Jessica Clark

Making Connections

In March, conservative uber-strategist Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform launched the Media Freedom Project. This new group is the latest entry in a three-decade-long contest between the progressives who want to protect and extend First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and those on the right who view unfettered expression as a danger to the established corporate order.

The Media Freedom Project's first press release, "The Return of the Re-Regulators," warned that Democratic efforts to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine "could mean the end of popular talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy." (See "Fairness Now.")

The Media Freedom Project's priorities show why the Fairness Doctrine, which compelled FCC-licensed broadcasters to "afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance," is sorely needed in what commentators like the Media Channel's Danny Schecter are calling a "post-journalism era."

Decades-old journalistic standards of "objectivity" -- and even its less-learned cousin, "balance" -- are on the ropes. Paid political operatives posing as bloggers are taking down journalists like Dan Rather, while progressive "citizen bloggers" expose faux-reporters like Jeff Gannon. (See "The Blogosphere: Insiders vs. Outsiders.") The federal government is filling the airwaves with "video news releases" and hired pundits like Armstrong Williams. (See "The GOP's Quest for Color.") Meanwhile, a study by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey revealed that young people who regularly watch "The Daily Show" are "more likely to answer questions about politics correctly than those who don't."

How the Conservatives Came to Dominate

The story of how conservatives have reshaped the media to their own ends has generated plenty of ink. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) founder Jeff Cohen, Salon's Joe Conason and The Nation's Eric Alterman have all written convincingly and at length for both mainstream and progressive outlets about how right-wing media has come to dominate the national debate.

Reformed conservative David Brock explains in The Republican Noise Machine that tarring the mainstream media as "liberal" was the first step in the conservative campaign to dominate the airwaves. Founded in 1969 by anti-communist economist Reed Irvine, Accuracy in Media (AIM) was set up to support President Richard Nixon's Vietnam policies by mobilizing opposition to "liberal" bias in the news. "Irvine was practicing a form of jujitsu" writes Brock. "Seeing itself as a public trust, the media was responsive to calls for accountability and was highly susceptible to criticism." Dan Rather was one of the group's targets during that era and has remained so to this day. AIM mocked his patriotic final broadcast as an "extreme makeover."

Inculcating fear of conservative disapproval in the mainstream press -- and a consequent alienation of advertisers and viewers -- has been the lynchpin of the conservative strategy. It set the stage for the creation of a conservative media machine. In an effort to shift public discourse to the right, conservative foundations, right-wing donors and corporations worked together to create multiple organizations that in turn generated think tanks, issue-based nonprofits and conservative media outlets -- all with their own highly paid and well-coached "experts." Then, the right, ever more loudly denouncing the biased "liberal media elite," inserted these newly minted experts into a mainstream media that was now on the defensive and vulnerable to manipulation.

The goals of the conservative media strategy are multiple and overlapping: to protect business interests, elevate a free-market philosophy, advance a frame of "family values," promote U.S. political dominance, and counter popular movements for civil, women's, consumers' and gay rights that were gaining prominence in the late '60s and early '70s. The traditional Republican right found ready allies in leaders of the Christian right like Pat Robertson, who in 1960 founded the Christian Broadcasting Network, which by the late '70s reached millions of viewers and regularly featured prominent conservatives.

During the '70s and '80s, conservative and corporate funders followed an explicit plan to establish and expand right-wing think tanks such as the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Instititue. The think tanks served as incubators for right-wing ideas and by the '90s were poised to capitalize on emerging -- and unregulated -- media sectors such as cable television, talk radio and Internet commentary. They were complemented by a host of corporate-funded "astroturf" groups created by the public relations industry to counteract genuine grassroots organizations fighting for social, environmental and economic justice.

Like the Bush presidencies, the rise of a conservative media machine has been an elaborate, multi-generational affair. AIM's late-'60s media criticisms were complemented by the critiques of Irving Kristol, the influential co-editor of the conservative journal The Public Interest. Irving is the father of William Kristol, who founded the prominent conservative magazine The Weekly Standard in 1995 with funding from Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch. Small political magazines like these, despite their low circulation, have been standard-bearers for once-radical ideas that have now moved into the mainstream. After several years of editing The Weekly Standard, the younger Kristol used grants from the Bradley Foundation to establish the Project for the New American Century, a nonprofit organization of neoconservative activists who hatched the rationale for President George W. Bush's war in Iraq.

