass news, public affairs, education, arts and culture, civic engagement.
How does it fit within the media reform movement?
How do we develop strategies and tactics to realize those goals?

What infrastructre does our public media need to have.
How do we ensure ease of use for producers, distributers and users?

The Bill of rights is the foundation for thinking of that structure.

Sustainability. What models of financing should we explore? Should we explore multiple methods? Tax, portion of spectrum sales, advertising?

Governance. What standards do we put in place to ensure accountability and transparency, to offer true diversity.

Another theme is the role of public media in society -- what can it provide that won't be provided by private media?

Should an explicit role be to stimulate creative innovation?

Movement building. How do form stronger alliances? Do we start with mapping all aspects of media reform and independent production?

Do we work more closely together to avoid duplication?

These are the questions we need to answer in order to address the issue. Public media needs to be reformed. How do we do it?

Jenny Toomey, Exec. Dir. Future of Music Coalition
One of the ways she was going to talk about it, is to talk about the organization. She is an activist and a rocker, and started the coalition about 5 years as a result of a few things. She ran an independent record label for 8 years. Thought one way to change things was to create better music and do good business, treat artists well. She was lucky to start out in punk rock, which had a parallel culture, it's ideals weren't overtly commercial. At some point in time the style of music they were making, and the parallel economy of college radio, record stores and zines, became cherry picked by the major labels. We realized we'd spent 8 years building a parallel economy that was vulnerable.

It was actually profitable, in that you could be 25 years old and live on it. But then you'd loose all your popular bands because they could make more in the mainstream economy media.

They closed down the label because they were faced with the choice to join a distribution deal with a major label or close down. They didn't start a label to own bands' copyrights and sell them to the major labels.

So she worked for the Washington Post for a few years and was asked to write about and MP3 jukebox early on, and thought this would be disruptive to the mainstream music economy. So she called all her friends in independent labels still struggling with it and began interviewing them and asking if they were using these technologies. They said they were too busy to think about it.

So she started going to these conferences with no artists there were professors say that artists would make all their money off t-shirts in the future. She thought they need artists in the conversation.

They knew early on that DRM would never be successful because of the analog hole -- if you can hear it, you can tape it.

They also knew that the law would not be on the side of the technologists. Like the MP3.com lawsuit, which sucked the momentum out of energy to use mp3 to create new music distribution methods.

All the people working on digital music started to consolidate, and the biggest one required artists to sign exclusive contracts, which got them back to the start of where major labels are.

So she knows that they had to have a different group. She didn't pay any attention to politics until she started the Coalition.

We need an artists middle class to find ways that musicians get paid. They need health insurance. Musicians quit music because they need this sort of resource.

They need access to an audience. That's why we started working with Common Cause, because they did a big radio consolidation move. We counted what happened with radio consolidation, and we had the resource to do this research.

All you have to do is say to an average american that Clear Channel went from 40 to 1200, and do you like what you hear in the radio, and they start to get it.

It's very hard to organize artists, they're individual, iconoclastic, and it's bred into them. They told their art isn't valuable. Media activists are a bit like that, too. One of the things they were able to bring to the process of the Media Bill of Rights is to work with people who don't generally want to work on these sorts of things.

Common Cause was very helpful in getting people to work together. This is a first step and she's very proud to be a part of it.

Danny Schechter, Mediachannel.org, the News Dissector
No matter where you go that's where you are. We're in St. Louis in the United States of America, the Land of Media. Conference started with Nichols invoking Joseph Pulitzer, and the next day the Post-Dispatch announces that they're being sold to Lee media. On page 16 there's a intesting story about people arguing about a driveway, and the news from Iraq is even deeper.

We can't have a democracy in american without a media that respects and promotes a democracy. Our media system has gone from an institution protected by our constitution to serve a watchdog role, to one that is conducive and colluded with the worst aspects of our political culture. Without the media the Iraq war wouldn't have happened the way it did.

The media is not just something students write papers about, that we complain about when we can't find anything we want to see.

As we go through that exercise it increasingly typifies american life. Maybe there's a problem here.

I worked for ABC, CNN, I worked for a company taken over by Infinity, they took over an announced that they were firing 19 people. They were surprised that we wouldn't go quiety, and had one of the few successful strikes and got a small victory. I know that media can matter in people's life that people care about media.

I know from a recent Pew study that we are not alone. We are not grumpy and cranky like people imagine us. In fact many people share our concerns. According to Pew 70% of people are dissatisfied with an industry that prides itself on a claim that they're only giving people what they want. Well, we don't want it, and we're not going to take it anymore.

Guess what, 70% of people working in the media are also dissatisfied. Our stories are spiked, we don't get to work on what we believe in. Days of work get shrunk down to a few minutes or seconds.

I became a refugee of network news. I started a company called Globalvision which tried to tell stories from the inside out. Did a series on South Africa starting with $200 a month that informed people about what was happening with Apartheid.

Went to PBS and said human rights was the key challenge they were facing, looked at their pilot and told him that human rights is an insufficient organizing principle for a program, unlike cooking, which is.

We worked station by station to get their programming seen. This was not a welcoming environment for a diversity of point of view. It was not living up to its mandate.

These issues brought us back to one place. One day they were in their Times Square office and they saw the porn theater get torn down and replaced by a big tower for an investment bank. Then we looked up the street and there was media consolidation in our face: FOX, MTV, NBC , Reuters. They're all there. We realized our world had changed.

We realized we had joined media to spotlight the problems of the world, but now media was one of the problems. It's pervasively invisible, but we look at like a piece of furniture, a toaster with picture, in the words of an FCC Chairman.

so I wrote the More You Watch the Less You Know. I was encouraged to be positive in the last chapter. So I proposed a media channel to watch all the other channels, but that would cost $100 million to get off the ground. So we went on-line and reached out to other groups, and 1300 organizations are now part of the network.

