Media Reformers Rally in D.C.

By Jordan Moss, AlterNet. Posted March 25, 2002.

Inja Coates, director of Media Tank in Philadelphia, helped organize the Angels of The Public Interest demonstration at the FCC in Washington last week

"We're here to launch a campaign to build a movement for media democracy."

So declared Jeff Chester, head of the Center for Digital Democracy, in front of the Federal Communications Commission's headquarters last week. Chester was speaking to the "Angels of the Public Interest," a group of media reform protesters who derived their name from a speech given by FCC chair Michael Powell: "The night after I was sworn in, I waited for a visit from an angel of the public interest. I waited all night, but she did not come." The message from the protesters -- we've been here all the time, you just weren't listening.

Powell is probably not quaking in his boots at Chester's bold statement, as there were only about 65 media activists on hand, many of them grassroots media producers videotaping the event for broadcast on the Web and on public access stations back home.

But the demostration -- featuring, yes, protesters in angel garb and the Billionaires for More Media Mergers -- served as something of a pep rally for the would-be leaders of a mass movement for media democracy. The organizers, from a variety of media reform groups and a growing number of Independent Media Centers, impressed themselves by pulling it off in just a month's time via e-mail and the Web.

The organizers had been planning a larger Earth-Day-style week of workshops, protests and celebrations for October centered around media democracy. But because the courts and the FCC are rapidly removing restrictions on corporate media ownership, the activists decided to act now.

In February, for example, a U.S. Court of Appeals handed Powell an easy chance to strike down some media ownership regulations by sending them back to the FCC for review. Activists expect Powell to push the deregulation through, which will likely consolidate the broadcast television industry. And just a couple of weeks ago, the FCC declared that broadband Internet service is an "information service," rather then a "telecommunications service," which may prevent Internet Service Providers from having equal access to cable Internet networks. Activists describe the problem this way: Just like you're out of luck now if you want the Food Network and your cable company won't provide it, so too might you be left hanging if you want to log on to a Web site and the cable network running your service doesn't offer it.

"It's not just old media being deregulated," Chester told the gathering. "The Internet is being hijacked."

Media scholar and activist Dee Dee Halleck warned that the Internet is emerging from the utopian "democratic and participatory" moment enjoyed by all new media early in their evolution. Now, Halleck argued, corporations are moving in to parcel up the Internet frontier.

Of course, the recent FCC rulings are only the latest affront to those fighting for democratic media. They follow many others -- made easier by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 -- that give greater control over the flow of information to fewer and fewer corporations.

A widespread movement is the only way to stop the speculators from speculating and make the regulators regulate, activists say.

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