Jason Salzman
RETURN TO MEDIA GIRAFFE PROJECT PROFILE PAGE
Jason Salzman Interview – Rocky Mountain Media Watch
Background/How got into media criticism
When I was at Brown at one point I was a student activist and I organized a student election vote on whether the University should stock suicide pills in the infirmary for use after a nuclear war – only after a nuclear war, not before a nuclear war – that was important. The students actually voted on that. There are obscure votes in history and that’s one of them. Because it was on the ballot and it was at Brown it got an undue amount of media attention and I became interested in the media after that. I studied the coverage of that particular event as a class with a professor and interviewed reporters. It was a gratifying project in that I got my start in media criticism. I analyzed why it was newsworthy.
Arnold Fellowship to study the antinuclear movement in the South Pacific – what was that like?
I maintained a interest as a student activist at Brown in the antinuclear issues and at that time New Zealand had just banned nuclear ships from entering their ports and it was an unusual, strong statement, even though that country’s so far out of the cold war. Because it was a U.S. ally it got a lot of attention here and the question was why. It seemed like there was a pretty strong grassroots antinuclear movement there that pushed that. The labor party made that declaration banning the nuclear armed and powered ships and so I corresponded with activists down there and developed a plan to try to figure if there was anything the grassroots antinuclear movement in the United States, which was failing so miserably at the time, could learn from New Zealand. Then I got a little grant and airplane ticket to the South Pacific; which was pretty nice after college. I traveled around, hitchhiked around New Zealand. That whole area is quite antinuclear, so I went to some of the Pacific Islands too and tried to explore why that was.
How long were you in the South Pacific for?
Six months.
What did you do afterwards?
Then I wrote about that for a while, freelanced, published some stuff about why that occurred. And then I went to Washington D.C. and worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council in their Washington D.C. office; they have a nuclear program there. I worked for 2 years there on the environmental impact of nuclear weapons production. Because my thinking at the time was that part of the reason why people didn’t care about nuclear weapons in America was because they didn’t know the effects, but there were these networks of weapons sites where there were actual, real environmental pacts and that might be a good way to try to work to stop the nuclear arms race.
When did you start working with Greenpeace USA?
Then I got tired of the Washington D.C. scene and I grew up in Denver and returned to Denver and was doing various jobs – painting and I was a mascot for Taco Bell for a while. I was wearing a giant taco. It helped me understand the importance of imagery and the potential of costumes in later political work. No job is a waste. I had a friend that I met in the Washington D.C. Greenpeace office who knew I was in Denver and it was not long after I was here that the FBI raided Rocky Flats Plant. Which was at a time when it was very unusual - the FBI raiding another government facility, and a nuclear facility at that. There were accusations that they had been burning plutonium and it got a lot of national media attention. And the director at Greenpeace at the time wanted to hire someone to draw more attention, take advantage of the situation for Greenpeace. So that’s how I got started with Greenpeace.
What kind of work did you do at Greenpeace?
At first I was focused specifically on the Rocky Flats Plant, which is where they made part of the bomb, that they called “plutonium pit.” And I did research and sent it in as a lobbying campaign to try to close the plant based on its safety record – that’s what I was focused on. I did quite a bit of PR in the Greenpeace style of attention grabbing PR, and also writing, and lobbying, and research which I’d learned how to do when I was working on similar stuff at the NRDC. And so I just did some more of it and I focused on Rocky Flats and later I did, with others at Greenpeace, nuclear weapons production in the United States and internationally. Then later at Greenpeace I was part of the renewable energy and fossil fuel campaign, the energy campaign and I did research for that.
When did you start Rocky Mountain Media Watch?
