May 12, 2005
Audio from Media Consolidation: Opening Plenary & Session 3
I know that our pal Phlegm is having trouble getting his comprehensive audio posted, so I'll try to fill in some of the gap with audio I got on my trusty Hi-MD recorder.
You will find posted to Radio Indymedia audio from Tuesday night's opening plenary, featuring Rep. Bernie Sanders, Naomi Klein and Amy Goodman, and from Wednesday's session #3, featuring Len Hill, Dennis Swanson (Viacom), Paul Jay, Roberta Baskin (Center for Public Integrity) .
Session 3 was fun due to the presence of Mr. Swanson from Viacom, who you would guess isn't very popular at a media consolidation conference. There was a bit of fireworks between him and some of the questioners, including our own Phlegm and Amy Goodman.
I think it's safe to say that Mr. Swanson doesn't quite get it. He's drinking the big media Kool Aid, and he likes it (and that nice house in Connecticut).
Posted by paul at 10:14 AM | Comments (0)
May 11, 2005
Notes on Today's 3rd Panel: Len Hill, Dennis Swanson (Viacom), Paul Jay, Roberta Baskin (Center for Public Integrity)
Like the last set of notes, these are pseudo-live-blogged notes, with some more snarky remarks at the Vicaom guy. Click MORE to read 'em.
Panel 3:
After an impassioned plea by Len Hill for “content neutral” regulation to preserve the capitalist media system that hews to the ideals proclaimed by the Supreme Court as expressed in precedent, we hear from Mr. Swanson, head of broadcast stations from Viacom, who tells us all his company’s properties and assures us that the license renewal process is not a “rubber stamp” and that he takes it very seriously. Previous speaker, Len Hill, advocated for a 3 year renewal cycle in order to make stations more accountable.
Mr. Swanson is reading rather dryly from a prepared speech telling us how much Viacom has invested in satellite and microwave systems for news gathering, in addition to all of the company’s weather facility. He touts the “wall-to-wall” coverage of weather events in Florida last year.
In essence, Mr. Swanson is telling us how great his company’s broadcast facilities are, and how competitive they are.
He believes the media’s role post-9/11 in NYC was important in bringing calm. My esteemed colleague, Phlegm, just asked, didn’t Viacom attempt to bilk insurance for millions of dollars after 9/11?
He tells us that Viacom owns 2.5% of the TV stations in the US, and that all the big owners only have 7.5% of the stations. However, what this statistic leaves out is their reach to actual persons, which makes up a significantly larger percentage of the US population, given that Viacom
and their ilk have most of their stations in the biggest markets in the US.
Mr. Swanson is working the “500 channels” argument, proclaiming how many cable and internet channels there are. He takes Washington DC as an example. In 1960 you would have seen 4 full power broadcast TV stations, now there are 15 full power and countless cable channels. Or Burlington, VT (he owns property in that area). In 1960 there were 2 full-power stations, now there are 10 full-power, 6 low-power, there were 5, now 15 radio. And, again, all those cable and “internet channels.”
Isn’t interactive on the internet great? He says it empowers “media consumers.” He says that the FCC fails to account for the impact of entertainment programming on viewpoint diversity, because it primarily counts news and public affairs programming.
He believes that diversity should be measured by counting all channels on internet, cable, newspaper, etc. Wow, I can barely keep up he’s reading his prepared statement so fast.
I wonder if the statement we just heard isn’t the same one delivered to a House or Senate subcommittee to bash the FCC and defend the so-called “free market.” He delivered it, however, with considerably less zeal, perhaps knowing that he may soon be a lamb to the slaughter.
Len Hill, Canadian news producer, comparing contemporary politics to pro wrestling, where the players know they have to be in character, and there are strict rules to how things actually go down. In the code of journalism, like the code of wrestling, there are questions you can’t ask of, say, Condi Rice, like you can’t ask her about the oil tanker that was named after her. Tim Russert can’t be too hard on Rice, or else she might not come back, and only give access to competitors.
The news operation has been made just one part of the corporate body, with pressure to be a profit center. In 1992 Bin laden had agreed to be interviewed, but CBS decided it was too expensive and nobody cared. Just 7 months prior to 9/11 CBS decided not to cover what was going on in Afghanistan, again because they said nobody cared, even though George Tenet had told Bush that Afghanistan was one of the biggest threats to national security.
It’s a combination of bottom line considerations and political/geopolitical interests. Not going to go too much into the problem. The president of Viacom just before the last election said publicly that he supports George Bush, because Bush’s policies are good for Bush. How can that not affect things? He doesn’t claim it causes direct censorship, but ultimately everyone reports to the president of the company.
There are three fronts that we need to fight. One is media reform. Two is criticizing existing media. Three is creating independent media. He is talking about building something that allies what exists and creates a platform to build on. He is talking about World Independent Television.
If we can harness the economic power of the 20 million people worldwide who protested the war in Iraq, then we can create an ad-free independent public TV station.
