[Seattle-editorial] FP: Moyers Impassioned Speech on Media Reform

[sheri at speakeasy.org]

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Sunday, May 16, 2004  

Published on Wednesday, November 12, 2003 by CommonDreams.org

Bill Moyers
Keynote Address to the National Conference on Media Reform
>From http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1112-10.htm
by Bill Moyers
  Founding Director, Public Affairs Television
  President, The Schumann Center for Media and Democracy
  November 8, 2003
  Madison, Wisconsin
Note: A moving audio recording of the following 
impassioned speech is available at 
http://www.freepress.net/conference/recordings.php


Thank you for inviting me tonight. I'm flattered 
to be speaking to a gathering as high-powered as 
this one that's come together with an objective 
as compelling as "media reform." I must confess, 
however, to a certain discomfort, shared with 
other journalists, about the very term "media." 
Ted Gup, who teaches journalism at Case Western 
Reserve, articulated my concerns better than I 
could when he wrote in The Chronicle of Higher 
Education (November 23, 2001)

  that the very concept of media is insulting to 
some of us within the press who find ourselves 
lumped in with so many disparate elements, as if 
everyone with a pen, a microphone, a camera, or 
just a loud voice were all one and the same. 
ŠDavid Broder is not Matt Drudge. "Meet the 
Press" is not "Temptation Island." And I am not 
Jerry Springer. I do not speak for him. He does 
not speak for me. Yet 'the media" speaks for us 
all.

  That's how I felt when I saw Oliver North 
reporting on Fox from Iraq, pressing our 
embattled troops to respond to his repetitive and 
belittling question, "Does Fox Rock? Does Fox 
Rock?" Oliver North and I may be in the same 
"media" but we are not part of the same message. 
Nonetheless, I accept that I work and all of us 
live in "medialand," and God knows we need some 
"media reform." I'm sure you know those two words 
are really an incomplete description of the job 
ahead. Taken alone, they suggest that you've 
assembled a convention of efficiency experts, 
tightening the bolts and boosting the output of 
the machinery of public enlightenment, or else a 
conclave of high-minded do-gooders applauding 
each other's sermons. But we need to be - and we 
will be - much more than that. Because what we're 
talking about is nothing less than rescuing a 
democracy that is so polarized it is in danger of 
being paralyzed and pulverized.

  Alarming words, I know. But the realities we 
face should trigger alarms. Free and responsible 
government by popular consent just can't exist 
without an informed public. That's a cliché, I 
know, but I agree with the presidential candidate 
who once said that truisms are true and clichés 
mean what they say (an observation that no doubt 
helped to lose him the election.) It's a reality: 
democracy can't exist without an informed public. 
Here's an example: Only 13% of eligible young 
people cast ballots in the last presidential 
election. A recent National Youth Survey revealed 
that only half of the fifteen hundred young 
people polled believe that voting is important, 
and only 46% think they can make a difference in 
solving community problems. We're talking here 
about one quarter of the electorate. The Carnegie 
Corporation conducted a youth challenge quiz of 
l5-24 year-olds and asked them, "Why don't more 
young people vote or get involved?" Of the nearly 
two thousand respondents, the main answer was 
that they did not have enough information about 
issues and candidates. Let me rewind and say it 
again: democracy can't exist without an informed 
public. So I say without qualification that it's 
not simply the cause of journalism that's at 
stake today, but the cause of American liberty 
itself. As Tom Paine put it, "The sun never 
shined on a cause of greater worth." He was 
talking about the cause of a revolutionary 
America in 1776. But that revolution ran in good 
part on the energies of a rambunctious, though 
tiny press. Freedom and freedom of communications 
were birth-twins in the future United States. 
They grew up together, and neither has fared very 
well in the other's absence. Boom times for the 
one have been boom times for the other.

