April 28, 2005
Robert W. McChesney Is Working To Reclaim Our Free Press
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
Our seminal belief is that if all these issues of ownership of public broadcasting, or copyrights, and right of Internet access, are laid out in the open, we’re pretty confident we’ll get good policy. American people will, in a healthy debate, come up with good policies. ... The important point to remember is that the bad guys here are ultimately not Clear Channel Radio, or ViaCom, or Rupert Murdoch. ... The bad guys here are the policy makers who created this system. Radio’s really a very inexpensive medium, and there’s no reason why every radio station in Chicago couldn’t have a different owner. ... But the rules that allow Clear Channel to gobble up all the stations are negotiated behind closed doors. And that’s what our fight is - to make the policy makers accountable to the people of this country, not to Clear Channel, ViaCom or Sinclair Broadcasting.
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A free press is assumed to be part and parcel of American democracy. But as Robert W. McChesney makes clear, we'd better fight for it right now if we want to hold onto it and actually reclaim it from the corporate boardrooms and unseen political backrooms where decisions are currently being made. The upcoming National Conference for Media Reform, which McChesney has helped to organize, will bring together many freedom-of-the-press fighters whose ideas and activism are focused on shaping public policy on the media, encouraging independent media -- say, there's a worthy cause -- or offering up media criticism. Here's his conference preview and thoughts on what we need to be doing.
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BuzzFlash: You are the founder of Free
Press, which is the organization sponsoring the National Conference for
Media Reform May 13 - 15 this year in St. Louis, Missouri. The title is
"The Media Are in Crisis. The Time To Act Is Now." What will
people get out of attending this conference?
Robert W. McChesney: It’s going to be a large and heterogeneous
conference with two or three thousand participants, so no two people will
experience the exact same thing. The unifying thread is that we need to
organize politically to change media policy. We will address three planks
of media activism. Even though our conference is aimed primarily at emphasizing
the political organizing that has to go on and the full range of media
policies, we also pay attention to people who do independent media, and
the experts who critique lousy media coverage.
People will come here to learn about media policy issues
and how groups are working on them at every level, from local to global.
People who are active will get a chance to talk to each other, interact
and share ideas. A great conference will enable us to share one or two
or three years of work in one weekend.
A lot of people will be interested in policy and want to learn about it,
but the other aspects will be independent media and media criticism. There
also might be activists in areas such as campaign finance, environmental
issues, civil liberties, et cetera, who can link up with like-minded people.
There will be a huge division of people doing independent media who will
be able to get out there, to talk to and meet with each other. Likewise,
a lot of the people who do the great media criticism of our times will
be present.
This conference will bring together people who are devoted
and are thinking about the issues in a lot of different ways, so only
good things are going to happen. It’s about raising the knowledge level
of everyone. We know from our first conference, you can’t really predict
exactly what’s going to happen. It’s like popping popcorn.
BuzzFlash: You’re a professor of communications at the
University of Illinois, focusing on the mass media. And you’re in practically
every DVD on the media BuzzFlash has
offered as a premium. You’re sort of the lead act on media reform. Free
Press has offices in Northampton, Massachusetts and in Washington, D.C.
Is the media reform movement growing?
Robert W. McChesney: I think the obvious answer is yes.
You know, MoveOn and True Majority each polled their membership in recent
months about what issues their groups should be working on and putting
energy into over the next couple of years. In both surveys, media reform
ran second, ahead of environment, education and many other great, pressing
issues. There’s a growing recognition by people that, unless they do something
about media in this country, they’re going to have a lot of trouble winning
all the other issues they care about. Part of the process of changing
this globe for the better, and democratizing society, is to go through
changing the media. It’s a very important part of our work.
BuzzFlash: Give us some background, if
you don't mind. How did this event come about?
Robert W. McChesney: Free Press started less than three
years ago. John Nichols, my frequent coauthor and comrade, and I, had
written many articles and a couple of short books basically arguing for
media reform and saying, based on government policies, we’ve got to organize
to get public involvement and improve this media system or we’re in big
trouble. An organizer read that over and over, and contacted me, and said,
I want to do the organizing. Let’s get to work here. That person was Josh
Silver, who had been instrumental in organizing the successful campaigns
to get public reforms of elections in Arizona. He approached us in 2002
and said let’s get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy
making.
