Results tagged “ncmr2008” from Eccentric Eclectica

I left off my NCMR coverage after yesterdays midday report. Saturday afternoon started off with my late entry to a history session looking back at some of the big media reform successes of the past.

Randall Pinkston talked about his rise to become the first black weekday anchor in the South during the late 1960s and early 1970s. They showed part of a documentary about the WLBT struggle, a lengthy effort to get the station’s license revoked by proving racial bias.

Nicholas Johnson, a FCC commissioner during the early 1970s, described his personal efforts to eliminate racial discrimination. He and George Stoney were pioneers in public access television.

Joe Bagent, Breaking the Beer Barrier

The author of Deer Hunting With Jesus stopped by to present an essay on Breaking the Beer Barrier.

Bagent’s key point in the book and his talk is the need for progressives to reach out to the working class, a group of people that have been getting the short end of the political stick for the past 40 years. In particular, poor white people have become Republicans by default because the leaders of the progressive movement either ignore them or talk down to them.

I liked his characterization of the working class as people who are unable to decide when, where, or how to work. They can’t decide when to take a vacation or go on break without getting permission. According to Bagent the working class includes 90 million Americans. The middle class, by contrast, is only 20% of workers.

Bagent’s presentation was witty and fun to watch. He’s getting to be an old man now and isn’t “trying to impress anyone to get laid.” So he speaks his mind, admits to being a commie and moves on.

Listening to him talk made me think about my personal class history. I’m only three generations away from immigrant great-grandparents. My grandfathers worked as a butcher and a fork lift driver. One owned a home and the other rented for most of his life, including a mobile home.

Some other points made by Bagent: why can’t beer and sports be part of a progressive political aesthetic, people in Belize will get together to watch sport championships so there’s no reason for anyone to look down on sports. His most subversive question to ask a poor white person: why are your kids teeth so bad?

Everyone has learned to become helpless. He once asked an audience of college students to stand up and then sit down when they had thought of something they could do after his talk to help another person. Many of them stood dumbly for a minute without thinking of anything. They’d rather listen to some “dumb redneck who has written a cheap book.”

Practical Tips for Building Effective Community Organizations

Michael Jacoby Brown led us through a couple of exercises and a short presentation on common issues faced by community organizations. How do you attract people, how do you stay motivated or deal with difficult personalities? His main message was that you need to talk one-on-one with the people you want to attract. Media messages won’t do it, they won’t get you committed people. The personal is key.

For me this is a difficult message. I’d rather focus on the technology and the media but it doesn’t finish the job. Finally he said that people will never join or donate if you don’t ask. And that may be the hardest part.

I think we are too easily seduced and brainwashed by the propaganda of self-reliance in America. For some this means thinking that they are in the top 20% of the income distribution when reality is much different. For others this means looking up information online before asking your neighbor for help.

Closing Keynote

The closers were a bunch of heavy hitters: Jonathan Adelstein, Louise Erdrich, Amy Goodman, and Van Jones.

I was especially impressed with Amy Goodman. Her story about being a reporter in East Timor and witnessing the massacre of 300 villagers was impressive. Sometimes the duty to report the truth really is a matter of life and death. So much so that you have to bury a newspaper in the back yard in order to keep yourself from being kidnapped by the security police. We need to go to where the silence is. Then we can return and tell it on the mountaintop.

Here are a few blog entries I found through Google Blog Search and Technorati.

Girlmedia Maven on Bill Moyers and the missing female voices and the power of collaboration.

Harold making fun of Bill O’Reilly at WetMachine.

Funferal on the keynote and grassroots organizing.

BitchPhD on copyright and fair use

LocalMN with some in-depth panel coverage.

PF Hyper covering Minneapolist WiFi and the opening

Listics with some short comments.

Uppity Wisconsin also has some interesting notes and praise for Bill Moyers.

Up early this morning to get into town in time for the 8a.m. plenary talk by Bill Moyers. Moyers has spoken at all four NCMRs to date, hosts a rocking show on PBS and spoke eloquently today about the abdication of responsibility by the dominant media over the last 8 years plus. Some great quotes: “the 4th estate has become a 5th column against democracy”; “capitalism breeds destruction unless tempered by an intuition of equality.” See this twitter update by kaeti - I totally agree.