While Murdoch's support for The Weekly Standard has been instrumental in the recent history of conservative media, it's his Fox News that represents the pinnacle of right-wing media strategizing -- a 24-hour station, available to all cable subscribers that militantly masquerades as a "fair and balanced" member of the mainstream media. According to an analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, in 2004 Fox News anchors and reporters included their own opinions in 73 percent of the stories they reported on Iraq. In contrast, only 2 percent of CNN reporters did so. The report notes, "Those findings seem to challenge Fox's promotional marketing, particularly its slogan, 'We Report. You Decide.' "

The 24-hour news cycle has also spawned its own virulent brand of media manipulation: repetitive, coordinated and incessant. For example, every Wednesday morning, the Media Freedom Project's Norquist convenes an invitation-only meeting of high-level GOP strategists, Congressional and White House staffers, and corporate leaders to formulate the "talking points" for the week. In a January 2004 profile of Norquist in Mother Jones, Michael Scherer wrote:

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Political Realities

This election year, documentaries have broken free of their film festival ghettos. Progressive documentary films like Super Size Me and The Corporation have been packing theaters all summer, and by mid-August, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 had grossed $115 million. DVDs are being screened at "house parties" organized by MoveOn.org and offered as premiums for donors to progressive media projects like Alternet and Buzzflash.

Organizations on the right have simultaneously tried to fight back, unsucessfully tarring ads for Moore's film as "electioneering" and promoting such bilious fare as Disney's America's Heart and Soul. An upcoming pro-Bush documentary, The Big Picture, wades right into the roiling controversy over who's connected to campaign communications: Director Lionel Chetwynd, a friend of Karl Rove, also is working on two films to be screened at the Republican National Convention.

Several of the recent documentary projects dissect the failure of America's mainstream media to adequately cover Bush's rush to war in Iraq. In These Times sat down to speak with two directors whose films on media and war are making an impact. Robert Greenwald is director of Outfoxed and Uncovered, both now in theaters across the country, and executive producer of two forthcoming films, Unprecented and Unconstitutional. Robert Kane Pappas wrote and directed Orwell Rolls in His Grave, which details the toll that media consolidation takes on American democracy; it opens in San Francisco and Portland this weekend.

Pappas: I enjoyed Outfoxed very much. In it, you talked about the use of language like "flip-flop," where candidates (in this case Kerry), concepts or issues are reduced to little two-word little segments. When the media reduce everything ot the shortest sound bites we could ever imagine, what is the effect on the public?

Greenwald: I think that's why we're seeing so many books become bestsellers – because they go into depth – and why, say, your films and others are really reaching a wide audience, because they crave the information to help them navigate through these times. The primary media is not doing it, because they're doing 30-second soundbites. I think they have underestimated the craving people have for substance.

Pappas: Like you, I covered lost history in my film, such as the October Surprise.When reporters go into stories like these, they're risking their career. I would like your comments about the lost history I sense now with regard to the newest enemy and the changing rationales for war. The networks are not providing context. How can we help them?

Greenwald: I think, during the buildup to war when you looked at the networks, the debate was: "Should we bomb them, or go in by land?" That was the spectrum of views we got. And any general who'd ever been in the Army was on television, when people who had dissenting opinions just could not get on.

But, again, I'm encouraged because there's so much good work going on at all levels of the media. There's Bob McChesney's work on the corporate control of media, which is structural. Then there's the alternative media: Alternet, Buzzflash, LinkTV, Air America, The Nation, In These Times... There's really a variety of those alternatives that we need to support. And then in what I call the middle ground, there are the folks monitoring the media, from FAIR to David Brock's new group, Media Matters, which is terrific.

