Media Reform
means many things. This is one of the blandest possible points to make about this past weekend's big media reform conference in Memphis. The attendance figure given by the organizers was upwards of 3000, and that was no exaggeration. These 3k activists, scholars, and interested citizens assembled into a very cool audience, and I was happy to be among them.
I'm fortunate to be an insider and an outsider at the same time. I know a lot of the insiders, enough to pick up on the vibe, but am unentangled, and hence don't care that there are tensions between positions and that people can be pissed off about their relative share of the program.
So when a friend told me that he thought "the people are to the left of the program," I could see his point. The attendees tend to be younger, hipper, and more radical than the folk they're listening to. At the same time, it hardly seems that the organization is turning into PBS--that is, an official grown-up culture that means to impose itself on ordinary folk. Of course, there's the Bill Moyers of it all. And he did begin his keynote by urging the movement to avoid schisms. It's not that any of the hiphop activists in the crowd didn't agree with him, but I can't imagine they were all very interested. And there is an asymmetry between the crowing over stopping the legislative abolition of network neutrality and the anguish over Iraq and Katrina. It's like we asked for a brain and we got a diploma.
But it's all about the direction of change. It's grand that Bill Moyers and the hiphop artists are moving in the same direction.
I left Memphis with the feeling that things WERE beginning to move in the right direction. It'll take a few weeks of avoiding cable news for that feeling to take root. I'll also have to ignore the lack of attention that the whole affair received outside the bubble of progressive media. There was an item in USA Today, but it was on the business page, it was short, and it concerned only the release of studies questioning the need for cross-ownership when the profitability of newspapers and broadcast stations is secure.
means many things. This is one of the blandest possible points to make about this past weekend's big media reform conference in Memphis. The attendance figure given by the organizers was upwards of 3000, and that was no exaggeration. These 3k activists, scholars, and interested citizens assembled into a very cool audience, and I was happy to be among them.
I'm fortunate to be an insider and an outsider at the same time. I know a lot of the insiders, enough to pick up on the vibe, but am unentangled, and hence don't care that there are tensions between positions and that people can be pissed off about their relative share of the program.
So when a friend told me that he thought "the people are to the left of the program," I could see his point. The attendees tend to be younger, hipper, and more radical than the folk they're listening to. At the same time, it hardly seems that the organization is turning into PBS--that is, an official grown-up culture that means to impose itself on ordinary folk. Of course, there's the Bill Moyers of it all. And he did begin his keynote by urging the movement to avoid schisms. It's not that any of the hiphop activists in the crowd didn't agree with him, but I can't imagine they were all very interested. And there is an asymmetry between the crowing over stopping the legislative abolition of network neutrality and the anguish over Iraq and Katrina. It's like we asked for a brain and we got a diploma.
But it's all about the direction of change. It's grand that Bill Moyers and the hiphop artists are moving in the same direction.
I left Memphis with the feeling that things WERE beginning to move in the right direction. It'll take a few weeks of avoiding cable news for that feeling to take root. I'll also have to ignore the lack of attention that the whole affair received outside the bubble of progressive media. There was an item in USA Today, but it was on the business page, it was short, and it concerned only the release of studies questioning the need for cross-ownership when the profitability of newspapers and broadcast stations is secure.
posted by jnerone at 9:46 AM
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