  Yet today, despite plenty of lip service on 
every ritual occasion to freedom of the press 
radio and TV, three powerful forces are 
undermining that very freedom, damming the 
streams of significant public interest news that 
irrigate and nourish the flowering of 
self-determination. The first of these is the 
centuries-old reluctance of governments - even 
elected governments - to operate in the sunshine 
of disclosure and criticism. The second is more 
subtle and more recent. It's the tendency of 
media giants, operating on big-business 
principles, to exalt commercial values at the 
expense of democratic value. That is, to run what 
Edward R. Murrow forty-five years ago called 
broadcasting's "money-making machine" at full 
throttle. In so doing they are squeezing out the 
journalism that tries to get as close as possible 
to the verifiable truth; they are isolating 
serious coverage of public affairs into 
ever-dwindling "news holes" or far from prime- 
time; and they are gobbling up small and 
independent publications competing for the 
attention of the American people.

  It's hardly a new or surprising story. But there 
are fresh and disturbing chapters.

  In earlier times our governing bodies tried to 
squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt 
instruments of the law - padlocks for the presses 
and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers. 
Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions, 
the courts and the Constitution struck those 
weapons out of their hands. But they've found new 
ones now, in the name of "national security." The 
classifier's Top Secret stamp, used 
indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a 
writ of arrest. And beyond what is officially 
labeled "secret" there hovers a culture of sealed 
official lips, opened only to favored media 
insiders: of government by leak and innuendo and 
spin, of misnamed "public information" offices 
that churn out blizzards of releases filled with 
self-justifying exaggerations and, occasionally, 
just plain damned lies. Censorship without 
officially appointed censors.

  Add to that the censorship-by-omission of 
consolidated media empires digesting the bones of 
swallowed independents, and you've got a major 
shrinkage of the crucial information that 
thinking citizens can act upon. People saw that 
coming as long as a century ago when the rise of 
chain newspaper ownerships, and then of 
concentration in the young radio industry, became 
apparent. And so in the zesty progressivism of 
early New Deal days, the Federal Communications 
Act of 1934 was passed (more on this later.) The 
aim of that cornerstone of broadcast policy, 
mentioned over 100 times in its pages, was to 
promote the "public interest, convenience and 
necessity." The clear intent was to prevent a 
monopoly of commercial values from overwhelming 
democratic values - to assure that the official 
view of reality - corporate or government - was 
not the only view of reality that reached the 
people. Regulators and regulated, media and 
government were to keep a wary eye on each other, 
preserving those checks and balances that is the 
bulwark of our Constitutional order.

  What would happen, however, if the contending 
giants of big government and big publishing and 
broadcasting ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to 
eye in putting the public's need for news second 
to free-market economics? That's exactly what's 
happening now under the ideological banner of 
"deregulation." Giant megamedia conglomerates 
that our founders could not possibly have 
envisioned are finding common cause with an 
imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce 
not the sons and daughters of liberty but the 
very kind of bastards that issued from the old 
arranged marriage of church and state.

  Consider where we are today.

  Never has there been an administration so 
disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep 
in keeping information from the people at large 
and - in defiance of the Constitution - from 
their representatives in Congress. Never has the 
so powerful a media oligopoly - the word is Barry 
Diller's, not mine - been so unabashed in 
reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and 
power. Never have hand and glove fitted together 
so comfortably to manipulate free political 
debate, sow contempt for the idea of government 
itself, and trivialize the people's need to know. 
When the journalist-historian Richard Reeves was 
once asked by a college student to define "real 
news", he answered: "The news you and I need to 
keep our freedoms." When journalism throws in 
with power that's the first news marched by 
censors to the guillotine. The greatest moments 
in the history of the press came not when 
journalists made common cause with the state but 
when they stood fearlessly independent of it.

