Michael Albert

 

The Second Media and Democracy Congress
was held this past October 16–18. It was an auspicious
affair, bringing together nearly 1,000 folks from all manner
of media operations and projects around the country. The aim
was to develop insights and connections to help force
mainstream media to do a better job, to better utilize the
limited mainstream venues progressives enjoy, and to develop
our own alternative media in tune with our values and
priorities.

The M&D conference ran for two full
days with a third day—at the outset—devoted to
ancillary meetings and sessions. Also, one of the main
benefits was the micro element: the informal chats, lunches,
and small gatherings that help folks get to know one another,
network, and sometimes establish new working relations. To
try to capture some of what went on and what it tells us
about ourselves, here are some snapshots.

 

Snapshot One: Money and
Institution Building—Ask the Pros

An opening-day panel on Money and
Institution Building is sponsored by some of the more
grassroots elements present. The audience is mostly folks who
work in relatively small, highly-stressed, non-profit
projects. The panel is two folks, Jay Harris, the publisher
of Mother Jones, and Hamilton Fish, past publisher of
The Nation and current president of The Nation Institute.
Aside from the incongruity of these institutions with
connections galore and huge budgets lecturing on how to get
money—rather than, say, setting up meetings with donors
for the smaller projects, or not charging them for the use of
mailing lists, or providing promotion space in their pages
free—there was, well, a sharing of their wisdom. At one
point, to give an example of this wisdom, Fish notes that The
Nation, for various reasons dating back to earlier years,
is not non-profit. No matter that it has investors, however,
because, Fish tells us, they have no impact on the
periodical. Not five minutes later he jokingly points out
that the current main investor, Victor Navasky, is sitting in
the room listening, and also just happens to be both
publisher and editorial director of The Nation. Ha.
Ha. Everyone chuckles and Fish continues. But Fish might have
also noted—though the joking tone might not have
sufficed to cover the incongruity of the fact—that were
the structure of The Nation (or MJ) as an
institution abstracted out of its masthead and placed
alongside a structure abstracted out of the masthead of the New
York Times, say, or Time magazine, there would be
few consequential differences.

No one, not Harris nor Fish nor anyone
else in attendance asked why it was, if funding plays no role
in the definition of "our" periodicals, almost all
of our periodicals are run from the top-down by either the
primary donor/investor or the key fund-raising person in the
institution, unless no such individual exists. This seems to
be a remarkable oversight for a group of left leaning
individuals.

Some writers for The Nation
say, "come on, stop expecting so much of The Nation
already, it isn’t an alternative publication."
Well, I say back: (1) Why not expect more? That is, why not
expect that the radical writers and other radical employees
of The Nation identify the actual failings of their
institution and work to make it better rather than operating
as if they have no possible capacity or responsibility to
impact it. And, (2) why is The Nation, despite its
limitations, regarded as the exemplar regarding money and
institution building at a the Media and Democracy Congress,
even at one of its more grass-roots sessions?

 

Snapshot Two: Who
Are We—Let’s Be Inclusive Now

Periodically, folks tried to describe
who we are at the Media and Democracy Congress. Their answer:
"We are ‘Independent Media,’" which is to
say, we are media that are not owned by national or
international conglomerates. One analyst explicitly urged
that we use this precise term, "independent,"
rather than such vague concepts as "alternative."
Other analysts implicitly eliminated all but the
"independent media" label by refraining to use
other adjectives. (And those panelists that did use the label
"alternative" were with few exceptions vague enough
so it may as well have meant independent anyhow.)

So what, you might ask? Well, the term
"independent media" with its given definition,
encompasses Z and the Village Voice, The
Nation and Monthly Review, Micro radio, Pacifica,
and NPR—also right-wing newsletters, small corporate
Cable companies, local-aspiring small capitalist consumer
guides. In fact, anything fits—right or left, large or
small, authoritarian or democratic, racist or multi-cultural,
patriarchal or feminist, statist or anarchist, and corporate
or anti-corporate—as long as it isn’t owned by Time
Warner et. al.

Well, okay, I agree that sometimes it
is useful to distinguish independent from subordinate in this
manner, but if this is our only adjective, if being owned by
a multinational or not is the only differentiation we use,
then implicitly the only goal we share for ourselves is to
escape multinational domination. This seems to fall far short
of what one would hope for from a Media and Democracy
Congress.