What happened during the work at Greenpeace is that it became I was more convinced that the media as was an underutilized and powerful tool for activists to use. At the same time it seemed like the media was not being held accountable by citizens for mistakes and not covering certain issues in appropriate depth and seriousness. So we started Rocky Mountain Media Watch to try and do both those things and wanting it to criticize the media but also to help activists do a better job of telling their stories to journalists because it’s a two-way street. You can’t expect journalists to do it all by themselves, sometimes activists have to understand what journalists need and be able to give it to them. And that was 1995. This guy named Paul Klite and I started it and we focused initially on local TV news and also on what we called the “access” part of it, the citizen access to those two areas.
Focused mostly on local news?
Local TV news nationally. We focused on the criticism side – we first did content analysis of the local stations and then we did it nationally. We had a network of activists around the country who taped one TV show a night and during a steady period they would send that to us and we did a content analysis of all of them – like 100 stations or so. And we produce a report showing exactly resulted from these broadcasts.
How did you go about starting Rocky Mountain Media Watch?
We first, when you start a non-profit you find an organization who will be your fiscal sponsor it’s called, you can just accept donations through that organization. They can basically house you and allow you to accept donations and apply for grants. We found an organization locally to be our fiscal sponsor and then we created our own board and our own non-profit within about a year of that. And how we did it? We basically went for the work, we wanted to produce our reports and do our activism and at the same time we tried to find people who were naturally interested in the topic, hopefully nationally, who would be on our board and advise us.
Why is Rocky Mountain inactive these days?
We kept going until 2001 or 2002 and Paul Klite died, the guy that I co-founded it with. Even before that we stalling a bit because it was very hard to fund the organization and some of where we’d really copied down our best work in the area of local TV news, others were doing it like Tom Rosenstiel. They started doing, also, local TV news analysis. We weren’t coming up with new ways to analyze it, but getting burnt out, too, on doing it. Although we felt really good up to that point, we started it exposing in a quantified ways what’s on these shows and we got a lot of good, positive feedback but there wasn’t – even now there’s more support for grassroots groups that are doing media criticism then there was in those days.
What did you do after it deteriorated?
I started CauseCommunications which essentially took that part that was originally part of Rocky Mountain Media Watch – the media access, media training part and added to that PR, consulting, and used a book that I’d written, Making the News as a basis also to launch the company. I had a handful of clients since then and have been doing that.
Book – Making News
Originally it was a pamphlet, like a 2-page pamphlet with 10 steps for activists explaining how activists could stage a press conference not forgetting that journalists needed to be called and information like that, as opposed to mailing or faxing a press release – it’s not good enough, you have to actually call a reporter – kind of simple, stupid information that I found really helped people. When we started Rocky Mountain Media Watch, we got a grant – one of our initial grants – included money to produce that into a bigger book and we self-published it and sold it.. And then eventually a publisher picked it up and now it’s in it’s second printing, distributed by Basic Books. Now it’s expanded and includes all different kinds of information for activists who are trying to work with journalists in a productive way from both sides.
What do you see as the future of the media and where do you see the role of activists playing into that?
I think there will always be a more centralized media or journalism outlets. I think there will always be a need for activist to hold those folks accountable to make sure that when they’re wrong that they’re told they’re wrong or when they’re missing something that they’re missing something, and also, conversely, to make sure that they tell those people information when they have it that might be newsworthy. I think there will always be a market for information that journalists provide and because of that interest that people have in the news, that inherent interest there will be that market and then there’ll be a way to support journalism through advertising because the two go hand in hand – taking advantage of distributing information and also carrying advertiser’s messages. So it’s just matter of how it all shapes out in the end in terms of how big journalistic organizations are and what kind of nuts and bolts of distributing those stories looks like. But I think that’ll always be there.
What are your plans for the future?
I write a media criticism column for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and I hope to continue that as long as Rocky Mountain News will take it. I write every other week and there’s a conservative critic that writes one week and then I, the progressive liberal critic, write the next. I might try and take that and try to turn it into broader media criticism and try to free-lance more media criticism. But for the most part I think I’ll stay on the communications side which is helping, advising campaigns and activists on how to spread their messages actively and widely.
RETURN TO MEDIA GIRAFFE PROJECT PROFILE PAGE