  Which brings me to the third powerful force - 
beyond governmental secrecy and megamedia 
conglomerates - that is shaping what Americans 
see, read, and hear. I am talking now about that 
quasi-official partisan press ideologically 
linked to an authoritarian administration that in 
turn is the ally and agent of the most powerful 
interests in the world. This convergence 
dominates the marketplace of political ideas 
today in a phenomenon unique in our history. You 
need not harbor the notion of a vast, right wing 
conspiracy to think this more collusion more than 
pure coincidence. Conspiracy is unnecessary when 
ideology hungers for power and its many adherents 
swarm of their own accord to the same pot of 
honey. Stretching from the editorial pages of the 
Wall Street Journal to the faux news of Rupert 
Murdoch's empire to the nattering nabobs of 
no-nothing radio to a legion of think tanks paid 
for and bought by conglomerates - the religious, 
partisan and corporate right have raised a mighty 
megaphone for sectarian, economic, and political 
forces that aim to transform the egalitarian and 
democratic ideals embodied in our founding 
documents. Authoritarianism. With no strong 
opposition party to challenge such triumphalist 
hegemony, it is left to journalism to be 
democracy's best friend. That is why so many 
journalists joined with you in questioning 
Michael Powell's bid - blessed by the White House 
- to permit further concentration of media 
ownership. If free and independent journalism 
committed to telling the truth without fear or 
favor is suffocated, the oxygen goes out of 
democracy. And there is a surer way to intimidate 
and then silence mainstream journalism than to be 
the boss.

  If you doubt me, read Jane Kramer's chilling 
account in the current New Yorker of Silvio 
Berlusconi. The Prime Minister of Italy is its 
richest citizen. He is also its first media 
mogul. The list of media that he or his relatives 
or his proxies own, or directly or indirectly 
control, includes the state television networks 
and radio stations, three of Italy's four 
commercial television networks, two big 
publishing houses, two national newspapers, fifty 
magazines, the country's largest movie 
production-and-distribution company, and a chunk 
of its Internet services. Even now he is pressing 
upon parliament a law that would enable him to 
purchase more media properties, including the 
most influential paper in the country. Kramer 
quotes one critic who says that half the 
reporters in Italy work for Berlusconi, and the 
other half think they might have to. Small wonder 
he has managed to put the Italian State to work 
to guarantee his fortune - or that his name is 
commonly attached to such unpleasant things as 
contempt for the law, conflict of interest, 
bribery, and money laundering. Nonetheless, "his 
power over what other Italians see, read, buy, 
and, above all, think, is overwhelming." The 
editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, was asked 
recently why a British magazine was devoting so 
much space to an Italian Prime Minister. He 
replied that Berlusconi had betrayed the two 
things the magazine stood for: capitalism and 
democracy. Can it happen here? It can happen 
here. By the way, Berlusconi's close friend is 
Rupert Murdoch. On July 3lst this year, writes 
Jane Kramer, programming on nearly all the 
satellite hookups in Italy was switched 
automatically to Murdoch's Sky Italia

  So the issues bringing us here tonight are 
bigger and far more critical than simply "media 
reform." That's why, before I go on, I want to 
ask you to look around you. I'm serious: Look to 
your left and now to your right. You are looking 
at your allies in one of the great ongoing 
struggles of the American experience - the 
struggle for the soul of democracy, for 
government "of, by, and for the people."

  It's a battle we can win only if we work 
together. We've seen that this year. Just a few 
months ago the FCC, heavily influenced by 
lobbyists for the newspaper, broadcasting and 
cable interests, prepared a relaxation of the 
rules governing ownership of media outlets that 
would allow still more diversity-killing mergers 
among media giants. The proceedings were 
conducted in virtual secrecy, and generally 
ignored by all the major media, who were of 
course interested parties. In June Chairman 
Powell and his two Republican colleagues on the 
FCC announced the revised regulations as a done 
deal.

  But they didn't count on the voice of 
independent journalists and citizens like you. 
Because of coverage in independent outlets - 
including PBS, which was the only broadcasting 
system that encouraged its journalists to report 
what was really happening - and because citizens 
like you took quick action, this largely 
invisible issue burst out as a major political 
cause and ignited a crackling public debate. You 
exposed Powell's failure to conduct an open 
discussion of the rule changes save for a single 
hearing in Richmond, Virginia. Your efforts led 
to a real participatory discussion, with open 
meetings in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New 
York and Atlanta. Then the organizing that 
followed generated millions of letters and 
"filings"at the FCC opposing the change. Finally, 
the outcry mobilized unexpected support for 
bi-partisan legislation to reverse the new rules 
that cleared the Senate - although House Majority 
Leader Tom De Lay still holds it prisoner in the 
House. But who would have thought six months ago 
that the cause would win support from such allies 
as Senator Trent Lott or Kay Bailey Hutchinson, 
from my own Texas. You have moved "media reform" 
to center-stage, where it may even now become a 
catalyst for a new era of democratic renewal.