 

Shapshot Three:
Pacifica—What’s The Issue?

At the first Media and Democracy
Congress, Pacifica’s Pat Scott got a merit award and
made an acceptance speech, and there was no other formal
attention paid to the on-going conflicts at Pacifica. This
year, to its credit, The Media and Democracy Congress
scheduled an extra-long panel, "The Politics of Public
Radio," with a variety of participants including Pat
Scott and Norman Solomon, and with time for audience
questions and debate. Solomon raised many critical questions
about Pacifica. Scott defended her administration’s
actions. With one or two exceptions the questions and
comments from the floor were aggressively critical of Scott
and current policies, and, I have to say, largely incoherent
to anyone listening. Impassioned to the point of being
uncivil, the questions/comments were barely constructive and
managed to surface little sensible exchange. Most disturbing,
I think, was the number of people currently associated with
Pacifica, who had first-hand knowledge of goings on within
Pacifica’s stations, sitting in the audience outraged at
the current policies and what they felt were
misrepresentations, yet unwilling to take any public stand.
They fear for their jobs, they say. Okay, so, now what? Why
is the dissident side of this dispute: (a) so muddled, or (b)
so quiet? What is the isolating and disempowering dynamic,
not just inside Pacifica but in the progressive community
more broadly, that yields these outcomes, and how can it be
overcome?

 

Snapshot Four:
Communication or Commodification

On Saturday night there was a Nation-sponsored
thematic panel titled "State of the Media." This
had promise, I thought, as I sat waiting for it to get
started. Walter Isaacson, the editor of Time Magazine,
sat on stage with Katha Pollitt, Christopher Hitchens, Farai
Chideya, and Marc Crispin Miller,  and Bill Moyers as
moderator. Moyers did his job, trying to provoke interesting
exchange, and Isaacson did his job, defending and posturing
about his institution. What was disturbing to me was
"our side" of the affair. Marc Crispin Miller
castigated Time for running covers that promote its
parent company’s movies and an unenlightening exchange
about the ills of cross promotion went on for some time (the
only interesting aspect was the extent to which
Isaacson’s reaction to every point was to first note Newsweek’s
similar policies, indicating how could Time do
otherwise, the power of market homogenization/competition on
display but unaddressed.) At one point, Katha Pollitt made
the point that talk about Time being owned by a parent
conglomerate was really beside the point. Time was no
better on the things that matter 50, 10, or 5, years ago,
before intense centralization of media. But no one then
asked, okay, what is it about Time that makes it
despicable, and, more to the point, what lessons do we take?
No one challenged Isaacson with serious documentation and
evidence regarding Time’s content, regarding the
relative weight given to different types of story, regarding
the absence of certain types of content, and so on. There
wasn’t a single word spoken about the class structure
within Time, about Isaacson’s power within the
institution, for example. There was almost nothing about the
role of advertising; no questions regarding the make-up of
the budget; exactly how important ads are and what
advertisers want. The exchanges felt kind of folksy and
appeared largely off the cuff. There was no analysis of ten
years of Time covers, say, or of a year’s worth
of its columns, broken down regarding content and bias. An
opportunity to use Time, and its editor, to make
points more broadly about mainstream media and its role in
society, was squandered. More, while people yelled and felt
intense passion with Pacifica’s Scott, just a few hours
before, this guy from Time was treated with kid
gloves. This person is near the top of the media apparatus
that sustains, justifies, obscures, and partakes of crimes
against humanity every day of every week. Why is he treated
so congenially to the point of avoiding disagreement and
contestation? Why is his organization not subject to serious,
sober, but aggressive analysis, to make the points that need
to be made about mainstream media, both for the audience at
hand, and for those watching C-Span or who hear the exchanges
on radio, and so on? What is it about a panel like this, or
the pressures on its participants, or their circumstances
more generally, or whatever else, that yields such a lame
outcome? Is it too much cocktail circuit interactions for the
participants, as many in the audience said, so that debate
becomes just a game or a job for people. Or is it something
more subtle about our self definitions and awareness?

Also disturbing was that the same
people who sat in the audience disparaging members of the
panel as "performing" would then, afterward, sidle
up to them, praising them, laughing and joking with them,
leaving them, of course, feeling that, hey, everyone had a
grand time, the script was just fine. The issue is, again,
our priorities and agendas, and our inability to express what
we feel so that it might be seriously addressed.