I think that the monitoring people will play an increasingly important role because we've essentially left that ground to the right. They were, as Eric Alterman says, "working the refs" all the time. But now, with MoveOn coming into the picture, which is a critical component, I don't think the networks will be able to get away with it in the same way as when they were only worried about hearing pressure from the right. We can write letters, we can make phone calls, and, as I say all the time, liberals also buy cars and soap. It's just nuts in an evenly divided country for us not to have our voice at least equally heard.

Ambassador Joe Wilson, who was in Uncovered and who's become a friend and advisor, said to me a while ago: "Greenwald, do you know the problem with you liberals? You're too damned nice." (I'm cleaning up his language a little bit). He says, "You gotta use sharp elbows with these guys," and I think this is absolutely right. And I think we're seeing it, from Michael Moore to Al Franken to a series of people on our side. There's no point in playing nice with these guys because they're ruthless.

I've now come to understand from working with David Fenton [Chairman of Fenton Communications, a public-interest PR firm], who's quite brilliant at much of this, that part of it is finding a way to get these stories back into the news cycle. I think sometimes on our side we have a tendency to give them too much power by saying that they shut out our ideas because they're political. Sometimes they shut out our ideas because we do a lousy job of presenting them.

If we're going to play within this game, which is a system of media run for profit, we have to get better at playing by the existing rules. Hopefully we'll change the rules over time, hopefully we'll change infrastructure. But while we're here, part of our job is figuring out how to do it, and Fenton and MoveOn and Michael Moore have been brilliant at doing some of that.

Pappas: You directed fiction films before, correct?

Greenwald: Yes. That's what I've done all my life. I've done about 54, 55 works of fiction and just started documentaries two years ago. I was reading some article with the Bush administration talking about programs for weapons of mass destruction, and I got very upset because I figured, "Oh they're going to be able to convince us that they found a program, which is a whole hell of a lot different than a weapon." That started me down the road to Uncovered, because I felt that I could tell that story, and remind people emotionally – even though they knew intellectually – about the level of fear that had been instilled in us about a "weapon," not a "program."

I immediately thought of doing it as a documentary, and because I'd worked actively with MoveOn and had met John Podesta of the Center for American Progress by then, I reached out to both MoveOn and the Center to become my partners.

In These Times: One thing that happened with Outfoxed was that Alternet announced this lawsuit against Fox in conjunction with the film's opening. This in turn played on a longstanding back-and-forth. Fox sued Al Franken last year for using "Fair and Balanced" in his book title.

I'm seeing a lot more of this synchronicity. One of the reasons I wanted to have you two speak is because as people who are interested in the same issues, we need to be rapidly working together and creating the sort of infrastructure that the right has created.

Greenwald: Right, you make a very good point. This was all by design, and here's where learning from my previous films. I worked very closely with MoveOn and with Don Hazen at Alternet. He had told me about the lawsuit. I said, "Let's wait and coordinate the activity." Similarly, with Bob McChesney's work at Free Press – they wanted to go out with a petition and some stuff that FAIR was going to do.

So, we commissioned a study from FAIR for the movie, and then we absolutely organized it so that we had the film, and then we had the petition, and then we had the lawsuit, and ... there's more to come by the way, but I can't talk about it yet.

The film is really the center for creating more attention for change. I love making films but it's not enough in this case. If you go to our Web site, you'll see 10 or 12 of the media groups all listed, all linked, so that the film can be contexualized, can be part of the change we all want.

In These Times: The National Media Reform Conference in November might have been the linchpin, the place where people could see each other face to face all at once and realize, "being over here in my isolated world scrambling for funding is just not doing the trick."

Pappas: I screened Orwell Rolls in His Grave at that conference, and a lot of very smart people were thinking the same way. But you, Robert, have been so clever in making them cover it. My hat is off to you.

Greenwald: Well, I've had a lot of help, and part of it is good old-fashioned organizing: getting all the media groups together; knowing when the film is coming out; working with the Center for American Progress, which was going to have a conference on media, which they did on same day; working with the American Prospect, which put out its article on media consolidation at the same time; having MoveOn go out with the petition. That's working, so that we're all organized, so that one plus one equals five.

If McChesney and those guys had not been out there for years and years on this issue, we wouldn't have been able to have this effect.

