'We Have To Tell The Story Ourselves'

Isaiah J. Poole

January 12, 2007

Veteran journalist Bill Moyers on Friday challenged 3,000 progressive activists and communicators to take back the telling of America’s story at the National Conference of Media Reform in Memphis. He put his finger squarely on the deep vein of discontent with the way mainstream media is ill-serving American democracy.

In his address, Moyers, who is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, went through a sordid litany of corporate media malfeasance, from the lackluster and largely non-skeptical reporting of the Bush administration’s launch of the war in Iraq to the lack of attention paid to a domestic landscape of increasing economic disparity and racial segregation. Virtually uncontrolled media consolidation over the past decade, he said, has meant a loss of independent journalism and created “more narrowness and homogenization in content and perspective, so that what we see on our couch is overwhelmingly the view from the top.”

It is in this environment that the Bush administration can, for example, can “turn the escalation of a failed war and call it a surge, as if it were a current of electricity through a wire instead of blood spurting from the ruptured veins of a soldier,” Moyers said.

On the domestic front, “the question of whether or not our economic system is truly just is off the table for investigation and discussion, so that alternative ideas, alternative critiques, alternative visions never get a hearing,” he said.

“It is clear what we have to do. We have to tell the story ourselves,” he said.

What Moyers is calling for is a two-pronged attack. Activists should continue pressing the established media to live up to the public service obligations of the Communications Act of 1934, obligations that have been trampled in the past two decades as both political parties succumb to the influence of enormously powerful telecommunications and entertainment company lobbies.  At the same time, the Internet and digital communication tools allow every citizen to become a Thomas Paine, he said, challenging the establishment with an alternative vision of social justice and government for the common good. It makes it possible, he said for citizens to say to those who seek to exert imperial control over both government and the means to be informed about government, “you no longer own the copyright to America’s story.”

The Rev. Jesse Jackson echoed Moyers and chided the major broadcast news media for being “all day, all night, all white.” He asked participants when the last time they had seen a leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Organization for Women or a leading Latino organization on a Sunday morning news talk show, and reminded listeners that no broadcast news operation now has an African American in an anchor position comparable to that held by the late Max Robinson of ABC News n the 1980s or Bernard Shaw during the early days of CNN. “We must fight to open up the airways to all people,” he said.

This is the third Media Reform Congress organized by Free Press, which has brought together bloggers, progressive media and grassroots political and social activists. The conference has virtually taken over downtown Memphis. The intense interest in this conference is a reflection of the thousands of Howard Beales on the left who are as mad as hell and are not going to take dumbed-down, homogenized, corporatized, power-subservient media any more.