  We working journalists have something special to 
bring to this work. This weekend at your 
conference there will be plenty of good talk 
about the mechanics of reform. What laws are 
needed? What advocacy programs and strategies? 
How can we protect and extend the reach of those 
tools that give us some countervailing power 
against media monopoly - instruments like the 
Internet, cable TV, community-based radio and 
public broadcasting systems, alternative journals 
of news and opinion.

  But without passion, without a message that has 
a beating heart, these won't be enough. There's 
where journalism comes in. It isn't the only 
agent of freedom, obviously; in fact, journalism 
is a deeply human and therefore deeply flawed 
craft - yours truly being a conspicuous example. 
But at times it has risen to great occasions, and 
at times it has made other freedoms possible. 
That's what the draftsmen of the First Amendment 
knew and it's what we can't afford to forget. So 
to remind us of what our free press has been at 
its best and can be again, I will call on the 
help of unseen presences, men and women of 
journalism's often checkered but sometimes 
courageous past.

  Think with me for a moment on the reasons behind 
the establishment of press freedom. It wasn't 
ordained to protect hucksters, and it didn't drop 
like the gentle rain from heaven. It was fought 
and sacrificed for by unpretentious but feisty 
craftsmen who got their hands inky at their own 
hand presses and called themselves simply 
"printers." The very first American newspaper was 
a little three-page affair put out in Boston in 
September of 1690. Its name was Publick 
Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick and its 
editor was Benjamin Harris, who said he simply 
wanted "to give an account of such considerable 
things as have come to my attention." The 
government shut it down after one issue - just 
one issue! - for the official reason that printer 
Ben Harris hadn't applied for the required 
government license to publish. But I wonder if 
some Massachusetts pooh-bah didn't take 
personally one of Harris's proclaimed motives for 
starting the paper - "to cure the spirit of Lying 
much among us"?

  No one seems to have objected when Harris and 
his paper disappeared - that was the way things 
were. But some forty-odd years later when printer 
John Peter Zenger was jailed in New York for 
criticizing its royal governor, things were 
different. The colony brought Zenger to trial on 
a charge of "seditious libel," and since it 
didn't matter whether the libel was true or not, 
the case seemed open and shut. But the jury 
ignored the judge's charge and freed Zenger, not 
only because the governor was widely disliked, 
but because of the closing appeal of Zenger's 
lawyer, Andrew Hamilton. Just hear him! His 
client's case was:

  Not the cause of the poor Printer, nor of New 
York alone, [but] the cause of Liberty, and. . . 
every Man who prefers Freedom to a Life of 
Slavery will bless and honour You, as Men who. . 
.by an impartial and uncorrupt Verdict, [will] 
have laid a Noble Foundation for securing to 
ourselves, our Posterity and our Neighbors, That, 
to which Nature and the Laws of our Country have 
given us a Right, -- the Liberty - both of 
exposing and opposing arbitrary PowerŠby speaking 
and writing - Truth.

  Still a pretty good mission statement!

