---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 03 Jan 2002 13:39:47 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: The Making of a Movement
The Making of a Movement
<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020107&s=mcchesney>
by ROBERT W. MCCHESNEY & JOHN NICHOLS
January 7, 2002
No one should be surprised by the polls showing that close to 90 percent of
Americans are satisfied with the performance of their selected President,
or that close to 80 percent of the citizenry applaud his Administration's
seat-of-the-pants management of an undeclared war. After all, most
Americans get their information from media that have pledged to give the
American people only the President's side of the story. CNN chief Walter
Isaacson distributed a memo effectively instructing the network's domestic
newscasts to be sugarcoated in order to maintain popular support for the
President and his war. Fox News anchors got into a surreal competition to
see who could wear the largest American flag lapel pin. Dan Rather, the man
who occupies the seat Walter Cronkite once used to tell Lyndon Johnson the
Vietnam War was unwinnable, now says, "George Bush is the President.... he
wants me to line up, just tell me where."
No, we should not be surprised that a "just tell me where" press has
managed to undermine debate at
precisely the time America needs it most, but we should be angry. The role
that US newsmedia have
played in narrowing and warping the public discourse since September 11
provides dramatic evidence of
the severe limitations of contemporary American journalism, and this
nation's media system, when it
comes to nurturing a viable democratic and humane society. It is now time
to act upon that anger to forge a broader, bolder and more politically
engaged movement to reform American media.
The base from which such a movement could spring has already been built.
Indeed, the current crisis
comes at a critical moment for media reform politics. Since the middle
1980s, when inept and disingenuous reporting on US interventions in Central
America provoked tens of thousands of Americans to question the role media
were playing in manufacturing consent, media activism has had a small but
respectable place on the progressive agenda. The critique has gone well
beyond complaints about shoddy journalism to broad expressions of concern
about hypercommercial, corporate-directed culture and the corruption of
communications policy-making by special-interest lobbies and pliable
legislators.
Crucial organizations such as Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), the
Institute for Public Accuracy, the MediaChannel, Media Alliance and the
Media Education Foundation have emerged over the past two decades. Acting
as mainstream media watchdogs while pointing engaged Americans toward
valuable alternative fare, these groups have raised awareness that any
democratic reform in the United States must include media reform. Although
it is hardly universal even among progressives, there is increasing
recognition that media reform can no longer be dismissed as a "dependent
variable" that will fall into place once the more important struggles have
been won. People are beginning to understand that unless we make headway
with the media, the more important struggles will never be won.
On the advocacy front, Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting and
People for Better TV are pushing to improve public broadcasting and to
tighten regulation of commercial broadcasting. Commercial Alert organizes
campaigns against the commercialization of culture, from sports and museums
to literature and media. The Center for Digital Democracy and the Media
Access Project both work the corridors of power in Washington to win
recognition of public-interest values under extremely difficult
circumstances. These groups have won some important battles, particularly
on Internet privacy issues.
In addition, local media watch groups have surfaced across the nation.
Citizens' organizations do battle to limit billboards in public places and
to combat the rise of advertising in schools, fighting often successfully
to keep Channel One ads, corporate-sponsored texts and fast-food promotions
out of classrooms and cafeterias. Innovative lawsuits challenging the worst
excesses of media monopoly are being developed by regional groups such as
Rocky Mountain Media Watch and a national consortium of civic
organizations, lawyers and academics that has drawn support from Unitarian
Universalist organizations. Media activists in Honolulu and San Francisco
have joined with unions and community groups to prevent the closure of
daily newspapers that provided a measure of competition and debate in those
cities.
Despite all these achievements, however, the media reform movement remains
at something of a standstill. The sheer corruption of US politics is itself
a daunting obstacle. The Center for Public Integrity in 2000 issued "Off
the Record: What Media Corporations Don't Tell You About Their Legislative
Agendas"an alarming expos of the huge lobbying machines employed by the
largest communications corporations and their trade associations, as well
as the considerable campaign contributions they make. According to the
center, the fifty largest media companies and four of their trade
associations spent $111.3 million between 1996 and mid-2000 to lobby
Congress and the executive branch. Between 1993 and mid-2000, the center
determined, media corporations and their employees have given $75 million
in campaign contributions to candidates for federal office and to the two
major political parties. Regulators and politicians tend therefore to be in
the pockets of big-spending corporate communications lobbies, and,
surprise, surprise, the corporate newsmedia rarely cover media policy
debates. Notwithstanding all the good work by media activists, the "range"
of communications policy debate in Washington still tends to run all the
way from GE to GM, to borrow a line from FAIR's Jeff Cohen.