Pappas: In my interview with him, McChesney talked at length about the think tanks. In the early 1970s, just a couple of industrialists got together and said: "We're going to start putting a lot of money into philosophical warfare. We're going to get our side of the story out, and we're going to keep pounding it out."

Greenwald: They were very smart, and we weren't. And now we will be. Again, we're certainly as smart. We don't have as much money, but we have other kinds of resources. But we are guaranteed to continue to lose on the larger issues of social justice if we don't look at them from a long-term structural point of view.

All too often, our side wants a knight in shining armor; we expect a politician to come and save us. It's not going to happen. We've got to be strong enough and organized enough on the issues, from the environment to civil liberties to terrorism to jobs, so that whoever the candidates are, they advocate our issues. When they're in power, they're not able to change their opinions.

Unlike with Clinton, when many progressives fell asleep because they thought we'd all be taken care of, I think everybody is aware that we have work to do under a Kerry administration, strong and important progressive work, again, around the issues so that we're not candidate-dependent.We can't get hooked on that heroin. We have to make our issues and our organization and our infrastructure, from Free Press to In These Times, Alternet, etc. Then we will win over the long run. But it's not immediate.

Robert Greenwald is the Vice President of the board of directors of the Independent Media Institute, parent organization of AlterNet, and a long time supporter of the organization.

Lessig Fights An Uphill Battle

Editor's Note: Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig is the nation�s leading advocate for intellectual property law reform. Lessig, the author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, also chairs the Creative Commons project, which in December introduced an alternative set of copyright licenses to allow creators to set their own terms for sharing their work. He was named one of Scientific American�s Top 50 Visionaries in 2002 for arguing �against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online.�

In October, he represented online publisher Eric Eldred before the Supreme Court in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. As In These Times went to press, the court ruled 7-2 in favor of upholding the act, which Lessig had argued contradicted the Constitution�s original definition of copyright for �limited times.�

�When the Free Software Foundation, Intel, Phyllis Schlafly, Milton Friedman, Ronald Coase, Kenneth Arrow, Brewster Kahle, and hundreds of creators and innovators all stand on one side saying, �this makes no sense,� then it makes no sense,� Lessig commented on his blog immediately after the ruling. �Let that be enough to move people to do something about it. Our courts will not.�

In These Times spoke with Lessig shortly before the court�s decision.

In The Future of Ideas, you suggest that the struggles over copyright legislation do not fall into the typical camps of left vs. right, but are instead a battle between old industries and new innovators. What is the common interest or vision that you think activists from different sides of the political spectrum should be fighting for?

I guess there�s a common purpose between left and right here; it doesn�t follow that the reasons are the same.

People on the left rightly are concerned about restrictions on free speech and expression that come from overly expansive intellectual property regimes, making it very hard for new artists or artists out of the mainstream to produce and distribute their art.

I think people on the right are concerned with restrictions on the ability to innovate in a commercial context, especially when those restrictions are produced by government being used to benefit special interests against the interest of the public as a whole.

So both sides have a reason to resist what�s happening, even though their motives might be different.

How do the concerns about the shrinking public domain and the privatization of the Internet affect people whose everyday struggles�for food, housing, decent employment�are more basic ... people who are on the other side of the �digital divide�?

In my view these issues are important, but starvation and war and basic human rights are certainly more important issues. I guess what motivates me here is that there�s such a fundamental opportunity for a wide range of creativity and empowerment that we�re losing because of classic interference by special interests and powerful companies. Where we have so many people on the right side of the issue, we should take it and do something good with it.

The Creative Commons is working on a Conservancy project that will allow creators to donate their works into the public domain. Why would artists, writers or scientists choose to donate their works?

Our first focus is going to be on enterprises that want to develop standards or protocols for other people to use, but that they don�t themselves want to control.

Here�s the general idea: There�s a technology called Java out there. The idea of Java was you�d be able to write a program for one platform, like the Linux platform or the Windows platform, and then it could run on any number of different platforms. So there�d be a strong desire for people to write for Java because it would lower the cost of programming.