  During the War for Independence itself most of 
the three dozen little weekly newspapers in the 
colonies took the Patriot side and mobilized 
resistance by giving space to anti-British 
letters, news of Parliament's latest outrages, 
and calls to action. But the clarion journalistic 
voice of the Revolution was the onetime editor of 
the Pennsylvania Magazine, Tom Paine, a penniless 
recent immigrant from England where he left a 
trail of failure as a businessman and husband. In 
1776 - just before enlisting in Washington's army 
- he published Common Sense, a hard-hitting 
pamphlet that slashed through legalisms and 
doubts to make an uncompromising case for an 
independent and republican America. It's been 
called the first best seller, with as many as 
100,000 copies bought by a small literate 
population. Paine followed it up with another 
convincing collection of essays written in the 
field and given another punchy title, The Crisis. 
Passed from hand to hand and reprinted in other 
papers, they spread the gospel of freedom to 
thousands of doubters. And why I bring Paine up 
here is because he had something we need to 
restore - an unwavering concentration to reach 
ordinary people with the message that they 
mattered and could stand up for themselves. He 
couched his gospel of human rights and equality 
in a popular style that any working writer can 
envy. "As it is my design," he said, "to make 
those that can scarcely read understand, I shall 
therefore avoid every literary ornament and put 
it in language as plain as the alphabet."

  That plain language spun off memorable 
one-liners that we're still quoting. "These are 
the times that try men's souls." "Tyranny, like 
hell, is not easily conquered." "What we obtain 
too cheap, we esteem too lightly." "Virtue is not 
hereditary." And this: "Of more worth is one 
honest man to society and in the sight of God 
than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived." I 
don't know what Paine would have thought of 
political debate by bumper sticker and sound bite 
but he could have held his own in any modern 
campaign.

  There were also editors who felt responsible to 
audiences that would dive deep. In 1787 and '88 
the little New-York Independent Advertiser ran 
all eighty-five numbers of The Federalist , those 
serious essays in favor of ratifying the 
Constitution. They still shine as clear 
arguments, but they are, and they were, 
unforgiving in their demand for concentrated 
attention. Nonetheless, The Advertiser felt that 
it owed the best to its readers, and the readers 
knew that the issues of self-government deserved 
their best attention. I pray your goal of "media 
reform" includes a press as conscientious as the 
New-York Advertiser, as pungent as Common Sense, 
and as public-spirited as both. Because it takes 
those qualities to fight against the relentless 
pressure of authority and avarice. Remember, back 
in l79l, when the First Amendment was ratified, 
the idea of a free press seemed safely sheltered 
in law. It wasn't. Only seven years later, in the 
midst of a war scare with France, Congress passed 
and John Adams signed the infamous Sedition Act. 
The act made it a crime - just listen to how 
broad a brush the government could swing - to 
circulate opinions "tending to induce a belief" 
that lawmakers might have unconstitutional or 
repressive motives, or "directly or indirectly 
tending" to justify France or to "criminate," 
whatever that meant, the President or other 
Federal officials. No wonder that opponents 
called it a scheme to "excite a fervor against 
foreign aggression only to establish tyranny at 
home." John Ashcroft would have loved it.

  But here's what happened. At least a dozen 
editors refused to be frightened and went 
defiantly to prison, some under state 
prosecutions. One of them, Matthew Lyon, who also 
held a seat in the House of Representatives, 
languished for four months in an unheated cell 
during a Vermont winter. But such was the spirit 
of liberty abroad in the land that admirers 
chipped in to pay his thousand-dollar fine, and 
when he emerged his district re-elected him by a 
landslide. Luckily, the Sedition Act had a 
built-in expiration date of 1801, at which time 
President Jefferson - who hated it from the first 
- pardoned those remaining under indictment. So 
the story has an upbeat ending, and so can ours, 
but it will take the kind of courage that those 
early printers and their readers showed.

  Courage is a timeless quality and surfaces when 
the government is tempted to hit the bottle of 
censorship again during national emergencies, 
real or manufactured. As so many of you will 
recall, in 1971, during the Vietnam War, the 
Nixon administration resurrected the doctrine of 
"prior restraint" from the crypt and tried to ban 
the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New 
York Times and the Washington Post - even though 
the documents themselves were a classified 
history of events during four earlier 
Presidencies. Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of 
the Times, and Katherine Graham of the Post were 
both warned by their lawyers that they and their 
top managers could face criminal prosecution 
under espionage laws if they printed the material 
that Daniel Ellsberg had leaked - and, by the 
way, offered without success to the three major 
television networks. Or at the least, punitive 
lawsuits or whatever political reprisals a 
furious Nixon team could devise. But after 
internal debates - and the threats of some of 
their best-known editors to resign rather than 
fold under pressure - both owners gave the green 
light - and were vindicated by the Supreme Court. 
Score a round for democracy.