At this very moment, for example, the FCC is considering the elimination of
the remaining restrictions on media consolidation, including bans on
cross-ownership by a single firm of TV stations and newspapers in the same
community, and limits on the number of TV stations and cable TV systems a
single corporation may own nationwide. The corporate media lobbying
superstars are putting a full-court press on the FCC, which, with George W.
Bush's imprint now firmly on its membership, is now even more pro-corporate
than during the Clinton years. The proposed scrapping of these regulations
will increase the shareholder value of numerous media firms dramatically,
and will undoubtedly inspire a massive wave of mergers and acquisitions. If
the lessons of past ownership deregulation, particularly the 1996
relaxation of radio ownership rules, are any guide, we can expect even less
funding for journalism and more commercialism. All of this takes place
without scrutiny from major media, and therefore is unknown to all but a
handful of Americans.
The immensity of the economic and political barriers to democratic action
has contributed
to demoralization about the prospects for structural media reform and an
understandable turn to that which progressives can hope to control: their
own media. So it has been that much energy has gone into the struggle over
the future of the Pacifica radio chain, which looks at long last to be
heading toward a viable resolution. The Independent Press Association has
grown dramatically to nurture scores of usually small, struggling nonprofit
periodicals, which are mostly progressive in orientation. And dozens of
local Independent Media Centers have mushroomed on the Internet over the
past two years. These Indy Media Centers take advantage of new technology
to provide dissident and alternative news stories and commentary; some, by
focusing on local issues, have become a genuine alternative to established
media at a level where that alternative can and does shift the dialogue. We
have seen the positive impact of the IMC movement firsthand, in Seattle, in
Washington, at the 2000 Democratic and Republican national conventions, at
the three lamentable presidential debates later that year, during the
Florida recount and in the aftermath of September 11 in New York and other
cities. It is vital that this and other alternative media movements grow in
scope and professionalism.
Yet, as important as this work is, there are inherent limits to what can be
done with independent media,
even with access to the Internet. Too often, the alternative media remain
on the margins, seeming to confirm that the dominant structures are the
natural domain of the massive media conglomerates that
supposedly "give the people what they want."
The trouble with this disconnect between an engaged and vital alternative
media and a disengaged and
stenographic dominant media is that it suggests a natural order in which
corporate media have mastered the marketplace on the basis of their wit and
wisdom. In fact, our media system is not predominantly the result of
free-market competition.
Huge promotional budgets and continual rehashing of tried and true formulas
play their role in drawing viewers, listeners and readers to dominant print
and broadcast media. But their dominance is still made possible, in large
part, by explicit government policies and subsidies that permit the
creation of large and profitable conglomerates. When the government grants
free monopoly rights to TV spectrum, for example, it is not setting the
terms of competition; it is picking the winner of the competition. Such
policies amount to an annual grant of corporate welfare that economist Dean
Baker values in the tens of billions of dollars. These decisions have been
made in the public's name, but without the public's informed consent. We
must not accept such massive subsidies for wealthy corporations, nor should
we content ourselves with the "freedom" to forge an alternative that
occupies the margins. Our task is to return "informed consent" to media
policy-making and to generate a diverse media system that serves our
democratic needs.
In our view, what's needed to begin the job is now crystal clear, a
national media reform coalition that can play quarterback for the media
reform movement. The necessity argument takes two forms.
First, the immense job of organizing media reform requires that our scarce
resources be used efficiently, and that the various components of a media
reform movement cooperate strategically. The problem is that the whole of
the current media reform movement is significantly less than the sum of its
parts. Isolated and impoverished, groups are forced to defend against new
corporate initiatives rather than advance positive reform proposals. When
they do get around to proposing reforms, activists have occasionally worked
on competing agendas; such schisms dissipate energy, squander resources and
guarantee defeat. More important, they are avoidable. Organizers of this
new coalition could begin by convening a gathering of all the groups now
struggling for reform, as well as the foundations and nonprofits willing to
support their work. "All the issues we talk about are interlinked. We are
fighting against a lot of the same corporations. The corporations, while
they supposedly compete with one another, actually work together very well
when it comes to lobbying," explains Jeffrey Chester of the Center for
Digital Democracy. "We need to link up the activists and start to work
together as well as the corporations do for the other side." Will every
possible member organization get on the same media reform page? No. But
after years of working with these groups in various settings, we have no
doubt that most will.
