National Conference for Media Reform

Memphis, Tenn., 10 a.m., 1/13/07
Upward of 3000 media professionals, students, activists, lawyers and policy makers are here in Memphis for the National Conference for Media Reform, sponsored by the nonprofit, Freepress (freepress.net).

Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) just delivered a barn burner of a speech to kick off the Saturday session. He stressed that all of the most serious issues facing the U.S. and the world share one thing in common: they are ignored by the corporate media.

Sanders said that the single most important domestic news story in his lifetime has been the collapse of the American middle class and that two-earner families can’t afford the same things that one-earner households could three decades ago. He said, “That seems like a pretty interesting story to me. But the corporate media don’t even mention it.”

He also observed, “On Monday, we will celebrate the birthday of one of the great men of the 20th Century, Dr. Martin Luther King. What you will hear on the corporate media is the story of Kings work for civil rights. What you will not hear is that he was one of the leaders of the anti-war movement, trying to end the Vietnam war. What you will not hear is that at the end of his life he was trying to bring together black and white and Latino people to fight against economic injustice.”

Sanders has introduced legislation with a cosponsor in the House which will force the FCC to revisit the Fairness Doctrine and evaluate whether the public airwaves are being used responsibly by broadcast companies. “I don’t think fairness means that 90 percent of the talk shows should be hosted by ultra conservatives,” he said.

10:13 a.m.
Trust or Verify: Propaganda and the Press

Moderator Sam Husseini, Institute for Public Accuracy (accuracy.org). Highly commended sourcewatch.org as an excellent site for revealing the connections, employers, associates of sources quoted in the news.

Nancy Snow, author of Impeach the President and The Arrogance of American Power: What U.S. Leaders Are Doing Wrong and Why It’s Our Duty to Dissent is doing a presentation on the “Big Lie” used to sell the invasion of Iraq. Snow is a tenured professor at California State University, Fullerton and an adjunct professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.

“Pentagon planning now includes the World Wide Web as a potential enemy and the Information Roadmap (created by Rumsfeld) calls for plans to completely dominate the internet.”

10:27
John Stauber of the Center for Media and Democracy (PRWatch.org) and author of Weapons of Mass Deception is reporting on the organization’s work.

Among the projects:
Congresspedia is a new wiki they have assembled with citizen/journalist contributions about every member of the U.S. Congress.

Fake News Watch—documenting VNRs (video news reports) which are advertorials which purport to be real news and are distributed to and used by local news shows around the country.

10:36
Judy Daubenmier of News Hounds (We watch FOX so you don’t have to, newshounds.us), a 24 year veteran AP reporter who now works with Robert Greenwald (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices, etc.) and blogs as a media watchdog.

News Hounds goal is to correct frequent factual errors in FOX reporting and to ridicule FOX News and its personnel. “We don’t want anyone to regard them as a serious news organization.”

“We want to nip in the bud any of the outrageous ideas offered by Fox news employees or their guests, and we want to educate people about the ways FOX bends the news.”

“FOX News is still on the air, but they have seen a double-digit decline in viewership this year.”

10:52
Peter Philips of Project Censored (projectcensored.org), which publishes an annual collection of the most censored news stories, is describing his work.

“The success of the merger of big PR firms and corporate media since 911 has been very successful at shaping the public perception of the war.”

Philips noted that the misinformation from mainstream media can even make it difficult for indy media to tell a story because the public has preconceptions. (Israel/Palestine, Yugoslavia, impeachment movement as examples)

He said, “Polls are showing that fifty percent of Americans believe Bush and Cheney should be impeached if they lied to lead us into war. That isn’t being reported at all by the corporate media.”

“Steven Jones and other scientists who have studied the Bulding Seven collapse at the World Trade Center and established that fire could not have caused the collapse without additional explosives should be significant news story. It isn’t even getting coverage from the alternative press because of preconceptions among readers, nor was it mentioned in the 911 Report.”

11 a.m.
Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media

This will probably be the best attended workshop at the conference, featuring as it does, Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now!, Josh Silver, of Free Press, Pete Tridish, of the Prometheus Radio Project and Betty Yu, of the Manhattan Neighborhood Network,Aeiand because the subject is, in many ways, the core issue of the weekend. The moderator is Eric Klinenberg, author of the book Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media and an NYU professor.

“We need to tell our story. We need to explain why media reform is urgent. We know that media reform is one of the fastest growing movements in the country today, but we also know that the corporate media are not going to tell that story at all.”

Tridish explained the history of Prometheus which started as a pirate radio station, was busted by the FCC and challenged the FCC rules resulting in legalization of low power FM. They have proceeded to help people set up low power stations all over the country. Asheville’s WPVM-LP 103.5FM is one outgrowth of Tridish’s work.

“If you would like to operate a radio station, there will be a window of opportunity, about five days in April, when the FCC will award high power licenses for the first time in about 25 years. If you want to do it, Prometheus will do everything in our power to help you make it happen.”

Yu reported that public access TV organizations now produce far more news than the corporate media but that proposed legislation now threatens to undermine public access by ending local control. “Phone companies are pressing to end local franchising and remove requirements to fund public access programming.”

Such legislation has already gone into effect in North Carolina (”UR not TV”, Xpress, Dec. 13) and 14 other states.

Silver suggested that media reform is not a right/left issue and that conservatives also have reasons to support it so that “media activists should meet people where they are.”

“I get so sick of people saying that Bill Moyers or Amy Goodman are liberal. That’s b-s. They are journalists doing their job, holding elected officials accountable for their positions and their decisions.”

“When we talk about reform, I want to emphasize that we are not going to see large scale divestiture of major media any time soon. It’s going to be a long effort. In the short term I think we can reform public broadcasting.”

“The big opportunity is that all media will be delivered by broadband in just a few years. The decisions about how that will happen are being made now. We lost it with radio in the 30s, with TV in the 50s, with cable in the 70s. We have to win this fight, because this will break the control of the corporate media.”

Goodman is discussing “the rise of indy media at the Battle of Seattle and watching network TV being used to show us pictures of the corporate delegations and ministers of trade coming in at the airport while people were gasping for air in the streets. The mayor was denying that rubber bullets were being used on demonstrators and we were picking up handfuls in the streets. It didn’t take much investigation.”

Goodman described how her team managed to get broadcast quality pre-war interviews and images out of Iraq by using technical tricks to send them in small packets via e-mail while the major media were all paying Saddam hundreds of thousands of dollars for satellite access. (Saddam’s government had firewall screens that prevented sending of large files.)

“We need to use the public spaces that are there before we lose them. Lies take lives. Democracy now!”

1:17 p.m.
Goodman just received a standing ovation from about 600 attendees of this workshop.

– Cecil Bothwell, staff writer