ARTS & FARCES internet

That’s what Bill Moyers said in the middle of his plenary address at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis yesterday morning.

Last evening I twittered that there wasn’t much worth writing about coming out of the conference. In reviewing my notes from the Moyers plenary, I find I was at least partially wrong.

Drawing a parallel between the US media system and his son’s ordeal with addiction, Moyers began by stating that nothing is ever broken that can’t be fixed if enough people are committed.

And the US media system is indeed broken. Dominant media consolidation is a “corrosive social force,” said Moyers.

Moyers sees a large part of the brokenness lying solely with corporate media, what he refers to as the dominant media. Paraphrasing Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly, Moyers said,

“... what we need to know to make democracy work for all Americans is compromised by media institutions deeply embedded in the power structures of society. Whether employing professional journalists trained at prestigious universities or polemicists whose ignorance, arrogance, and malevolence serve partisan agendas, our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders….”

Friday morning’s plenary by Lawrence Lessig also pointed to breakage. It was wonderfully done—few have mastered the true essence of PowerPoint like Lessig—but covered no new ground.

Beginning by comparing the Intel Pentium chip flaw with flaws in the US’s operating system—the Constitution—Lessig asks, “What do we do to defend democracy?” How, for example, can the US Congress pass legislation that extends the term of copyright 11 times when the Constitution specifically states such terms are to be secured for limited times. It’s a flaw. It can be fixed.

Moyers accurately pointed out that online advertising is badly broken. Advertisers, Moyers observed, have gone back into the programming business themselves, creating what they call “branded content.”

“Imagine the Camel News Caravan revived, but this time online as a sponsored YouTube channel. Already newspapers and magazines and soon television are encouraged to sell keywords to advertisers in the online versions of stories. Can you imagine advertisers going for stories with keywords such as ‘healthcare reform,’ ‘environmental degradation,’ ‘Iraqi casualties,’ ‘contracting fraud,’ or ‘K-Street lobbyists’? I don’t think so. So what will happen to news in the future? As the already tattered boundaries between journalism and advertising is dispensed with entirely and as content programming, commerce, and online communities are rolled into one profitably attractive package? Last year the investment firm Piper Jaffray predicted that much of the business model for new media would be just that kind of hybrid. They called it ‘communitainment.’”

Ironically, at that point in his address, Moyers worked in an advertisement for public broadcasting.

Moyers cited an Advertising Age statistic indicating that US media employment is at a 15-year low and went on to blame corporate ownership:

“The new owner of the Tribune Company, the real estate mogul Sam Zell, recently toured his new property, the Los Angeles Times newsroom, telling employees that the challenge is ‘how do we get somebody that’s 126 years old to get it up? Well,’ said Zell, ‘I’m your Viagra.’ I’m not making this up. He told his journalists that he didn’t have an editorial agenda or a perspective about newspapers’ roles as civic institutions. ‘I’m a businessman,’ he said. ‘All that matters in the end is the bottom line.’ Just this week Zell told Wall Street analysts that to save money he intends to eliminate 500 pages of news a week across all of the company’s 12 papers. That can mean eliminating some 82 pages every week just from the Los Angeles Times. What will he use to replace reporters and editors? He says, to the Wall Street analysts, ‘I’ll use maps, graphics, lists, rankings, and stats.’ Sounds to me as if Sam has confused Viagra with Lunesta.”

Turning to the Iraq occupation, Moyers defined a neoconservative as “an arsonist who sets the house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out.”

Professional journalists didn’t escape Moyers’ wrath, as he called dominant media professionals out for being complicit in the Bush administration’s propaganda campaign in the lead-up and justification for the invasion and then steadfastly denying the role played. “It just goes to show,” said Moyers, “when the bar is low enough, you can never be too wrong.” Moyers goes on to cite Danny Schechter’s Huffington Post piece stating the great danger of the dominant media is the blocking out of any other narrative. The fourth estate, Moyers said, “has become a fifth column” for the government.

In his closing, Moyers sounded alarmingly like a mumble-free, super-articulate Hunter S. Thompson:

“You will search the dominant media largely in vain for journalism that tells the truth about the fading of the American Dream.”

Moyers closed by quoting Arlo Guthrie’s “Patriot’s Dream.”

Unfortunately, with very few exceptions, the conference became as limp as Zell at that point.

One of the problems with the conference is that it’s grown too big. As Moyers pointed out, there were 1,700 attendees in Madison in 2005; 2,500 in Saint Louis in 2006; 3,200 in Memphis in 2007; and 3,500+ in Minneapolis for the 2008 conference.

Future conferences need a professional/advanced track where attendees can be assumed to be well-versed on the underlying issues. Too many of the breakout sessions were at the beginner/intermediate level. I was, for example, really looking forward to Dan Gillmor’s participation in the “New Media, New Models, New Journalism” panel but he phoned it in. Maybe because, as he pointed out on his weblog, Free Press—the conference organizer—didn’t reach out across the political spectrum. It would have been a much more interesting conference if the conservatives were in attendance. Not the right-wing-nut whack-a-dos, but the true conservatives who are just as concerned about media reform as the progressives and anarchists. There is much common ground there to till.