It just so happened that we had just launched Free Press at the end of
2002 and the beginning of 2003. It was precisely when the Federal Communications
Commission was reviewing its media ownership rules. As you may remember,
that set off a major firestorm politically that no one expected, where
nearly three million people petitioned and phoned members of Congress
and the FCC to express opposition to easing the ownership rules and allowing
more media consolidation.
It was in the context of this outburst of popular involvement
and interest in media in 2003 that helped us rapidly expand, as did the
entire movement. The Free Press today has fifteen full-time organizers.
We’ve got a website that’s huge, and it’s a portal for our movement now
that many people are working on. It’s updated on an hourly basis. And,
we’re working on a number of different campaigns in addition to throwing
this conference and operating the website.
And there’s plenty of work that others are doing. If you go to the FreePress.net
website, we list 140, 130 other media stations and show what they’re doing
and give contact information. A lot of good work is being done.
So the answer to your question is, yes, the media reform movement is growing
rapidly. And yes, Free Press is growing rapidly. But that doesn’t mean
that we’re going to continue to grow, and that we’ll be successful. It’s
very much up in the air, how far this movement goes. There’s still skepticism
about the ability of media reforms in this country to really take hold,
mostly due to the power of the media corporations and how they more or
less own the politicians. But nonetheless, we know this movement’s now
at a window of opportunity. In the next three, five, six, ten years, we’re
either going to take off and become a major force and really be part of
changing the media, or we’ll just drift to the sidelines.
BuzzFlash: What are some of the historical precedents
that media reform can learn or benefit from?
Robert W. McChesney: Two relevant predecessors are the
environmental movement and the campaign finance reform movement. The environmental
movement went up quickly in the late sixties and early seventies, and
went from really nonexistent to becoming an issue that every politician
had to have a position on, to developing huge grassroots support. And
that’s the goal we have. The other side of this is campaign finance, which
is an issue of paramount importance in our society, and it had a tremendous
amount of momentum in the 1990s. It’s more important today than ever,
but I think most of the people who have been working aggressively on campaign
finance over the years have left the movement. That said, I know it’s
still important, but many have concluded we just can’t win, so I’m going
somewhere else. A lot of them are coming over to media reform.
BuzzFlash: There was an incredible reaction to the FCC
ruling that allowed deregulation in. At BuzzFlash, we were frankly astonished.
In contrast, before the Iraq War, although the calls to senators, even
from red states, were overwhelmingly opposed to the war, that didn’t
have any effect on the Senate. So what happened? Were there other factors
at play beyond the phone calls?
Robert W. McChesney: First of all, the term deregulation is widely used, but I think it’s pretty inaccurate. It’s not about deregulation. "Deregulation" is the corporate term, they like that term. It suggests that there won’t be any government rules or enforcement, and everything will be free. But that’s not the issue here.
They said they deregulated radio in 1996 – remember that?
– when they let single companies like Clear Channel acquire as many stations
as they could nationally. But radio is still totally regulated. It’s just
been re-regulated to allow single companies to have a thousand of these
monopoly licenses rather than a handful. It’s just regulated for them,
now, not for you. That’s really the fight we’re talking about here. It
isn’t regulation versus deregulation. It’s about informed consent of the
people, and not the politics of the powerful special interests, and yet
it’s behind closed doors.
And like the environmental movement, this is not a left-right issue. It
is politically attractive across the horizon. The reason is very simple.
All the media reform movement calls for is simply that there be informed
public participation on media policy decisions – that they should no longer
make policy behind closed doors without any public awareness or involvement.
Anyone who believes in legitimacy of government and rules has got to be
in favor of that.
Our seminal belief is that if all these issues of ownership
of public broadcasting or copyrights, and right of Internet access are
laid out in the open, we’re pretty confident we’ll get good policy. American
people will, in a healthy debate, come up with good policies. If
the majority of the American people, in an informed debate, decide that
they really like the idea of a handful of companies owning most of the
media – if they’d rather have children’s brains marinated in advertising
eight hours a day – that’s what we'll have to live with. We won’t be happy.
We’ll argue against it. But we’ll say, okay, that’s the way it works in
a democracy.
But we’ve got to get to that point of making it a democratic debate. If
we get our chance to have genuine public involvement in the debate, it
will not be a left-right issue.
