Free Speech TV John Stout Article
Jon Stout is the general Manager and co-founder of Free Speech TV, a national independent television network reaching 25 million homes via DISH Network and over 140 community cable stations. He wrote the article below reporting on the Sept. 2005 conference in Philadelpha of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC).
HEADLINE: Media Justice & Media Reform: Let’s Dance A Movement
In the last issue of MAIN, NAMAC Co-Director Helen De Michiel covered The National Conference for Media Reform that took place in St. Louis in May. After discussing the various clarion calls sounded at this conference organized by Free Press, she observed that NAMAC’s own constituency seemed sparsely represented among the participants. She emphasized the imperative for NAMAC members to get involved in the burgeoning campaigns for media reform and media justice. For those who missed the Free Press conference, NAMAC’s Taking Liberties conference offered another opportunity to engage with the immediate advocacy campaigns of the media reform movement. Perhaps even more significantly, the conference also directed an invaluable spotlight on the movement-building contributions—theoretical and practical—being made by media justice organizers.
Thanks to savvy campaigning from advocacy organizations like Free Press, Common Cause and the Center for Digital Democracy, the media reform movement has been gaining momentum and honing its strategies for regulatory reform and corporate accountability. At the pre-conference panel discussion, What Price Media Consolidation?, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein commended the power of the movement, pointing to the two million comments the FCC received objecting to its 2003 relaxation of the media ownership rules. That public outcry was cited by the presiding judge as the deciding factor in the court case that overturned the rules, noted Media Access Project’s Andy Schwartzman.
Yet—as media consolidation accelerates, support for public interest media diminishes, and the Brand X case opens the door to corporate control of Internet content—it’s clear that future media reform victories hinge on building, sustaining, and leveraging an even broader-based movement. While Taking Liberties resounded with the common refrain that media reform needs to be the first mission of all media-makers and the second mission of every social justice organization, it was the leaders (self-identified or not) of a media justice movement who provided the most concrete and inspirational examples of how a broad-based movement can be—and is being—built.
Some of the most passionate and pioneering voices at the conference belonged to organizers from the Media Justice Network, an effort currently anchored by Fourth World Rising (FWR), Video Machete (VM), Third World Majority, and Media Tank (whose director, Inja Coates, did an excellent job organizing the conference’s Activism Track of panels). As articulated by Tammy Ko Robinson (VM), Amalie Anderson (FWR), and others, the media justice movement’s agenda includes many of the same policy and accountability issues championed by the media reform organizers, while placing these issues within the framework of “communications rights.” Media justice leaders repeatedly stressed the need to bring a more explicit race and class analysis to media issues: we need to ask ourselves, continually, “what is the racial and economic impact of each media reform policy? who’s brought in and who’s left out?” If a reform policy essentially reifies existing power relationships, they contend, then it’s failing many communities and doesn’t merit their active support.
“The logic of the media reform movement mirrors the logic of corporate media, [which] mirrors the logic of America… and we need to change that,” remarked Youth Media Council’s Malkia Cyril, simultaneously offering critical analysis as well as an invitation for constructive engagement. Cyril and others made a compelling case that organizers need to engage traditionally marginalized communities—in meaningful, not merely rhetorical, ways—so that those most affected by problems can lead the way toward solutions. To build our movement, they contend, we need to connect media struggles with the daily fight for economic, environmental, gender and racial justice. Only by building such a broad, unified, and politically and economically powerful base, can we effect the systemic changes truly needed.
Creating a diverse coalition involves more than current movement leaders extending invitations for new allies to join their cause, argued several panelists. It requires placing media tools in the hands of those most marginalized in order to demonstrate the power of media and the reasons why their communities should care about media reform issues. It also requires working with these communities on winnable campaigns to advance their own primary agendas—often dealing with subsistence issues like food, housing, jobs, jails, and schools—so that they have the resources necessary to take on media issues as their second mission. And, as our circle of allies expands, movement-building requires a collaborative framing of the issues, shaping of the reform agenda, and development of the strategies to advance it. What follows below are several inspirational examples of groups walking this talk.
In a moving keynote address, Lani Guinier extolled the power of the collective voice, citing the media-savvy labor organizing by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). Using the airwaves of Radio Consciencia, a low-power radio station that was “barn-raised” with the folks from the Prometheus Radio Project (PRP), the CIW called a community meeting for all workers owed back-wages from a company doing reconstruction work in Hurricane Charley’s aftermath. Two hours later, the organizers and the 300 workers who responded to the on-air call, confronted the company’s management at its offices. Within a day, a company executive personally flew down to Florida with $57,000 in cash to pay these workers. As PRP’s Pete Tri Dish pointed out, this case was not only was an important economic justice victory; in demonstrating the power of community-controlled media, it is helping to seed a media reform agenda within this community of low-wage, largely Latino/a, Haitian, and Mayan Indian immigrant workers.
