The Politics of Media Reform

“Pulitzer would be horrified by the state of the media,” writer John Nichols boomed during the opening remarks at the National Conference for Media Reform, held May 13 through 15 in St. Louis, Missouri. The conference drew more than 2,000 media activists from across America and around the world and was convened by the organization Free Press. Scads of media-related organizations and publications were represented, and volunteers staffed dozens of booths handing out information on everything from Project Censored to short wave radio projects.

Among the fifty panels and workshops: Media Activism 101; Independent Media: Creating the Solution; Racial Justice and Media Policy; Localism and Diversity in Radio; Public Broadcasting; and Challenging Cable Monopolies. There were also several smaller caucuses held to allow group discussions, and a series of films were screened, including Money for Nothing, Toxic Sludge Is Good for You, and WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception.

The keynote event was hosted by Air America’s Al Franken, author of several books including Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Two Federal Communications Commissioners, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, gave brief talks and provided insight into the inner workings of the FCC. Good ole boy, best-selling author, and professional shitkicker Jim Hightower added some levity to the proceedings, livening up the crowd before a well-meaning but meandering talk by California Representative Diane Watson. Other notables included Naomi Klein (author of the anticorporate book No Logo), radio show Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, and Bill Moyers.

One interesting thing about the conference was the diversity of its participants: tattooed and pierced skateboarders rubbed shoulders with college professors and Phil Donahue, and hip-hop activists and peacenik vegans commingled with FCC commissioners, all united in a common goal: to figure out what’s wrong with the media and set it right.

This lofty goal was, of course, easier said than done. Before I walked into the conference, I thought I had a decent grasp of what a media reform conference would include. I had a pretty good idea about many of the central media reform issues, including media monopolies, biases, media literacy, and more. In fact, I recently published a book on the media, Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us. I had managed to fill over 300 pages with examinations of (mostly) non-political media reform issues. Ostensibly united under the banner of “media reform,” a variety of issues and themes emerged at the conference: the threat of media consolidation, the need to increase racial and gender diversity, and the need for nationwide, free Internet access.

So I didn’t expect to find “media reform” to be an umbrella topic for a vast array of left-leaning topics. (The Iraq war is at least partly a media reform issue, but is the issue of depleted uranium?) It’s not that I necessarily disagreed with what I was hearing; I was just surprised (and a little puzzled) by the easy and unquestioned blending of politics and media reform. The discourse was remarkably polarizing, and I began to wonder what a Republican would think if he or she walked into the room where Bush-bashing and media criticism were synonymous. During one talk, Free Press cofounder Bob McChesney made some noises about the need to include a diversity of political viewpoints, but the overwhelming tone of the conference was left-wing, progressive activism.

Shouldn’t Republicans and conservatives be just as concerned about media reform as democrats and liberals? After all, Republicans have made a cottage industry of flogging the news media’s alleged liberal bias. If Rush Limbaugh, Bernie Goldberg, Ann Coulter, and other conservative commentators are so concerned about the misleading media, they should have been just as welcome and eager to attend as Al Franken. (It’s an interesting irony that, in rhetoric at least, neither the left nor the right feels that the news media represents them. Some journalists may take this as a sign of objectivity—the “as long as we’re getting angry letters from all sides, we’re doing our job” position—but I’m not so sure that’s true. It seems just as likely that the news media really is divorced from its audience in many ways.) Media reform has in fact been trumpeted by those across the political spectrum. Michael Powell’s dismal tenure at the FCC was brought to an end through bipartisan efforts. Sure, the Democrats were up in arms over media deregulation, but conservatives joined the fight and together they struck a significant victory for media reform.

The very day the conference ended, an international story highlighted why media reform is an important issue for Republicans: Newsweek’s infamous and inaccurate blurb on the American military’s abuse of the Koran drew heated protests and rebukes from the Bush administration. Though some of the administration’s indignant outrage was selective and transparently self-serving—for example, they were conspicuously silent when news outlets falsely suggested a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq—their basic point was valid: the news media must be accurate and responsible.

