|
Comment on this article |
Email this Article
|
|
News :: Media |
|
Lasting Images Of Media Reform |
Current rating: 0 |
by Madison Capital Times
(No verified email address) |
10 Nov 2003
|
|
Jackson, Terkel, others were highlights |
After a weekend when Madison became the epicenter of the media reform movement, all that's left today are the echoes and the images of this national gathering of activists.
The event was the National Conference on Media Reform, which brought about 1,500 people together for three days to consider ways to get the public more involved in debates over media policy.
Image: The Rev. Jesse Jackson on the stage of the Memorial Union on Sunday building to a crescendo as he linked the efforts at breaking up the concentration of power in the media with the efforts to defeat President George Bush in 2004.
Referring to the members of the Federal Communications Commission who voted earlier this year to allow more cross-ownership of newspapers and television stations, Jackson reminded the overflow crowd, "The FCC commissioners are appointed just like Bush was. ... We must fight to take our country back."
Image: Two of the FCC commissioners who opposed the rules to allow increased media concentration - Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein - were treated like celebrities throughout the weekend, which must have seemed a bit odd to these two, who to the broader public are relatively obscure federal regulators.
When the assemblage of activist musicians came out on the stage at the Orpheum Theatre for a final performance late Saturday night, Adelstein came out to join them, playing harmonica on the soul tune, "People Get Ready." That brought down the house.
Image: Studs Terkel, 91 years old, mostly deaf, but still an icon to many in the crowd, showing up at event after event to bestow his aura on each one. The prolific Chicago author and activist made his reputation with interviews with ordinary people as well as with the well known.
He introduced journalist Bill Moyers at the Saturday night event. He introduced Al Franken at the comedian's Sunday afternoon show. He held forth at his own book signing at Canterbury Bookselllers late in the day, telling the crowd how happy he was to be in the town of his boyhood hero, "Fighting Bob" La Follette. (Terkel was born in 1912 and La Follette did not die until 1925.)
Image: Moyers himself holding the packed Orpheum Theatre spellbound with his analysis of the threat to democracy that he said comes both from increased concentration of media ownership and increased efforts by government to restrict information.
"Democracy cannot exist without an informed public," Moyers said. "It's simply not the cause of journalism that's at stake. It's the cause of American democracy and liberty."
He recalled that in an earlier era, editors and publishers fought censorship by sitting in a jail cell.
Moyers said the three plagues of modern journalism were government secrecy, large media conglomerates and a right wing, partisan press, noting "I'm a journalist who sees that the larger and more powerful big media becomes, the more diminished journalism becomes."
Image: The buzz around Wisconsin's own U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat who has taken a leading role in raising issues of media concentration. Wherever Feingold went among this crowd, he was treated as a rare elected official who was fighting for democracy.
But he was not the only elected official who took part. Madison's Tammy Baldwin was among a half dozen members of Congress at the sessions. At the closing session on Sunday, she sharply questioned whether the news media has been critical enough of the U.S. role in Iraq.
Image: The crowd at this conference clearly tilted to the left side of the political spectrum, given their responses to the parade of speakers that ranged from Green Party leader Ralph Nader to independent Congressman Bernie Sanders to Amy Goodman, the host of the "Democracy Now" radio program. Yet the crowd had a wide variety of young and old, journalists examining the future of their profession and media critics expressing their deep distrust of mainstream journalism.
Much of the work of this conference occurred not in the high profile large sessions but in a plethora of workshops that focused on strategies for engaging the public in the effort at media reform. Many of the sessions are being posted on the Free Press Media Reform Network Web site (www.mediareform.net) and the conversations of the past few days will continue through that group, founded by former University of Wisconsin journalism professor Robert McChesney and John Nichols, the editorial page editor of The Capital Times.
Copyright ©, Capital Newspapers
http://www.madison.com/captimes |