Here’s where they are. On the advisory committee are people like Amy Goodman, Bob McChesney and Naomi Klein. They have seed founding from Canadian autoworkers, Ford and MacArthur foundation. They want to start in all the big English speaking countries. The essence is a marriage between Internet and TV, and citizen and professional journalists with programming that will not bow to pressure. The heart will be an independent news operation, a media new criticism show, the best of citizen journalism vetted by pros, the best of what exists in print, internet and radio.
The thing that is critically wrong with our news is not that everything is missed, what’s reported never has a sense of urgency, as if it’s something disconnected from our lives. Reported so that you can hear the story then go watch a sitcom. No sense that the story impacts us in a way such that we can act. We want to cover things so that you feel that you can and should do something.
They want fair and broad debate, but not a phony debate. Not “is there an environmental problem?” but “what are we going to do about it?”
He has one final thing to say. We need to have a sense of urgency but act strategically. We have to act today, but build institutions that will last for years. He decided to do this because he was writing a film script about a journalist that stumbles on a conspiracy in the room 2020. He was trying to imagine what the world would be like in 2020, and it didn’t look good. What if we had a TV network that was independent and stood up to power. Well, you can’t just start building that in 2019.
Remember what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says, “Don’t Panic.” Let’s build Independent World TV.
Roberta Baskin, new executive director for the center for public integrity. She started out as an investigative reporter in Chicago where Dennis Swanson was her general manager. She thinks that freedom of the press can survive consolidation. Things are so bad now, that it creates an incentive to do better. She’s watched the firewall between news and business values crumble.
As an investigative reporter she could cover things that could make a difference, health, safety and corruption. People would call and comment, say “you think that’s bad, let me tell you my story.” Community groups would come to the story every three years and threaten the station management over challenging the license. That doesn’t happen anymore.
She asked Michael Powell about this, and in a flippant response he said that in 1996 with the Telecom Act Congress gave TV stations an “easy pass” in license renewal.
It’s time for a new paradigm now. We can celebrate that now. There is a wall that has been built between what journalists do, and the community. When she was a journalist she got phone calls, she testified to Congress on drug testing and radon testing. You could focus on a problem and get something done about it.
At the networks she didn’t hear from people much, and she could follow up on her stories. She could do a story about a Dow Chemical pesticide, but they wouldn’t let her follow up since Dow was supplying huge binders of information complaining about the story.
At CBS she was able to do a international story once a year, as the networks were closing down their foreign bureaus saying nobody cares about what goes on outside America. She wanted to do a story on how soccer balls are made by child and bonded labor in Pakistan, and her superiors were worried how anyone would understand what was spoken in Urdu. She found a factory where children were making surgical instruments for UNICEF, but UNICEF said they hadn’t seen it. Reebok was very upset about being implicated and the executive producer wanted to pull the Reebok section, and the president of CBS was in on the screening. She Baskin argued that the Reebok section was the heart of the story, as a company that has an anti-child-labor stance which employs child labor. The president decided to run it and not buckle under, so it relies on the personalities involved, and it keeps getting harder.
She did a story about Nike’s labor in Vietnam, where women workers there were abused. It resonated on college campuses and was used in demonstrations against the company. It was scheduled to reair that Summer, which is standard practice, with new information. But the president pulled it, and it turns out that CBS struck a deal with Nike over the Nagano Olympics. The next night she saw her colleagues on 48 Hours on air wearing prominent Nike logo clothing. She confronted the president of CBS, and then told that she had breached professional etiquette and was demoted to the morning news, and was able to get out of her contract.
She took a paycut to go behind the scenes at 20/20 on ABC hoping she could do some good work in selecting stories, but was only able to do so much. She got an email one day from the CEO of Disney, ABC owner, that said “Dear Cast Member.” She sat in and watched how 20/20 stories are selected. She has minute-by-minute ratings that executives worry about. The ratings go up for an interview with MacAuley Culkin but go down for a story about counting presidential election votes. A whole show on porn kept people tuned in. So it’s become “how do we keep people entertained?” not “how do we keep them informed?”
She moved to NOW with Bill Moyers and did a long investigation of influence peddling in Washington.
The Center for Public Integrity is fifteen years old, and is made up of investigative reporters doing independent, hard-hitting journalism. They supply investigations to NY Times and other mainstream press. They have stories on media consolidation – you can go to the website and punch in your zip code to find out who owns your local media. They have a project called Lobby Watch, keeping an eye on what they call the fourth branch of government. 14 billion dollars has been spent on lobbying in the last 6 years. 21,000 companies are involved, and 49 of the top lobbying firms don’t even file required disclosure forms.
Her last words are that she is not discouraged. The bad news is that it’s so bad that it’s good news – we can build something better and take journalism back to local accountability.
Questions
Phlegm asks: For Dennis Swanson, he respects the fact that he’s come to sit at this table and would like to think that the reason is because people are engaged and want to hear what he has to say. Leads to his comment: please don’t regurgitate the same factoids that were trotted out during the 2003 media rules revision, such as they own only 2% of stations, even though they reach 36% of the national audience. The second comment, is dealing with his radio brethren in Chicago. He used to dream of working for
WMAQ , in irreverent radio station that got bought by Infinity/Viacom and taken off the air. That was part of the reason why he left the radio business.