Amy Lesser of the Community Technology Centers Network (CTCNet) cited the victories of the youth participations in the Ark After-School Program, a grantee of CTCNet’s “Youth Visions for Stronger Neighborhoods” initiative. Armed with video cameras and less than a year of training, these residents of a Troy, NY low-income housing development investigated the behavior of local security personnel by conducting interviews of people from all parts of their community about conflicts as well as successful interactions. After presenting their edited pieces to local officials, peers, and elders in the community, a dialogue has been opened about questions of racial profiling and harassment of youth in particular. The youth hope to continue this work to establish a better relationship between tenants and security personnel. This success has not only empowered these “at-risk” youth and improved their predominantly African American and Hispanic community, it has prepared them with real-life experience to become future movement leaders.
The Youth Media Council (YMC) is an Oakland-based organization dedicated to “building youth power through media advocacy and media accountability.” Leslie Ruiz, a young Si Se Puede Fellow, spoke passionately about YMC’s “Unplug Clear Channel” campaign, which is organizing thousands of students, people of color, parents, workers and progressives to demand that the FCC not renew the broadcast license of hip-hop station KMEL. Campaign literature asserts that “Clear Channel is an anti-poor, anti-union, and pro-war media corporation” making big bucks corporatizing hip-hop culture on the FM dial while promoting racist hate radio on the AM dial. By focusing on an issue directly affecting its community members and allowing them to lead the charge, YMC is bringing important new voices to the national media reform arena.
While YMC is working to hold the corporate media accountable, Third World Majority (TWM) is working to assure that women and people of color have access to the tools and training necessary to tell their stories through the media. Past activities have focused on community digital storytelling workshops, which have also empowered groups to incorporate media strategies into their organizing campaigns. TWM’s Thenmozhi Soundararajan noted, for example, that the South Asian immigrant organizers of D.R.U.M. (Desis Rising Up and Moving) now employ media in their work on behalf of families of Muslim INS detainees. Andrea Quijada talked about how TWM’s workshops helped Albuquerque’s Young Women United (an organization she co-founded) to begin using media to explore the community impact of teen pregnancy, rape and domestic violence and to understand the relationship of these problems to the region’s imperialist history. A community organizer brought to media via TWM, Quijada now directs educational programs for the New Mexico Media Literacy Project.
Most recently, according to Soundararajan, TWM joined forces with KPFA’s Hard Knock Radio team to send a fact-finding delegation of journalists of color to the Gulf states to collect unreported stories and to challenge the frame of the corporate media’s coverage of Katrina’s aftermath. The project was initiated in response to requests from local organizers for help in holding government agencies and reconstructionist corporations accountable to poor communities of color devastated by the hurricane, by “relief” efforts, and by racist, classist media coverage. TWM’s continuing work in the area will focus on providing documentary training to local community organizers who are gathering evidentiary media to support their grievances and appeals. As longtime media activist Martha Wallner noted, the delegation’s foregrounding of people working together stood apart from the corporate media’s representation of the same merely as “victims” (or “looters”), demonstrating the import of who, through the media, is writing our history and shaping our future.
Finally, a truly broad-based media coalition also needs to cross the rural/urban divide. For over 35 years, the Kentucky-based Appalshop has been placing media tools into the hands of folks living in the Appalachians. Former Appalshop director Dee Davis now mobilizes these same communities for political action through the Center for Rural Strategies (CRS). A recent CRS campaign scored a big victory when CBS bowed to public pressure and pulled from production The Real Beverly Hillbillies, a “reality-based” show ridiculing a poor, uneducated rural family placed into a Beverly Hills mansion. A model for the media reform movement itself, CRS’s successful strategy (see their excellent “Anatomy of a Public Awareness Campaign” report at www.ruralstrategies.org/campaign/report) included building a national alliance of groups not traditionally associated with rural or media campaigns, such as National Asian American Telecommunications Association, the National Civic League, and several labor unions. According to Davis, these disparate groups shared a common conviction that social justice movements “need to change public perceptions in order to change public policies.”
Commenting on our rapidly shifting media landscape, veteran media activist DeeDee Halleck wisely observed that “Political convergence is as important as technological convergence.” NAMAC’s Taking Liberties, at its best, demonstrated the most innovative strategies being deployed to foster such collective action: with lasting marriages of substance, rather than fleeting trysts of convenience. All this comes not a moment too soon, as we collectively build “a movement for self-determination and expression”—in the words of NAMAC’s De Michiel— “frame by frame, person by person” and even byte by byte.