  Bi-partisan fairness requires me to note that 
the Carter administration, in 1979, tried to 
prevent the Progressive magazine, published right 
here in Madison, from running an article called 
"How to Make an H-Bomb." The grounds were a 
supposed threat to "national security." But 
Howard Morland had compiled the piece entirely 
from sources open to the public, mainly to show 
that much of the classification system was Wizard 
of Oz smoke and mirrors. The courts again 
rejected the government's claim, but it's 
noteworthy that the journalism of defiance by 
that time had retreated to a small left-wing 
publication like the Progressive.

  In all three of those cases, confronted with a 
clear and present danger of punishment, none of 
the owners flinched. Can we think of a single 
executive of today's big media conglomerates 
showing the kind of resistance that Sulzberger, 
Graham, and Erwin Knoll did? Certainly not 
Michael Eisner. He said he didn't even want ABC 
News reporting on its parent company, Disney. 
Certainly not General Electric/NBC's Robert 
Wright. He took Phil Donahue off MNBC because the 
network didn't want to offend conservatives with 
a liberal sensibility during the invasion of 
Iraq. Instead, NBC brought to its cable channel 
one Michael Savage whose diatribes on radio had 
described non-white countries as "turd-world 
nations" and who characterized gay men and women 
as part of "the grand plan to cut down on the 
white race." I am not sure what it says that the 
GE/NBC executives calculated that while Donahue 
was offensive to conservatives, Savage was not.

  And then there's Leslie Moonves, the chairman of 
CBS. In the very week that the once-Tiffany 
Network was celebrating its 75th anniversary - 
and taking kudos for its glory days when it was 
unafraid to broadcast "The Harvest of Shame" and 
"The Selling of the Pentagon" - the network's 
famous eye blinked. Pressured by a vociferous and 
relentless right wing campaign and bullied by the 
Republican National Committee - and at a time 
when its parent company has billions resting on 
whether the White House, Congress, and the FCC 
will allow it to own even more stations than 
currently permissible - CBS caved in and pulled 
the miniseries about Ronald Reagan that 
conservatives thought insufficiently worshipful. 
The chief honcho at CBS, Les Moonves, says taste, 
not politics, dictated his decision. But earlier 
this year, explaining why CBS intended to air a 
series about Adolf Hitler, Moonves sang a 
different tune: "If you want to play it safe and 
put on milquetoast then you get criticizedŠThere 
are times when as a broadcaster when you take 
chances." This obviously wasn't one of those 
times. Granted, made-for-television movies about 
living figures are about as vital as the wax 
figures at Madame Tussaud's - and even less 
authentic - granted that the canonizers of Ronald 
Reagan hadn't even seen the film before they set 
to howling; granted, on the surface it's a silly 
tempest in a teapot; still, when a once-great 
network falls obsequiously to the ground at the 
feet of a partisan mob over a cheesy mini-series 
that practically no one would have taken 
seriously as history, you have to wonder if the 
slight tremor that just ran through the First 
Amendment could be the harbinger of greater 
earthquakes to come, when the stakes are really 
high. And you have to wonder what concessions the 
media tycoons-cum-supplicants are making when no 
one is looking.

  So what must we devise to make the media safe 
for individuals stubborn about protecting freedom 
and serving the truth? And what do we all - 
educators, administrators, legislators and 
agitators - need to do to restore the 
disappearing diversity of media opinions? America 
had plenty of that in the early days when the 
republic and the press were growing up together. 
It took no great amount of capital and credit - 
just a few hundred dollars - to start a paper, 
especially with a little political sponsorship 
and help. There were well over a thousand of them 
by 1840, mostly small-town weeklies. And they 
weren't objective by any stretch. Here's William 
Cobbett, another Anglo-American hell-raiser like 
Paine, shouting his creed in the opening number 
of his 1790s paper, Porcupine's Gazette. "Peter 
Porcupine," Cobbett's self-bestowed nickname, 
declared:

  Professions of impartiality I shall make none. 
They are always useless, and are besides perfect 
nonsense, when used by a newsmonger; for, he that 
does not relate news as he finds it, is something 
worse than partial; and . . . he that does not 
exercise his own judgment, either in admitting or 
rejecting what is sent him, is a poor passive 
tool, and not an editor.

