Friday, November 14, 2003

Catching Up with Media Reformers The National Media Reform Conference last weekend in Madison, Wisc., included a speech by Bill Moyers that I hadn't read until today. No pulled punches: What would happen... if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what[base ']s happening now under the ideological banner of ''deregulation.'' Giant megamedia conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state. Danny Schecter argued a similar point at MIT last night, hinting at some quid-pro-quo between the Bush administration's FCC deregulation giveaways to "big media" and the pro-war slant in U.S. television news. The details are in his book, Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception. Harvard's Alex Jones, less of a conspiracy-theorist, didn't disagree about the pro-war slant in TV news, but attributed it to public opinion being caught up in a post-9/11 "sacred space" with no room for questioning the government. He held out hope that journalists are finally asking questions, digging out more facts and waving fewer flags. I may go back to my notes and try to decide how optimistic he really was, but first I have about 8,000 words of Bill Moyers' speech that I want to read again and think about. He starts off with an excellent point about the inclination to lump "the media" together, when there really are a lot of different voices out there. (While looking for optimism, I came across the progressive-focused news site Common Dreams, which is hosting Moyers' text. I also found a war-coverage television documentary, Uncovered, subtitled "How truth became the first American casualty in Iraq." OK, maybe not that optimistic...) New: Meanwhile, longtime Internet supporter Al Gore also gave a talk on "Media & Democracy" on Nov. 11, and reportedly said the Internet holds out some hope against the "quasi-hypnotic influence" of television: "We have to choose to rehabilitate our democracy in part by making creative use of these new media and by insisting within the current institutions of our democracy that we open up access to the dominant medium." I'm trying to track down a full transcript online to supplement the brief Associated Press story, which was used by all the major newspapers within driving distance of his speech. (If any other professional papers sent their own reporters to cover an almost-president speaking on this topic, I haven't found them.) I've found the campus paper at Middle Tennessee, where he spoke, and a slightly longer story in a college paper from one of the campuses that saw the talk on satellite TV. The talk was part of a project co-sponsored by, speaking of older media, the New York Times. 1:52:18 PM

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