Posted: March 17, 2004
PRESSING THE ISSUE
By Arthur Lewis
There’s a new American Revolution under way, but hardly anyone knows. Ironically, that’s what the insurrection is all about – the selective suppression of news by an increasingly concentrated media.
Last summer, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed regulations making it possible for media giants to gobble up more local TV stations. Even though more than three million people have picked up the phone or logged onto Internet petitions to express outrage, most Americans don’t know about the battle, because the media conglomerates who benefit from the rule change refuse to let the public in on their dirty little secret.
That was the impetus for 1,700 activists to swarm to Madison, Wisconsin on a chilly November weekend.
As a Canadian with nationalist inclinations, I witnessed the National Conference on Media Reform with a degree of detachment. It was not my battle. At the same time it was impossible not to feel inspired by the purposeful way these citizens were setting about to defend a fundamental principle of American democracy: the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. That’s the one that guarantees freedom of the press. Not freedom for the corporations that own the presses, but the right of the people to have free access to information. They want it back and they’re putting up a fight to get it. They’ve already kicked up enough fuss to garner strong support in Congress for overturning the FCC decision.
I though to myself how wonderful it would be if Canadians felt as strongly about defending their equally-threatened freedom. After all, we currently have a Senate committee holding hearings on media concentration. Are those hearings getting any coverage? Does anybody care? Not that I’ve noticed.
This was a powerful conference. Speakers included Jesse Jackson, Al Franken, Ralph Nader, top labour leaders, two dissident FCC commissioners, a Senator, members of Congress and hundreds of activists from every corner of the country. And yet, it was like that proverbial tree falling in the forest. After the conference I did a Google News search. Other than the progressive local daily in Madison, the only report I could find was a bit of wire copy that ran in a small paper in Biloxi, Mississippi.
In recent months, the only thing approaching mainstream media coverage has been on the PBS weekly public affairs program Now. If this revolution has a Paul Revere, he’s Bill Moyers, the conference keynote speaker who is Now’s host. Moyers has been credited with single-handedly raising the alarm about the FCC rule change. Other than that, detailed reporting remains limited to activist websites and alternate media.
Unfortunately, PBS reaches a thimbleful of Americans. That’s an essential difference between the Canadian and American media landscapes. As more than one speaker pointed out, media concentration is even greater in Canada, but the CBC is a mitigating factor. Because CBC reaches a critical mass of Canadians, our private media dare not ignore an important public issue. If they did, people would hear about it anyway and then demand to know why it wasn’t being reported elsewhere.
But, as Joni Mitchell once observed, “You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” With the federal government continuing to whittle away at the CBC — the corp took another $10 million cut just weeks before the conference — I looked around me in the heartland of America and thought wistfully that someday soon we may have to hold a similar conference back home in Canada.
This article first appeared in the January/February 2004 edition of THIS magazine. It is reprinted here with the author's permission.