Now of course, the core problem of our media system is that it’s dominated
by massive corporations and driven by commercial values. Traditionally,
conservatives are more comfortable with that than liberals are. But what
we’ve discovered about conservatives – and I think a lot of people have
got to keep this in mind – is that once you get away from the corporate
board, and once you get away from the upper echelons of the conservative
movement, when you go out into America, well, a lot of people still are
self-described conservatives. The values they hold dear are things like
local control. They don’t like the idea that it’s highly compensated media
that dominates their community’s media, and the owners are unrecognizable
and they’re in a distant place. They aren’t accountable. And so a lot
of people who are self-described conservatives absolutely did not like
the idea of one company owning all the media in their communities.
BuzzFlash: In North Dakota, a mostly rural red state with some
of the rural concerns about consolidation, there was a town where they
had three or four Clear Channel stations.
Robert W. McChesney: I think it was eight or nine, out
of ten. Clear Channel has gotten some sort of clearance, and they basically
own the whole town. It’s a company town.
BuzzFlash: There was a train with some dangerous toxic
chemicals on it, and the train derailed. The police tried to get a radio
station to broadcast to the public that an evacuation was necessary, but
because all the Clear Channel programming was done in advance, there was
no one at any station to broadcast it.
Robert W. McChesney: That’s exactly right. The important point
to remember here is that the bad guys here are ultimately not Clear Channel
Radio, or ViaCom, or Rupert Murdoch. The shareholders expect them to make
as much money as possible, so beating up on the corporations doesn’t make
sense. There is tremendous market pressure to just strip out all the local
competition.
The bad guys here are the policy makers who created this system. Radio’s really a very inexpensive medium, and there’s no reason why every radio station in Chicago couldn’t have a different owner. They’d have no trouble finding people who could afford the cost to run a radio station in Chicago if they made that rule. But the rules that allow Clear Channel to gobble up all the stations are negotiated behind closed doors. And that’s what our fight is - to make the policy makers accountable to the people of this country, not to Clear Channel, ViaCom or Sinclair Broadcasting.
BuzzFlash: BuzzFlash now has about 150,000 readers daily, and during the fall campaign, we had over five million visitors a month. We know we’re preaching to the choir. But sometimes we get a writer who says, why don’t you try to make your headlines less irreverent and win over more people? Well, that’s not our mission.
But many people will write to us and ask, what can I do
about the mainstream media – the Foxes, the CNNs – who seem to broadcast
almost without question what the White House or the Pentagon tells them,
even though these companies have billions of dollars at their disposal.
How can one reform them? They have become basically vehicles for selling
advertising, and they don’t want to upset the audience if they’re trying
to sell cars in between news segments. What do you say to people who have
a bleak vision of being able to impact the corporate media?
Robert W. McChesney: These corporations are sort of locked in
as part of the American way. Like the Rocky Mountains, which slow me down
and get in the way as I drive from Kansas to Los Angeles. I’d like to
get rid of them, but that’s ridiculous, so I’m just going to have to deal
with the Rockies and let it depress me. Most Americans feel that we’re
stuck with this media system. It’s there. There’s nothing we can do about
it. Maybe they would like to convince the person who owns ViaCom or Clear
Channel to be better, to be nicer, to try to have some civic consciousness.
Well, I think that’s a complete waste of time. You might as well go jump off a cliff and expect a swimming pool to be at the bottom. You know that’s not going to work.
The reason this movement has exploded is the increasing
realization that it isn’t natural or immutable. It has nothing to do with
the First Amendment. It has nothing to do with the free market. Our media
system is the result of media policies and subsidies made corruptly behind
closed doors, given to these huge companies. All these companies depend
on the nationally franchised licenses and subsidies for the foundation
of their empires.
We began to understand it that way in 2003. People began to question why
one company would own twelve hundred radio stations. Why do we extend
copyrights for hundreds of years, when we’re long past the point it has
met its purpose in terms of protecting content to encourage production?
Why have we eliminated the public demand? Why do we allow these companies
to get monopoly franchises for television stations to pummel our children
with advertising at age two and three, when similar broadcasters in other
countries in Europe are prohibited from advertising to children?
Once people realize ours is not a natural system – it has nothing to do with the Founding Fathers, the First Amendment, or a free market, for that matter, then the whole thing will implode.
It’s going to be a tough fight. Sure, these guys have a
lot of power. They control the news. But it’s a fight you have to engage
in. And the momentum in the last few years looks awfully good. It's like
a baseball team that won forty games a year for ten years, then won eighty.
And this year, it looks like it will win 95. Maybe it still can't win
the pennant, but things are heading in the right direction.