There was much at the Media and
Democracy Congress besides these few panels, to be sure. Some
was troubling, some quite productive. For example, there were
highly instructive gatherings about radio production and
creation, and about telecommunications politics and options.
There were informative gatherings about media concentration,
about campaigns regarding public media, about building
community, about diversifying media staffs, and so on. Z
did a panel on what makes Alternative Media Alternative, of
mixed success, I would say. Michael Moore gave a
side-splitting but very provocative talk arguing that the
latent class biases of much of the left—visible in its
attitudes to normal working people and their daily life
preferences—were a horrible obstacle to the growth of
progressive activism. The trouble, was, it seemed to me, that
after the laughing, there wasn’t much attention to the
actual implications of Moore’s claims. There were also
gatherings of folks involved in local, grassroots, media
organizing and projects trying to find ways to link to one
another and to develop mutual support and shared agendas.
This was very constructive, and one wondered why it
wasn’t a more focal aspect of the event.

Can we take some positive lessons from
it all?

I think a Media and Democracy Congress
that means to represent the broad range of independent and
alternative progressive media work in the U.S. has to be put
together by a larger sector of people than the Institute for
Alternative Journalism.

As long as The Institute for
Alternative Journalism is the sole hub through which all
energy flows and by which all decisions are made, their
imprint will be all over the Congress—understandably and
rightfully given their effort. This time they did much better
on issues of balance of panel participants, for example, and
focus of panels as well. But one organization’s imprint
is not enough, however hard it tries and whatever
organization it may be, to yield the diversity an
encompassing Congress needs. Next time, let’s broaden
the sponsorship and spread more of the responsibility.

A Media and Democracy Congress needs to
be clear that not being owned by a multinational is an
insufficient foundation on which to rest our identity and
provides almost no guidance for improving our work. We need
to settle on a meaningful list of values that we can judge
ourselves against, and improve ourselves in terms of.

In October’s Z, handed out
at the conference, I wrote that to be alternative media means
to the extent possible "to forego maximizing
profits," "to avoid selling audience to commercial
advertisers," "to seek broad and non-elite
audience," "to reduce and ultimately remove typical
oppressive hierarchies," and "to actively support
other like-motivated projects." It seems to me that for
media institutions to be labeled alternative they ought to
agree that reducing income differentials; disentangling
authority from money; developing jobs balanced for quality of
life and empowerment effects so that all can partake of
decision-making intelligently; incorporating truly democratic
and participatory decision making structures; steadily
diminishing gender and race biases in employment and in
on-the-job culture and product; and developing non-elite
outreach and mutually supportive relations among our projects
are worthy goals to inspire alternative media policy-making.
But if this list is bad or incomplete, fine, we need to fix
it. The point is, if we are going to make collective progress
we have to have a shared workable,and  respected notion
of who we are and what progress means.

A third Media and Democracy Congress
needs to focus on constructive mechanisms for people and
institutions doing valuable media work to help one another
and learn from differences and criticisms others may have.
And if we are going to spend any time critiquing the
mainstream, then, please, let’s do a definitive job so
we can get on to our own agendas.

Again in the October issue, I proposed,
for the second time, a Federation of Alternative Media
Activists and Supporters, with preliminary suggestions about
structure, decision making, and program. Is FAMAS a good
idea? I don’t know. But I do know that FAMAS or not,
something is needed. If it can’t emerge from the process
of the Media and Democracy Congresses, then folks who do
alternative media and who have shared values and aims that
transcend not being owned by multinationals need another way
to get to some working unity and coherence.

So how about this as a capstone to
Media and Democracy Congress 2? How about if our periodicals,
radio stations and networks, cable outfits, video operations,
book publishers, speakers bureaus, writers, journalists,
announcers, film-makers and all other workers in our media
institutions, and our "audiences" as well, over the
next 18 months, debate and develop a clear conception of what
we are trying to accomplish with alternative media, so that
we can take that agreement, whatever it turns out to be, to
Media and Democracy Congress 3 or some other suitable venue,
and come out of its deliberations with an organizational
apparatus and program for collectively moving forward. If we
do less, I suspect Media and Democracy Congress 3 will be deja
vu and barely worth attending.