If the 2,000 participants’ political goals seemed singular, their focus was not. A lack of clearly defined focus permeated the conference. The organizers and presenters acted as if basic goals and definitions were clear to everyone, but progress often stalled in the discussion groups as journalists and activists struggled to find and adhere to a common language. “Who or what is the ‘mainstream media’?” one journalist asked. “Is it the same as the ‘corporate media’?” Another chimed in, “Or the ‘progressive media’—does that just mean the ‘liberal media’?” Forty participants responded with forty answers.

One of the best panels included David Brock, of the political fact-checking watchdog group Media Matters for America and author of The Republican Noise Machine: Right-wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy. Brock discussed ways in which average citizens and his organization can hold the news media accountable. Other panelists suggested that local public utilities commissioners can influence policy regarding the public airwaves.

While many of the sessions were informative and interesting, I was disappointed in the superficiality and lack of independent, critical thinking in some of the presentations. For example, I attended the “Advertising and Commercialism” session hoping for an insightful discussion by the three panelists, Christy Glaubke of Children Now, Sut Jhally of the Media Education Foundation, and Tim Walker of the Adbusters Media Foundation. Glaubke spoke about message branding to children, the fact that kids often can’t distinguish between advertising and programming (neither can adults, for that matter), and the banning of interactive ads aimed at kids. Sut Jhally’s take was far more political, tackling the perils of consumerism and capitalism. Jhally pictured a world without ads as one of peace, freedom, goodwill, and social justice. In the final presentation, Tim Walker from Adbusters magazine picked up on the anti-consumerism theme. As a lapsed subscriber to Adbusters, I was familiar with the arguments and themes Walker was affirming, including several charts suggesting that advertising is responsible for a variety of social ills including violence and a stark jump in depression rates.

Almost no one likes advertising (unless, of course, we run or work for a business that needs to promote itself), and most people agree that, ideally, America’s children wouldn’t be exposed to six billion ads a month. The presenters were pretty much preaching to the choir and staying on message, but that left little time or opportunity for the independent thought or questions that the assembled crowd seemed to value so highly. I didn’t hear one word about how to balance free speech with advertising; after all, ads directed at children are still free speech. No one stepped up to question Tim Walker’s glaringly flawed arguments and charts allegedly linking incidence of depression and advertising. (Even assuming some sort of link was proven, as any scientist can tell you, correlation does not imply causation.) Walker was throwing around dubious assumptions and bogus statistics with a certainty and abandon that would have impressed Bush Administration officials (had they been there).

I’m no fan of advertising. My Web site has no advertising; the magazines I edit don’t carry ads. I’ve taken the stick to advertising repeatedly in print, interviews, and lectures. But the idea that advertising is a panopathogen, “immoral,” or “a child molester,” (as Mr. Jhally put it) is simply bizarre. I started to see that many of the positions and pundits I saw at the conference were just as insular, simplistic, and dogmatic in their thinking as those they criticize. I finally got up to speak, and reminded the panelists that perhaps there was a touch of hypocrisy in all the ad-bashing, since the reason that everyone was in the room at the time—the reason 2,000 people showed up for a conference on media reform—was because of advertising. Most attendees, myself included, had seen advertising in The Nation. All the hundreds of slick media reform color pamphlets, anti-corporate brochures, and posters in the Marriott’s hallways are advertising. The books and DVD films for sale just outside the door—the reason anyone has heard about them is advertising. Apparently all the panelists loathe advertising except when it suits their needs.

I agreed with many of the positions and issues brought up at the conference. I agreed with many statements, such as “media reform is not an academic exercise: it is a crucial problem for our time” But I was less sure about others. One speaker, echoing many including Bob McChesney, said that “Without racial, economic, and gender justice, there will never be a free press.” I was left with questions that I hoped the conference would answer, or at least address. For example, what did McChesney and others mean by “social justice”? What would a diverse media look like, in practical terms? Would it mean news stories being delivered by those with different points of view? Or reports representing a diverse spectrum of minority opinions, including Asian, African-American, Hispanic, and Native American points of view? Of course, these groups are not monolithic, homogenous entities, so no single voice will speak for everyone.

One can forgive some wobbly knees, indecision, and a lack of focus in the relatively young National Conference for Media Reform. The very fact that the conference was so successful, that over two thousand people took time out of their lives and dollars out of their pockets to be part of an effort to reform the media, is very encouraging. I hope that the media reform movement will continue to crystallize, focus, and build momentum in the coming years.