Objective of National Conference for Media Reform
I went down to the National Conference for Media Reform today for about three hours. I'm going to post on that later, but to kind of give you a summary of what the conference was all about, see the below statement from the Free Press website. Free Press is sponsoring the conference:
Media Reforms Goal
It will come as news to few Americans that we are now in the midst of a full-blown journalistic crisis in the United States. For but one example, the cheerleading news coverage of the war in Iraq, both before and during the conflict, has led to widespread public disaffection. Americans have been driven to the BBC and the international press to seek trustworthy news on American foreign policy. Post-election discoveries of pundits that received lucrative, undisclosed contracts from the Bush Administration to push unpopular policies further undermined American confidence in the fourth estate. The exposure of economic and political influence on the reporting of major newsrooms has badly injured the credibility of the "free press." Critically, in the public debate, this crisis in journalism is explicitly tied to the dangers of consolidating media ownership and the corruption of lawmakers by Big Media. Ultimately, the question must be asked: does a commercially-driven media even have the ability to serve the needs of democracy?
This gives you a real quick and accurate perspective on what this gang is all about and the people I mingled with today. They don't want a private media owned by a small pool of corporations and they want a public controlled media and one with very heavy concentration on local control and local programming. A model that looks like BBC on a national scale, with a local PBS based model and the local media having a much bigger role in the over all news coverage. A socialist model of control basically.
Final summary, MSM is controlled by business interests first therefore does not report in the ultra - ultra liberal fashion that these folks want it to. Very scary prospect indeed.
Media Reforms Goal
It will come as news to few Americans that we are now in the midst of a full-blown journalistic crisis in the United States. For but one example, the cheerleading news coverage of the war in Iraq, both before and during the conflict, has led to widespread public disaffection. Americans have been driven to the BBC and the international press to seek trustworthy news on American foreign policy. Post-election discoveries of pundits that received lucrative, undisclosed contracts from the Bush Administration to push unpopular policies further undermined American confidence in the fourth estate. The exposure of economic and political influence on the reporting of major newsrooms has badly injured the credibility of the "free press." Critically, in the public debate, this crisis in journalism is explicitly tied to the dangers of consolidating media ownership and the corruption of lawmakers by Big Media. Ultimately, the question must be asked: does a commercially-driven media even have the ability to serve the needs of democracy?
This gives you a real quick and accurate perspective on what this gang is all about and the people I mingled with today. They don't want a private media owned by a small pool of corporations and they want a public controlled media and one with very heavy concentration on local control and local programming. A model that looks like BBC on a national scale, with a local PBS based model and the local media having a much bigger role in the over all news coverage. A socialist model of control basically.
Final summary, MSM is controlled by business interests first therefore does not report in the ultra - ultra liberal fashion that these folks want it to. Very scary prospect indeed.
posted by Steve at 6:00 PM