People said they needed a prominent person to bring people in. They told him to go to Noam Chomsky at MIT, but then he realized that Noam doesn't watch TV. So he went to Walter Cronkike, not only did agree, but he made a video on the website that makes him sound more radical than Danny.

We have allies in places we didn't realize we had. They're fed up.

This is a battle we can take on and win. There are many people who will join if we can just talk to them.

Who? Parents, who are worried about what children watch on TV. Teachers, because the TV is competing with the classroom.

People in TV and the media industry but who are having doubts.

We have to figure out a way to cross the partisan divide. He knows it's a drag, but look at the media consolidation fight. Half from progressives, and the other half from the NRA. It was that combination that got Congress to vote for reexamining media rules.

We don't have enough people here to enforce our agenda, but we can talk to other people who don't know what's going on. The last thing the media wants you to know about is it's interest. We need to build common ground with other people

It's unfashionable. I went to Moveon.org, and he has great respect for them. He has a film on media and war, and asked about getting media issues on the agenda, their members say media is #2. If you look at their priorities media is not even on the list.

Look at the foundation side, it's changing, but the ones on the right have been ahead of us on investment. Not just grants, but 3 to 5 years of funding to create institutions. On the left they often have more money, but media isn't even on the list.

he found that people want to talk about these issues and get out side the box, and to think about new ways to build support for our concerns, values, hopes and dreams. I hope this is a sign that people want to get involved in the process. Not just hear from great thinkers, but be great thinkers.

I've heard some great projects from people doing interesting stuff. We need to hear their stuff. But with so little funding everyone's scrambling for crumbs.

Has to give credit to Common Cause. They got started with campaign finance reform. But what are politicians raising all the money, to buy media time. So they've taken a leadership role on media as an issue. They're willing to work with others and they want to make it work.

We need to fight for what we want, not just what we're against. This is everybody's issue, not just our issue. We can win our democracy back.

Moderator Lauren Coletta:
One thing the ACLU did around the Patriot Act was to get local city councils to pass resolutions on it. It helped to raise consciousness and get people involved against it. If you have any ideas like this, or any other ideas we'd like to hear them.

Comment:
Coming from outside the States, he's struck by one thing: that the focus is on diversity and localism, and local ownership. But his fear is that if you don't focus globally you won't get progressive voices to the rest of the world, they'll get CNN and FOX, and you won't get progressive voices from places like the Middle East. How does the Bill of Rights address that.

Schechter answers: this visioning exercise has a long history going back into the 70s and the roundtables that were held and the UNESCO meetings on the new info order. In a way we're drawing on the past. I'm working on a book called the Media Manifesto, and he's researching a very rich history of media criticism around the world. He went to Doha for the AlJazeera festival. They couldn't be nicer and more willing to connect with us. They know the Bush Admin doesn't speak for all of us.

Al Jazeera is launching an international channel with documentaries about the whole world. They're attempting to become a global broadcaster, can they get on the air here? Who knows, but we hope we can work with them and people in other countries.

We are not alone. Berlusconi in Italy is already ahead of Murdoch. In Eastern Europe they replaced public state broadcasters with American-based commercial media.

Comment:
He studied mass comm up to Masters degree, gave up during the Gulf War. Now he's getting back. His vision is radical, maybe stupid, he would like to see everyone get together to initiate legislation to make it illegal to own a radiostation newspaper or tv station outside the area it serves. It's big, so he throws it out there.

Comment:
This whole things reminds him of how the Encyclopedia Brittanica got together. In Scotland scientist and mathematicians got together and this reminds me of it. I had a bar and booked a lot of bands and became familiar with how musicians weren't given access to their music, and how difficulty it is to crack into the industry. The idea he had was to harness the energy of people who dissented, and to change the distribution of the music so that we divorced it from the RIAA and redistributed the money to promote free media, something self-supportive. Could the structure be changed?

Jenny Toomey answers: if you're going to redistribute music, it should go to the artists. 99% of artists are in debt to their label. The contracts have an audit deal, but the record companies don't have to say how many records they made.

We wanted to remove the middle man. One of the big hurdles is the existing control of the promotion distribution, the airwaves. One area where we doing a better job at building international movements is copyright -- it's one area where artists and producers are able to retain control, and therefore have the final say on the structure around new technologies.

There's a lot of parallels with patent laws, patenting seeds. It's one place where the world justice movement comes together.

Comment:
She went to school to become a DJ and learned about FCC and media issues, and now doesn't want to work for corporate media. She went to one conference where she wanted to create a statewide organization to help get media literacy out -- about the landscape of media reform. She wants all of Colorado to understand that media reform affects them at a local and state level. She needs to know if anyone is working specifically to do that, or if there are other statewide models they can follow.

She does interviews all over the state to talk about media reform on community radio and public access. She talks about these issues all the time, she can take cartons of the Bill and get the word out.

Lauren coletta responds: They are working with groups all over the country trying to work on good outreach strategies. The work they're doing with the Coalition they hope will just reinforce what is already out there.

Comment:
What about John McCain's media reform bill he heard about in another panel? Are you trying to introduce this to Congress?

Jonathan answers: Things in terms of policy are converging, like the indecency question, the digital transition, a rewrite of the Telecom Act, which is many ways in 1996 was the predicate for all the consolidation that's happened since then. It was hoped that the Bill is not the legislation itself, but would form the foundation of a piece of legislation that would be a model for legislation.

Jenny Toomey answers: on McCain's LPFM bill, it's great. It's a small solution, but it's a good one. The bill would allow more LPFM in urban areas.