BuzzFlash: We’re located in Chicago. The media critic
for the Chicago Sun-Times was Phil Rosenthal, and the Sun-Times ran his
column in their entertainment section. The Chicago Tribune lured him away,
but, lo and behold, his first day in the Tribune he’s not in the Tempo
section, which is the lifestyle and entertainment section that includes
television, but he’s in the financial pages. And he notes in his first
column that people will question why the media critic for the Tribune
who just came over from the Sun-Times is in the financial section? He
says, basically, it’s because it's about the bottom line. What’s your
reaction to that?
Robert W. McChesney: He’s accurate in one sense. The
media are capitalist enterprises, and it’s all about these powerful firms
doing whatever they can. In certain respects, you don’t really have much
journalism left in this country because it doesn’t make money for these
firms.
On the other hand, though, journalism is at the foundation of self-government. It’s implicit in our Constitution, which is predicated upon having an informed citizenry to govern this country. And it’s explicit in the Federalist Papers, in the writings of Madison and Jefferson, and in the First Amendment. Just as media is a business, the monopolists of the marketplace decided that scrapping journalism is just the way it is.
But when consolidation of media takes place, and the resulting
mega-corporation strips out all of investigative journalism and international
coverage, and a war begins but the citizens know nothing about the region
we’re invading, that is a political story. So it is disingenuous to present
it as just a business story. Profit drives our media system, pure and
simple. Behind closed doors, policies are made that allow big companies
to get away with this stuff.
But a company like the Tribune Company wants everyone to think of media
as a business issue. And stories about the media are pitched to investors
and to managers, not to the general public. That’s a sliver of the population
from the top of the economic pyramid. They should be privy to debates
about which company to invest in, and which one is making the most money.
The Tribune Company is resolutely opposed in principle to having the public
have any idea of what’s going on with these media policy debates. They
don’t want to cover it. They don’t want you to know.
They want to be in a situation where they can have one
newsroom serving our community -- the only newspaper owning a bunch of
radio and TV stations, a media-owned cable system, even having a cable
channel, and have one newsroom to serve it all, because that’s where they
create leverage in the community over advertisers and over viewers and
listeners and readers. That’s their dream fantasy, and that’s the fantasy
they’re never going to get if the American people have a chance to weigh
in on that. They’re only going to get that if the decisions are made behind
closed doors by their political cronies in Washington without any public
involvement. After they get rid of any restrictions on media, then they’ll
be for the "free" market.
BuzzFlash: We interviewed Bonnie Anderson, author of NewsFlash,
who had worked for CNN for many years. One of the things she mentioned
was that the first obligation of a corporation is to the shareholder of
the company that owns it.
Robert W. McChesney: Bonnie’s book, by the way, is terrific.
I just read it. And now we have bookshelves filled with books like Bonnie
Anderson's, by high quality, greatly respected journalists. The point
of all of them is that corporate pressure has destroyed journalism in
this country, period. There’s no other way to read it. We have to radically
change our media system. We have to think boldly. We cannot let journalism
be the province of these companies. They’ve lost their right to control
our journalism. They’ve abused that phenomenal privilege that they have
been given.
And we’ve gotten answers. We’ve got creative ways to come up with enlightened
democratic policies to promote viable journalism, to promote a free media.
I think in the long term we want policies that can promote more competitive
markets, and much more local ownership. We’ve got to think creatively
about encouraging and expanding nonprofit and non-commercial media and
creating a more heterogeneous nonprofit sector. These are the institutional
steps we’ve got to put in place to build the sort of press system that
can do the job that has to be done if democratic government’s going to
amount to a hill of beans in this country.
BuzzFlash: One question of deep concern to BuzzFlash
is the Internet. There are those who speculate that there’s a window of
opportunity here that may close up. One scenario is that you will have a
limited number of broadband carriers who will then perhaps start charging
for the privilege, just as on cable television, of having an individual
site posted and available through that broadband carrier. In another vein,
in Pennsylvania, the state passed a law that municipalities other than
Philadelphia, which was exempted, could not offer the Internet free without
Verizon having the first opportunity to present a proposal to any given
city.
Robert W. McChesney: Free Press was leading the policy fight
on that issue. The rise of community Internet is one of our main issues.
But let me back up. The new technologies are dazzling. The cost of production
and distribution online has plummeted. It’s clearly changing much about
our media environment.