Second, a coherent, focused and well-coordinated movement will be needed to
launch a massive outreach effort to popularize the issue. That outreach
can, and should, be guided by Saul Alinsky's maxim that the only way to
beat organized money is with organized people. If the media reform movement
stays within the Beltway, we know that we will always lose. Yet, so far,
outreach beyond the core community of media activists has been done on a
piecemeal basis by various reform groups and critics with very limited
budgets. The results have, by and large, been predictably disappointing. As
a result, says Representative Jesse Jackson Jr., "the case for media reform
is not being heard in Washington now. It is not easy to make the case heard
for any reform these days. That's why we need to do more. I hear people
everywhere around the country complaining about the media, but we have yet
to figure out how to translate those complaints into some kind of activist
agenda that can begin to move Congress. There has to be more pressure from
outside Washington for specific reforms. Members have to start hearing in
their home districts that people want specific reforms of the media."
That will only happen if a concerted campaign organized around core
democratic values takes the message of media reform to every college and
university, every union hall, every convention and every church, synagogue
and mosque in the land. To build a mass movement, the new coalition must
link up with organized groups that currently engage in little activity in
the way of media reform but that are seriously hampered by the current
media system. Organized labor, educators, progressive religious groups,
journalists, artists, feminists, environmental organizations and civil
rights groups are obvious candidates.
These groups will not simply fall into place as coalition partners,
however. Media corporations do not just lobby Congress; they lobby a lot of
the groups that suffer under the current system. Some of those groups have
been bought off by contributions from foundations associated with AOL,
Verizon and other communications conglomerates; others, particularly large
sections of organized labor, have been convinced that they have a vested
interest in maintaining a status quo that consistently kicks them in the
teeth. Building a broad coalition will require a tremendous amount of
education and old-fashioned organizing that will inevitably involve
pressure from the grassroots on major institutions and unions in order to
get the national leadership of those organizations to engage.
Movement-building will require that able organizers like Chester, Cohen,
FAIR's Janine Jackson and Media Alliance executive director Jeff Perlstein,
who have already been engaged in the struggle, be provided with the
resources to travel, organize and educate.
All the organizing in the world won't amount to a hill of beans, however,
unless there is something tangible to fight for, and to win. That's why we
need reform proposals that can be advocated, promoted and discussed. Media
reform needs its equivalent of the Voting Rights Act or the Equal Rights
Amendment, simple, basic reforms that grassroots activists can understand,
embrace and advocate in union halls, church basements and school
assemblies. And there has to be legislation to give the activism a sense of
focus and possibility.
Fortunately, there are several members of Congress who are already engaged
on these issues: Senator
Fritz Hollings has emerged as a thoughtful critic of many of the excesses
of media monopolies; Senator
John McCain has questioned the giveaway of public airwaves to
communications conglomerates; Representative John Conyers Jr., the ranking
Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, has
been outspoken in criticizing the loss of diversity in media ownership and
the failure of the FCC to battle
monopolization and homogenization; Representative Louise Slaughter has
introduced legislation mandating free airtime for political candidates;
Senator Paul Wellstone has expressed an interest in legislation that would
reassert standards for children's programming and perhaps adopt the
approaches of other countries that regulate advertising directed at young
children; and Jesse Jackson Jr. has expressed a willingness to introduce
legislation aimed at broadening access to diverse media, along with a wide
range of other media reform proposals. If an organized movement demands it,
there are people in Congress with the courage and the awareness to provide
it with a legislative focus.
Ultimately, we believe, the movement's legislative agenda must include
proposals to:
Apply existing antimonopoly laws to the media and, where necessary,
expand the reach of those laws to restrict ownership of radio stations to
one or two per owner. Legislators should also consider steps to address
monopolization of TV-station ownership and move to break the lock of
newspaper chains on entire regions.
Initiate a formal, federally funded study and hearings to identify
reasonable media ownership regulations across all sectors.
Establish a full tier of low-power, noncommercial radio and television
stations across the nation.
Revamp and invest in public broadcasting to eliminate commercial
pressures, reduce immediate political pressures and serve communities
without significant disposable incomes.
Allow every taxpayer a $200 tax credit to apply to any nonprofit medium,
as long as it meets IRS criteria.