Panel 1 - Precious Places, Public Platforms: Strategic Uses of Community Technology

This panel was filled with long-term activists, most of whom have been working in public access television for many years. Technologically it feels like a bit of throwback but as one person concluded - Web2.0 may be an answer to a lot of problems but we can’t forget to ask what is the question we are trying to answer. For the people in this room it was all about getting the stories of people out to the masses.

Louis Massiah started off by describing his work with the Scribe video center in Philadelphia and their project “Precious Places.” They have spent the last 4 years working with local filmmakers, scholars, and community members to create over 40 documentaries about neighborhoods in Philadelphia. He shared with us a portion of the prototype documentary about Francisville which was a really profoundly moving story of 1960s gang members being transformed into community activists. My favorite quote - “You could buy denim here [on main street] that would stay blue for 6 months.”

Peggy Berryhill of the Native Public Media provided another great quote “our lives are so labeled [1st generation urban Indian]…our lives are filled with anthropologists.” She reiterated the need for pride of place and community. Her group is working with 30+ native radio stations across the United States to build an infrastructure for Native American radio.

Lauren-Glenn Davitian from Vermont CCTV talked about the success that Vermont has had with public access television. There are 43 access channels in a state with only 600,000 people. Burlington, VT is building its own fiber optic network because the existing infrastructure monopolies, cable and telephone, can’t be trusted to protect the public interest or provide access to the public airwaves. We were lucky to get as much public access TV as we did in the 1970s and 1980s because cable companies are becoming much more stingy over time.

A bunch of cool community project were mentioned during the Q&A. KTNN, native american radio in Arizon, Thurston television center in Washington state, WOJB radio in Wisconsin, People TV from Atlanta, Deep Dish Network Waves of Change.

Panel 2 - Privacy in the Age of AT&T, Google, and the NSA

I thought this panel was going to focus on violations of information privacy by private companies but it ended up being more of a cross between private and governmental invasions of privacy. The central topic was the NSA wiretapping scandal and the complicity of telecom companies.

Lillie Coney from EPIC started out by describing some of the long history of surveillance cooperation between government and private industry, from communication intercepts during the Civil War, to Western Unions intercepting telegrams during WW2 and the Cold War, to the present day. It starts with a declaration of war and a climate of fear that ends up with a general walking into a CEOs office and demanding access to data “for the national interest.”

Tim Jones from EFF talked about their work on the NSA story and the facts they uncovered: domestic surveillance happened, it was a dragnet not a targeted search, and there were 15-20 telecom centers throughout the US that were turned into NSA branch offices. The FISA law was created to protect us because we’ve been down the surveillance road before - COINTELPRO, Church Committee, Project Shamrock at the NSA, Project Chaos at the CIA.

Marcy from Firedoglake described their research efforts surrounding the NSA wiretapping and the three prong strategy of research, education, and mobilization that led to some of the successes we’ve had to date preventing telecom immunity from passing.

Tim Sparapani from the ACLU brought the discussion back to what I thought it would be from the beginning by talking about the commercial data brokers who are creating a privatized dossier system by harvesting public and commercial data. I especially liked the strange loop that occurs as large data aggregators buy public information, like birth and death records, combine it private information about purchasing patterns and internet histories, and then sell that information back to public law enforcement at the state and federal levels. So we pay our taxes to collect this information twice, once as a public good and then again as a private aggregation. It’s another form of data enclosure. It has led to the creation of quasigovernmental companies who get the lucrative federal communications contracts and then give up private data when asked.

Bob Edgar from Common Cause sprinkled a bunch of quotations into his moderation but this one by Martin Luther King, Jr. was my favorite. He used part of this but the whole was too beautiful for me to pass up. The complete speech is here.

Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.” There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on.”

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

I think all of this needs to go into an Openness Manifesto of some kind. Everywhere I turn I’m seeing open courseware, open education, open access, open source, open data, open Congress, open information, public access and more.