Regrettably, there are some people who say, well, gee, now
that I’ve got my blog and my website, I don’t have to worry about the
corporate media anymore. I don’t have to worry about media policy making
anymore. It’s irrelevant because I’ve got my blog. And I can shoot a video
with my cell phone, so I’m cool. No one can stop me. The "man’s"
dead. I’m the boss now. We’re in the middle of this revolution. We can’t
be stopped. We don’t have to worry about the corporate media. We don’t
have to worry about corrupt policy making.
But that is the media activism of fools. Anyone who thinks that, by just
having the technology, this allows us to leapfrog over the hard political
fights that are necessary to protect and promote our genuine free press,
is really dreaming. Indeed, that’s exactly what Rupert Murdoch wants you
to think, as he goes on to gobble up other radio and TV stations. Through
market power, he will be able to alter the system to deny the great promise
that new technologies hold. I have no illusion about that. I think the
evidence is striking in that regard.
In terms of journalism, I’m delighted by blogs, and I’m
delighted by BuzzFlash. I think they are a phenomenal addition to our
culture. But we should not think that that solves our problems. Doing
great journalism requires resources, economic support, skilled labor.
And it requires institutional support. But when you do great journalism,
pretty soon you’re butting up against powerful people who are going to
try to silence you. Otherwise, you’re not doing great journalism. At some
point, that happens. And just having a website or blog doesn’t solve this
problem. I mean, BuzzFlash needs to make money somehow. It’s got to pay
the bills or else it’s just going to have volunteer labor. And these are
social problems. These are problems the Founders wrestled with. Madison
and Jefferson were big believers in massive subsidies to spawn a print
media that never would have existed if left to commercial values, if left
to the market. That’s why we had a huge postal subsidy, and massive subsidies
of our media at the very beginning of the republic.
We’ve got to think creatively as a society and see that resources get
funneled so we can have quality journalism. How we do that is unclear,
but that’s the sort of political debate we’ve got to have.
Moreover, we can’t take for granted that we can do anything
we want on the Internet and get away with it and nothing can stop us.
You know, if you’re looking at it from the perspective of the big phone
companies and cable companies that control broadband access currently
in the United States, these people aren’t morons. They're thinking about
what restrictions could be put in place to lock in their money. They’re
going to do everything in their power to make it a pay as you go system.
How successful they’ll be is going to be a political fight. But we know
they’ve got a lot of political muscle. They'll do everything in their
power to undermine the common carrier status.
A lot of the expansion of the Internet was due to the common carrier provision
in the law, which required phone companies to let anyone use it equally
without prejudice. Cable companies are not held to that same common carrier
provision. They are allowed to intervene and say you can come on the system
or you can’t. Phone companies haven’t had power to get rid of that common
carrier system.
BuzzFlash: That was due to an FCC decision? That’s still
in litigation?
Robert W. McChesney: This is the policy fight which could
go a long way towards deciding how much access people have to BuzzFlash
in the future, or how it’s going to weed out sites that can’t afford to
pay phenomenal fees. It’s a crucial policy decision.
We have the capacity in this country to create a system where we’d have
broadband wireless Internet access that would be ubiquitous in the whole
country. Everyone would get it for free. It would come with every electronic
device and be a public utility, and the cost would be vastly lower than
in the current system. We have that potential on the visible horizon,
and it’s starting to be taken up in towns like Urbana and Philadelphia,
which are implementing a ubiquitous broadband wireless network. The rational
way to do this isn’t to put up barbed wire and force you to pay to get
access. It’s just to make it free to anyone. It’s really the rational
way the technology should be used.
It’s a great idea to everyone in America except for two constituencies
-- the two great gangsters who run our broadband, the phone companies
and the cable companies. They understand, if this comes through, no one
will ever use their services again. No one’s going to pay forty, fifty,
sixty bucks to get a wire to their computer in their home if they can
pay a much smaller fee either directly to their city government or through
taxes to their city government to get a better service, a higher-quality
service, for free. So they’re doing everything in their power to prevent
the public from knowing about this, which is what happened in Pennsylvania.
In effect, Philadelphia announced it was going to set up a community environment
system, Internet access for the whole city, virtually for free. And Philadelphia
is a city with some of the worst poverty in the United States, an extraordinarily
class-divided city.
Everyone liked this public policy decision, which it is
important to understand was not a left-right issue. Businesses love this,
too. Their costs come down. The market for their goods goes way up. The
business community loves community Internet, except for the companies
that don’t want their duopoly to fall apart. Their whole profit scheme
is based on this artificial monopoly that the government has enforced
for them.