Viacom reaches 39% of the national audience, and he talks about getting rid of the years old rules, but still advocates keeping on the difference between UHF and VHF stations and how their counted.
Did Viacom ever file the business interruption insurance claim due to the lapse in advertiser revenue post-9/11?
A: Swanson can’t answer for Viacom since he didn’t work for them at the time. He worked for NBC and he believed that GE did file such a claim. Then.
Question: Amy Goodman asks if Dennis Swanson can respond to Robert Baskin’s experience on the Nike story at CBS?
A: Swanson says he respects Baskin and has no reason to doubt it, he has nothing to do with CBS news, and didn’t work for them then. The guy in charge isn’t here to respond, so it’s hard for him to give an answer – says he’s trying not to duck the question.
Q: Amy says, what about the reporters wearing Nike gear?
A: He says that CBS recently broke a story about auto recalls, and it ran throughout Viacom broadcast and Ford wasn’t thrilled and it cost them advertising. The reason he came back here today – he has two degrees from U of I – he was taught community service and believes in it.
He would not support the newscasters wearing the Nike logo, he finds the decision regrettable.
Q: Amy asks, does Roberta have a question?
Roberta responds: That Nike situation was the final sad turn of events after 8 years. She became a lightning rod for having written the memo. Producers would writer her to tell her that they want to do stories but can’t even suggest it because of CBS’ corporate relationships. What’s not talked about is all the self-censorship.
Having been her boss back in the Chicago days when investigative reporting was taken seriously, would Dennis reflect on what he’s seen.
Dennis says: he thinks they’re still doing investigative reporting. Reminds that CBS broke Abu Gharaib. He points out that Macauley Culkin was even news today, because he testified at the Michael Jackson trial.
Roberta points out that ABC has made it policy now to do more celebrity and entertainment reporting.
Dennis says: the fact of the matter is that the media platforms have so exploded. One of the problems of prime time television is how can they continue to crank out 40 –50 sitcoms a year. Maybe it’s the same problem with journalists – can we continue to train enough qualified journalists. The standards have changed.
Any asks: Was Roberta right to write the Nike memo?
Dennis: it’s hard for me to comment on that incident without talking to all the players.
Roberta: There was a memo from the president of CBS that said it was a breach of professional etiquette.
Dennis: if you wanted comments on CBS news, then you should have invited someone from CBS news. Commenting on these incidents is awkward since I’m hearing of them first time here.
Question for Mr. Hill, on the putrid process of Capitalism. Keep believing in Capitalism until they privatize your air. So how can you believe in spectrum regulation?
Answer: Mr. Hill believes that the airwaves belong to the people, and original spectrum allocation are still in place and been effectively been loosened of the regulatory restraints that existed as a tax on the resource. They have all the beef and none of the bill. The sad fact is that we have allowed our representatives to be purchased by big media – they don’t debate these issues in public. The Telecomm Act of 1996 was an abomination and needs to be done over.
Roberta: one of the things you need in a democracy is for light to be shone upon what goes on. When media rules were being debated at a Senate subcommittee there were 70 station managers there, but no camera to cover it.
Mitchell asks: In Chicago the main media monopoly is the Tribune company. One of the rules at play was the Cross-Ownership rule, the Tribune company in NYC, LA, Florida and Connecticut, it has cross-ownership in contravention of the law. Last month a judge in Connecticut ordered Tribune to divest one station,.
There is a paradox. On one hand there are all these media interests that tout their public service. On the other, you have a company blatantly breaking the law. How do make sense of that.
Dennis Swanson: You picked our competitor in Chicago, which would appear to have a clear violation of the ownership rules. He was at ABC when Cap Cities bought it, and it divested itself of stations in Buffalo and Detroit. Part of Viacom’s arrangement for buying the TV station in Sacramento was to divest a radio station. You’re right about Tribune in Connecticut, though they’ll probably appeal it. You’ll find examples of Fox in NY. Reality is that violations exist and some have grandfathers.
Len Hill says, read the Tribune corporate report, and you can be sure they’re assuring their stockholders that they’ll appeal and keep anything from happening for at least 5 years.
Posted by paul at 04:37 PM | Comments (0)
Notes on Today's 2nd panel: Phil Donahue, John Nichols, Naomi Klein
These are "live blogging" notes from the 2nd panel this morning at the Media Consolidation Conference. They're not REAL live blogged, because there's not network connectivity at Krannert, but they're still unedited, and pretty much just rough transcription. Click MORE to read 'em.
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*
Posted by paul at 04:32 PM | Comments (0)
May 10, 2005
Pictures: Hersh, Klein, Goodman, Sanders
Here's Seymour Hersh answering an audience question at tonight's Media Consolidation Conference at the University of Illinois:
See more photos at the Be the Media Group photo pool at Flickr.
If you're going to be at the Media Consolidation Conference or Media Reform in St. Louis and taking pictures, please join flickr (it's free) and send them to the group.
Posted by paul at 10:35 PM | Comments (0)