When Sun Microsystems released Java and promised it would have this cross-platform compatibility, it faced a standard dilemma: On the one hand, if it just released Java into the public domain, then what particular companies might do is embrace and extend Java in ways that polluted the objective of the common platform, but benefited one platform like Windows or Macintosh or whatever. So it feared giving the content away.

On the other hand, if it just keeps the copyrights and everything for itself as a corporation, then what people are constantly afraid of is that, down the road, the company will impose something like a �Java tax,� meaning at a certain stage they�ll decide that it�s important for them to ...

... charge everyone who uses it in their system?

Yes, so they will be able to extract the benefit of the whole world using Java at that stage. And that could have an effect of leading people away from using Java.

That�s the thing that we think we�re able to solve with something like the Conservancy, because if you give us the intellectual property, we�ll protect it against being abused by others. We would make the content available under an appropriate license to keep people from polluting it�but also no one would fear that we would impose something like a Java tax, because we�re a nonprofit that would not be permitted to do that.

That�s one part. Then there�s a group of people who we expect, for the same reason that people give money to land trusts, will just have a desire to help fuel the public domain�people like Tim O�Reilly of O�Reilly Press, which has donated a significant chunk of its stuff under the Founders Copyright [a voluntary copyright of 14 years], are expressing a view that copyright doesn�t serve a useful function after so many years. And when that�s true, then they ought to make the material available to others.

What we�re discovering is that there are lots of both altruistic and self-motivated reasons why people would want to be supporting work entering into a public domain or into a commons, and we�re just trying to enable them to do that. We�re eager to find generous sorts who want to support it through altruism, but also we�re realistic that the greatest works in the world are not necessarily altruistic.

There was an assumption with the early Internet that if you provide users with enough free content, they�ll become engaged with that content and it will gain value. Has that concept been discredited to some extent?

No, I think that�s a critical lesson of what the Internet did. The way I would put it is that people think about a commons typically as threatened by what�s called the �tragedy of the commons,� which is too many people exploiting the resource with the consequence that the resource becomes depleted.

The tragedy of the commons, though, only can happen with resources that are what economists call �rivalrous�� meaning when you use the resource, I can�t. With resources that are not rivalrous�like ideas�the fact that I used the resource does not interfere in any way with your ability to use the resource, and instead of there being a tragedy of the commons, there can actually be something like the comedy of the commons.

An October Wired article mentioned that you�ve called for a �million bit march� on Washington. What might that look like?

There�s a lot of activism around these issues, and that activism has grown from just a bunch of geeks, to a bunch of people who are quite strongly connected to the artistic and music and film industries, to people who are very eager to support growth in technology. All of these people have a strong interest in advancing freedoms of creativity and innovation in the context of the Internet.

And so what we imagine is that, using the Internet, we can create enough political speech out there that the politicians need to begin to pay attention.

Do you think that the kinds of in-your-face experiments like the Illegal Art show, where people skirt the law to make a point about where the boundaries are, are helpful or harmful to these kinds of struggles?

Oh, I think it�s very helpful. I think that ordinary people have no clue about the way in which intellectual property affects creative expression. People think that copyright is unambiguously pro-creativity. And a thing that scholars of copyright have known forever is that copyright is an important part of inducing creativity, but it also can, quite fundamentally, interfere with the creative process if, in fact, it becomes too strong or too extensive.

And I think, especially once digital technologies take off, people don�t really have a good sense of the extent to which copyright regulates creative activities using digital technology in a way that it really wouldn�t have regulated it so much outside of digital technology.

Where should people be focusing their energies right now in the fight to keep regulation at bay and establish a public commons?

I think there�s a huge issue around defending the right to fair use that would be very useful for people to focus on. How that happens�whether it�s through statutes that are going to protect fair use or not, I�m not sure yet�but the importance of getting access to content and being able to share content, I think, is going to be increasingly important, and we just have to make sure that people who have a vision of the 20th century don�t control the way creativity in the 21st century happens.

Jessica Clark is an Associate Publisher at In These Times.

Making Connections

Political Realities

Lessig Fights An Uphill Battle