The National Conference for Media Reform came to Minneapolis June 6-8, attracting more than 3,500 participants from across the nation. The conference, hosted by the advocacy group Free Press, celebrated recent victories in the fight to oppose increasing corporate consolidation in media ownership while at the same time highlighting continuing threats to a free and independent media.
"A strong, independent, diverse media is the key to a strong, vibrant democracy," said Congressman Keith Ellison, D-Minn., one of the keynote speakers. "It's not a mistake that the First Amendment has in it freedom of the press. Who else has a job in the Bill of Rights?"
The conference featured speeches by media legends Bill Moyers and Dan Rather, as well as workshops highlighting the work of grassroots media activists who are pioneering new digital media.
Many of the conference speeches and workshops were filmed and/or recorded and may be found on-line at www.freepress.net [1].
One workshop focused on media and the 2008 elections.
"We want a media that makes democracy function, rather than a media that makes us want to run away from elections," said journalist John Nichols, editorial page editor for the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin and a frequent contributor to The Nation. "The passion for personality journalism causes the major media to dismiss major issues." He added: "We're not just seeing bad media. We're seeing a daily assault and battery on democracy."
"Media is the ability for us to talk to one another," said author David Sirota, whose new book, The Uprising, chronicles a new wave of citizen activism sweeping the nation. With the internet and the explosive popularity of new media like You Tube, "we now have the chance to be our own media."
"We really need to go on the offensive," said FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, one of the final speakers at the conference. "We need to battle the ever-growing commercialization of the American media." Adelstein emphasized the key fight to maintain internet neutrality and preserve open access to the internet.
The 2008 elections will be a historic moment when media is driving politics, said another one of the final speakers, Van Jones, president of Green-for-All, a national organization promoting "green collar" jobs. "You wouldn't have had FDR without radio. You wouldn't have had JFK without television. You wouldn't have the next president, whose name I cannot say, without the internet."
Robert McChesney, one of the founders of Free Press, celebrated the growth of the media reform movement from its first conference five years ago. At that time, he said, his ideas seemed like "science fiction." Now, he said, "we're going to win."
Labor media long have been one of the counterweights to corporate media, but this writer saw little sign of labor at the three-day conference.
The only labor speaker appeared to be Linda Foley, president of the Newspaper Guild, who spoke on a panel about the challenges facing traditional big city newspapers.
Among the many organizations with booths in an exhibit hall at the conference, only two represented labor — The National Writers Guild and CWA-NABET.
The absence of organized labor at the conference was frustrating, said John See, from the Labor Education Service at the University of Minnesota, who served on a local planning committee for the conference. Labor's absence, he said, "wasn't for lack of trying."
The next National Conference for Media Reform will be coming up in 18 months. The conference planners choose workshops and speakers from submitted proposals. "There's plenty of time for us to get our ideas on the table," See said.
Steve Share edits the Labor Review, the official publication of the Minneapolis Regional Labor Federation. Visit the federation's website, www.minneapolisunions.org