TheMillerCircle.org

Over the weekend of June 6-8, 2008 the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR) was held at the Minneapolis Convention center in downtown Minneapolis. This is a group that is committed to media reform and has an organizational scheme to recover our once "free press" as an institution of objective journalism. This was the fourth annual meeting organized by FreePress.net and was attended by about 3500 people from many walks of life, but mostly by those associated with some aspect of journalism or activism. FreePress itself is a relatively new organization, but has had impressive leadership during its short existence. The emphasis for this movement has come about during the GW Bush presidency and is directed towards reshaping American political journalism and especially broadcast journalism which has gotten off the beaten path as almost everyone can attest. In general, this is a very progressive liberal movement. But, as Arianna Huffington emphasized, "we are not the left, we are mainstream. Every major issue we are emphasizing about the war, our health care system and the direction our country is going is supported by 60-80% of Americans."
The meeting was highlighted/dominated by celebrities in these causes, including John Nichols from The Nation , Naomi Klein (author of "The Shock Doctrine" ), Amy Goodman (Democracy Now ), Phil Donahue, Bill Moyers, Robert Greenwald, Robert Mcchesney (founder of Free Press), Arianna Huffington, Tim Wu (current leader of Free Press) and many others. No, Tim Russert was not there. The single most impressive person was, in my opinion, Lawrence Lessig who thinks deeply about the impact of the internet and the regulatory laws that are designed to limit its expression of freedom. And my favorite talk was given by Senator Byron Dorgan from North Dakota. He is and will be the Senator that submits legislation, hopefully this year (it is currently in committee) that will guarantee a free and open internet ("the Internet Neutrality Act"). He describes the bill on YouTube and you can see his speech on the FreePress website. In case you don’t know about him, he is the first to arrive and the last to leave the Senate office building. He is an effective and tireless leader against the corruption in our government today.

Four major themes of this meeting united most of those in attendance and the proposed solutions largely center around implementing regulatory reform, and reducing corporate control, including i) changing the broadcasting regulations so that the corporate news media are held accountable for the content of their programs; ii) keep the internet free from corporate intrusions; iii) restrict corporate ownership of mass media so that more independent news organizations can be revived and iv) through activist demands, force the major news media to cover issues such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and global warming. The meeting was also attended by the two current members of the FCC who are in the Democratic column, Johnathan Adelstein and Michael Copps, who will be the new FCC chairman if Obama is elected President. He talked about immediate reforms he plans to put into place, including a return to a three year review of broadcast licensing (it is now 8 years and virtually automatic) with a more strict enforcement of the old standard that broadcast licenses are given to serve a public function and need to uphold those values. He talked about probationary status if these changes are not adhered to and the prospect of losing a broadcasting license if things don’t change. It would be a very enjoyable outcome to see Fox lose their broadcasting license. Is that why Rupert Murdoch says he supports Obama?

The quality of this meeting was extremely high and most of the speakers were excellent and inspiring to those in attendance. In going to the meeting, I expected to see the attendance biased towards those with gray hair like me. But, in fact, as I surveyed the crowd, there were many young people in attendance and many middle aged adults. You came to appreciate it, if it wasn’t immediately obvious, that quality journalists are being terminated from major papers and news media in favor of softer journalism of the type that supports the current administration and blurs the line between pop culture and journalistic standards. Let’s face it, we have national news system that serves as apologists for the Republican Party and its policies. Until that changes, there is little chance that news can ever be educational. Where have you heard that Iraq is now so unsafe that journalists do not go outside of the Green Zone?

Bill Moyers gave an excellent speech on the freedom of the press and the current reform movement. He is truly the guru of the free press movement. You also came to appreciate that if we didn’t have PBS, we would not have any access to accurate reporting, except for what we get through the internet and C-Span. But, as Moyers pointed out, PBS, due to political pressure, has decided time and again not to produce or air things that are too controversial and they frequently program apology news for events such as 9/11. Dan Rather gave a good talk and admitted the complicity of the major news media in hyping the buildup to the war. He has his own program and has repented from his past sins.

Phil Donahue showed his riveting film "A Body of War" a story of a young US solider (Thomas Young) wounded and paralyzed in Iraq, who joined the Winter Soldier movement as a fierce critic of the war and our sitting president. The last scene in the movie, when the young soldier meets with Senator Robert Byrd, who led the fight against the declaration of war for invading Iraq (bet you never saw his speeches on TV–they were fabulous), and Byrd takes down a large plaque from his office wall, as his own greatest political challenge to the government and reading from the plaque, Byrd and Young read the names of the senators who voted against the war, after which they get up and walk side by side down the senate office building hall as they discuss their daily problems, having clearly formed a common bond. Try viewing that scene without tearing. Donahue was unable to sell his movie to any distribution system, but finally Landmark films stepped in and will show it in their theaters. So if you want to see a riveting film about the lives of our soldiers that we send to an illegal war, go see that one. It probably won’t stay long in any theater, but it was masterfully filmed and covers nearly three years of a soldier’s post-injury life and his activities as an antiwar Winter Soldier. I noticed and commented on the fact that when the credits to this movie were given, Donahue cited the figure of Iraqi citizen deaths at more than 1 million which reflects the best estimate available from the cluster survey and analysis reported in The Lancet a few years ago. That is the first time I have seen these more accurate figures be cited in any theater experience.

There was an opportunity to hear from Phil Donahue about his firing from MSNBC just as the Iraq invasion build-up was underway. He had the top-rated program on MSNBC, but he was fired because he was too liberal and a threat to the morale of the invasionary hype. But, before he was he fired, he had to have two conservatives on his show for every liberal, and, as prescribed by MSNBC, he had to count himself as already having two liberals on the show if no one else showed up. So, I guess by the math done at MSNBC, adding one liberal to his program meant a total of three, so having two conservatives to one liberal as guests, still meant that the liberals outnumbered the conservatives or neoconservatives. Does that give you some indication about the corruption and distortion of our television programming?

All of us can participate in helping the free press movement. If you go to the Free Press website, you can sign up for news alerts and other information. I would urge you to watch the video of Senator Dorgan’s speech and also that of Bill Moyers. When the news alerts come out, respond by signing the letters/emails that will be sent to your congressional leaders. It was that influx of demands (1.5 million) that forced the Senate to rescind the recent FCC ruling to give more expansionary communication acquisitions to newspapers, further enhancing giant corporate control over our news. Write-ins work! We just need more of them and they need to get bigger and bigger in volume. If I was disappointed about anything with the meeting, it was the complete lack of any attention given to the other dimension of this information suppression, which is the administration’s suppression of science information and their purge of scientists through the elimination of their funding. That is not just destructive, it is destroying our future.