Lower mailing costs for nonprofit and significantly noncommercial
publications.
Eliminate political candidate advertising as a condition of a broadcast
license, or require that if a station runs a paid political ad by a
candidate it must run free ads of similar length from all the other
candidates on the ballot immediately afterward.
Reduce or eliminate TV advertising directed at children under 12.
Decommercialize local TV news with regulations that require stations to
grant journalists an hour daily of commercial-free news time, and set
budget guidelines for those newscasts based on a percentage of the
station's revenues.
We know from experience that many of these ideas are popular with
Americans, when they get a chance to hear about them. Moreover, the
enthusiasm tends to cross the political spectrum. Much of our optimism
regarding a media reform movement is based on our research that shows how
assiduously the corporate media lobbies work to keep their operations in
Washington out of public view. They suspect the same thing we do: When
people hear about the corruption of communications policy-making, they will
be appalled. When people understand that it is their democratic right to
reform this system, millions of them will be inclined to exercise that right.
What media policy-making needs is to be bathed in democracy. The coalition
we envision will have its similarities to the civil rights movement or the
women's movement, as it should, since access to information ought to be
seen as a fundamental human right. It will stand outside political parties and
encourage all of them to take up the mantle of democratic media reform,
much as Britain's impressive Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom
has done. Although its initial funding may well come from large grants,
this reform coalition ultimately must be broad-based and member-funded,
like Greenpeace or, dare we say it, the National Rifle Association.
Activists must feel a sense of ownership
and attachment to a citizen lobby if it is to have real impact. We
understand that success will depend, over the long term, upon a
rejuvenation of popular politics and, accordingly, a decrease in corporate
political and economic power. At the same time, we are certain that a
movement that expands the range of legitimate debate will ultimately change
not just the debate but the current system. "I am convinced that when
people start talking about these big issues, these fundamental issues, when
they start to understand that they have the power as citizens in a
democracy to take on the powers that be and change how things are done,
then change becomes inevitable," says Jackson. "The challenge, of course,
is to get people to recognize that they have that power."
Even before it gets down to the serious business of reforming existing
media systems, the coalition we propose can lead an organized resistance to
corporate welfare schemes like the proposed FCC deregulation. And it might
even be able to prevent the complete corporatization of the Internet [see
Jeffrey Chester and Gary O. Larson, "Something Old, Something New," in this
issue]. The key is to have a network of informed organizations and
individuals who are already up to speed on media issues and can swing into
action on short notice. Currently that network does not exist. The heroic
public-interest groups that now lead the fight to oppose corporate
domination of FCC policies find themselves without sufficient popular
awareness or support, and therefore without the leverage they need to
prevail. The movement we propose will be all about increasing leverage over
the FCC and Congress in the near term, with an eye toward structural reform
down the road.
But is it really possible that such a coalition can take shape in the
months and years to come and begin to shift the debate? History tells us
that the possibility is real. At times of popular political resurgence
throughout the twentieth century, media activism surfaced as a significant
force. It was most intense in the Progressive Era, when the rise of the
modern capitalist media system was met with sustained Progressive and
radical criticism from the likes of Upton Sinclair, Eugene Victor Debs and
Robert La Follette. In the 1930s a heterogeneous movement arose to battle
commercial broadcasting, and a feisty consumer movement organized to limit
advertising in our society. In the postwar years, the Congress of
Industrial Organizations attempted to establish a national FM radio
network, one of the first casualties of the war on independent labor and
the left that marked that period. In the 1960s and '70s the underground
press provided vital underpinning for the civil rights, antiwar and
feminist movements.
In short, we are building on a long tradition. And there is considerable
momentum at present to coalesce. In November some thirty-five media
activists from all over the nation met for a day in New York to begin
coordinating some of their activities on a range of issues, from local and
national policy matters to creating alternative media. Leading media
scholars and educators are forming a new national progressive media
literacy organization, one that will remain independent of the media
conglomerates that bankroll existing groups. We are excited by speculation
that Bill Moyers, who has done so much to drum up funding for reform
initiatives, will in 2002 use his considerable influence to convince
progressive foundations to make a genuine commitment to this fundamental
democratic initiative.
The bottom line is clear. Until reformers come together, until we create a
formal campaign to democratize our communications policy-making and to
blast open our media system, we will continue to see special issues of The
Nation like this one lamenting our situation. We need no more proof than
the current moment to tell us that the time to build a broad coalition for
media reform has arrived.
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