Million-Word March for Media Reform

Outside the window was the great Arch of Exploration, St. Louis's national monument honoring Thomas Jefferson and his patronage of the Lewis and Clark expedition that mapped out our continent for major change back in the early days of the 18th century.

In these early days of the 21st century, alongside the banks of the same Mississippi River, two modern day Lewis and Clarks -- one a scholar named Robert McChesney, the other a journalist called John Nichols -- invoked the unfinished promise of Jeffersonian democracy to convene a second National Conference on Media Reform to energize an emerging citizens' movement to explore how to take back our media.

The goal: To redirect the most powerful arsenal of communication technology humanity has ever known away from serving corporate interests and into the hands of our citizens and public needs.

The organizers had to close the registration early because the aptly named Millennium Hotel could not accommodate more than the 2,500 people who crammed into the 50 or more panels and plenaries to hear calls for action and plan campaigns for media change.

They came from 50 states and 10 countries. They were old and young, white and black, straight and gay, media consumers and media makers, researchers and academics, lawyers and activists. In the words of an earlier exhortation to media combat in the movie Network, they were "mad as hell and not going to take it anymore." They didn't just open their windows to shout, but came to the conference to exchange ideas.

There were angry hip-hop activists demanding "media justice" and senior citizens alarmed about the current threats to PBS. There were internet savvy advocates of municipally-owned wireless systems and senior level "lions of litigation" who believe that the laws and the courts can be used to safeguard our rights.

There were unknown community media producers and some of the best-known voices of liberal left media, like radio revolutionaries Al Franken and Amy Goodman; concerned celebrities like Jim Hightower and Patti Smith; distinguished broadcasters including Bill Moyers and Phil Donahue; two outspoken FCC commissioners; several members of Congress; one Corporation for Public Broadcasting board member, and probably even a partridge in a pear tree.

At times, it had the feeling of a revival meeting, not just a rally. It was a million-word march to end media concentration and open the airwaves to more diversity of expression. And sure, there were tensions, with younger grassroots activists feeling frozen out by the grey heads and media movement vets who dominated the proceedings.

Hundreds of groups that care about media change took part -- national groups from MoveOn to Media Channel, from FAIR to Common Cause, and local groups from Chicago Media Action to Seattle's Reclaim the Media and Philadelphia's Media Tank. All gathered under the auspices of Free Press, a relatively new organization that now claims 183,000 people on its e-mail list.

The small but robust indy TV channels LinkTV and Free Speech TV, and the emerging news-oriented International World Television network were also there in a conclave of shared consciousness. Ditto for the Newspaper Guild, the National Writers Union, AFTRA and the Screen Actor's Guild. Earlier, organizations that claim to represent 20 million Americans had endorsed a citizens' Bill of Media Rights to lay out principles to guide the kind of media system that's needed.

Pacifica Radio aired Saturday night's session nationally, while C-SPAN sent its cameras to record a Sunday morning sermon by Bill Moyers (mp3 download) on the need for real journalism on PBS and a real PBS. (He glossed over its many flaws but upheld the need for a publicly-owned and responsible broadcaster in a time of so much commercialism and corporate media.) Moyers demolished the claims of new Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson that his on-air work needed to be "balanced" with new right-wing fare. "I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House," he said to continuing applause.