What happened was that Philadelphia passed this. And Verizon and Comcast,
the two big giant dinosaurs who want to keep their duopoly going, managed
to get the Pennsylvania state legislature to pass a law making it illegal
for other city governments to set up their own community Internet wireless
system, because that would be unfair competition to Verizon or Comcast.
Philadelphia got grandfathered, and they can go ahead with their thing.
But no other city can do it unless they get Verizon’s written permission.
It’s the most corrupt legislation that’s ever passed in American history.
It means city governments can’t offer a service to their people and community
unless a commercial monopoly gives you permission to do it.
BuzzFlash: Just for the record, on a political note,
it was someone who’s perceived as a "liberal Democratic" governor,
Ed Rendell, the former head of the Democratic National Committee, who
signed it.
Robert W. McChesney: That’s right. Democrats have a lot
of blood on their hands with media policy. They’ve been part of the system,
too. At any rate, though, the good news out of the Pennsylvania event
was that this did get a lot of attention after the fact. Activism on this
issue absolutely exploded, as you can see if you go to the Free Press
website and click on the community Internet page. But in every state where
we’ve done any organizing, we’ve won. Once people hear about it, they
will refuse to go along. We have support from rural groups, from local
businesses that need to have quality broadband and aren’t getting it from
these onerous phone companies and the other companies. It’s really exciting.
When you see the success we have had from a little bit of organizing,
it sort of makes you realize that, if we do a lot of organizing,
we could have a lot of success.
I’ll give you one other example before we close. The Bush Administration
has probably spent at least $100 million, if not more, on propaganda with
the U.S. news media, buying off journalists like Armstrong Williams to
promote their policies, putting a phony journalist in the White House
newsroom so they can ask softball questions. And creating literally hundreds
of these video news releases, apparently – bogus news stories sent out
to the local television news that are made by the Bush Administration
to promote Bush Administration policies that are on the air like they’re
legitimate news stories.
So, you know, this broke and people said this is outrageous
that they’re doing this. This is what totalitarian regimes and authoritarians
do – they surreptitiously dominate the news media with their propaganda
and filter it in as legitimate news. And it seems very difficult that
we could do anything about it because the FCC is dominated by Republicans.
The House and the Senate are run by the Republicans. They’re not going
to hold any hearings on this. They’re under the strict control of Tom
DeLay, Bill Frist, the White House, Dick Cheney. It’s march in lockstep.
So it seemed like there’s nothing we can do.
But Free Press, along with some others like John
Stauber and the Center for Media & Democracy, launched a campaign
and got tens of thousands of people to contact the FCC saying this is
outrageous – you should stop it. And the FCC finally had a four-nothing
vote. We were able to force these people to do the right thing.
We learn over and over that, when you organize, when you
do your political work and get off your butt, you can have an impact.
When you do organize, even in this very unsympathetic political environment,
you can still win some stuff.
BuzzFlash: In closing, the National Conference for Media
Reform will be held in St. Louis May 13th through 15th. By going to FreePress.net,
people can still register?
Robert W. McChesney: We expect two or three thousand
people in St. Louis. I would urge people who are thinking of coming to
check out our conference
web site. We’ve got some terrific people coming – Michael Copps
and Jonathan Adelstein from the FCC, Jim Hightower, Laura Flanders, lots
of members of Congress, Amy Goodman, George Lakoff, Naomi Klein, Al Franken.
It’s a really extraordinary group of people very committed to having a
free press and understanding how important it is to get to work on it.
Also, just as we’ve been talking about, we'll address community wireless
Internet access, government propaganda, media ownership – all these issues.
That’s what makes this conference exciting, and it's why our first one
held in Madison was so popular. We're exploring just how we can organize
to change this system. It’s the greatest feeling in the world to be around
people who are working together to change things for the better.
BuzzFlash: Robert, thank you so much and
we look forward to the conference.
Robert W. McChesney: It will be wonderful. See you there.
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
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Resources
National Conference for Media Reform: www.freepress.net/conference
http://www.robertmcchesney.com/
The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communications Politics
in the 21st Century (McChesney/2004)
http://www.mediaproblem.org/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1583671056/ref=ed_oe_p/102-0996932-8059323?v=glance&s=books&st
Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (McChesney/1999) http://www.press.uillinois.edu/f99/mcchesney.html
Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media (McChesney/2002)
Center for Media and Democracy
http://www.prwatch.org/node/3592