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This year The Progressive magazine celebrates its 100 year anniversary. If you don’t know about this publication, it was started in 1909 by Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin and was originally called La Follette’s Weekly. La Follette was one of the luminary progressives of his era, as was his wife Belle Case La Follette.  After his death in 1929, the magazine became The  Progressive. To celebrate its 100th anniversary, a special conference was organized and held in Madison Wisconsin on May 1-2 of this year. I had another obligation so I couldn’t go, but my son Drew went and text messaged back information on some of the highlights. Robert Redford was the honorary chair of the celebration event and notables in attendance included Senator Russ Feingold, Rep Dennis Kucinich, Howard Zinn, Cindy Sheehan, Barbara Ehrenreich, Katrina vanden Heuvel, George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, Naomi Klein, Ruth Conniff, Amy Goodman and many others. If you know nothing about the publication, or the history of progressive politics in the United States, you can purchase the April edition of the magazine, which is a historic summary of the first 100 years, including excerpts from writers who contributed articles over the years (you may have to subscribe to the magazine to get the 100 year anniversary issue that came out in April).  La Follete’s writings are messages of clarity and strong commitment and continuity of message. Every progressive you have ever heard of at one time or another contributed to the magazine and the article summaries in the centennial edition (April, 2009) give a quick sketch of some of the published material that appeared, organized year by year. It’s a fascinating view of our political history, albeit from a progressive point of view.

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Juan Cole has made a plea to insure that known liars and convicted felons should not be given space on broadcast news media for discussing political issues.  Democrats.com has taken him up on it and posted a listing of those that should not be allowed access time for discussing policies though the main media outlets.  It is a long list, and includes White House people that lied us into the war in Iraq, but it also includes those that have been convicted for perjury such as Bill Clinton. On the one hand, I can see the advantage of not treating many of these people as coequals for political issue discussions, but on the other, I wonder how much effort will be put in to indicting politicians on trumped up charges to render their visibility to zero. Yet, there is something pleasant about thinking that Karl Rove won’t be on Fox news anymore.  But, is Bill Clinton co-equal to Tom Delay? Hasn’t Bill Clinton’s political objectives been just the opposite to those of Carl Rove or Tom Delay?  This is one of those issues where you would hope that the news broadcast media would self-regulate and keep these people off the air waves through publicly accepted ethical standards, rather than apply some loose ratings criteria, which is what seems to be the rule they follow now. I would prefer to see the distinction made along the lines of those that have attempted to diminish our national interests vs those that have promoted them. Of course, I could be the decider! If so, we would see and hear from a lot fewer Bushie/neocon subhumans.

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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."

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