  In Cobbett's day you could flaunt your partisan 
banners as you cut and thrust, and not inflict 
serious damage on open public discussion because 
there were plenty of competitors. It didn't 
matter if the local gazette presented the day's 
events entirely through a Democratic lens. There 
was always an alternate Whig or Republican choice 
handy - there were, in other words, choices. As 
Alexis de Tocqueville noted, these many blooming 
journals kept even rural Americans amazingly well 
informed. They also made it possible for 
Americans to exercise one of their most 
democratic habits - that of forming associations 
to carry out civic enterprises. And they operated 
against the dreaded tyranny of the majority by 
letting lonely thinkers know that they had allies 
elsewhere. Here's how de Tocqueville put it in 
his own words:

  It often happens in democratic countries that 
many men who have the desire or directed toward 
that light, and those wandering spirits who had 
long sought each other the need to associate 
cannot do it, because all being very small and 
lost in the crowd, they do not see each other and 
do not know where to find each other. Up comes a 
newspaper that exposes to their view the 
sentiment or the idea that had been presented to 
each of them simultaneously but separately. All 
are immediately in the shadows finally meet each 
other and unite.

  No wandering spirit could fail to find a voice 
in print. And so in that pre-Civil War explosion 
of humanitarian reform movements, it was a 
diverse press that put the yeast in freedom's 
ferment. Of course there were plenty of papers 
that spoke for Indian-haters, immigrant-bashers, 
bigots, jingoes and land-grabbers proclaiming 
America's Manifest Destiny to dominate North 
America. But one way or another, journalism 
mattered, and had purpose and direction.

  Past and present are never as separate as we 
think. Horace Greeley, the reform-loving editor 
of the New York Tribune, not only kept his pages 
"ever open to the plaints of the wronged and 
suffering," but said that whoever sat in an 
editor's chair and didn't work to promote human 
progress hadn't tasted "the luxury" of 
journalism. I liken that to the words of a 
kindred spirit closer to our own time, I.F. 
Stone. In his four-page little I.F. Stone's 
Weekly, "Izzy" loved to catch the government's 
lies and contradictions in the government's own 
official documents. And amid the thunder of 
battle with the reactionaries, he said: "I have 
so much fun I ought to be arrested." Think about 
that. Two newsmen, a century apart, believing 
that being in a position to fight the good fight 
isn't a burden but a lucky break. How can our 
work here bring that attitude back into the 
newsrooms?

  That era of a wide-open and crowded newspaper 
playing field began to fade as the old 
hand-presses gave way to giant machines with 
press runs and readerships in the hundreds of 
thousands and costs in the millions. But that 
didn't necessarily or immediately kill public 
spirited journalism. Not so long as the new 
owners were still strong-minded individuals with 
big professional egos to match their thick 
pocketbooks. When Joseph Pulitzer, a one-time 
immigrant reporter for a German-language paper in 
St. Louis, took over the New York World in 1883 
he was already a millionaire in the making. But 
here's his recommended short platform for 
politicians:

  1.Tax luxuries

  2. Tax Inheritances

  3. Tax Large Incomes

  4. Tax monopolies

  5. Tax the Privileged Corporation

  6. A Tariff for Revenue

  7. Reform the Civil Service

  8. Punish Corrupt Officers

  9. Punish Vote Buying.

  10. Punish Employers who Coerce their Employees in Elections

  Also not a bad mission statement. Can you 
imagine one of today's huge newspaper chains 
taking that on as an agenda?

  Don't get me wrong. The World certainly offered 
people plenty of the spice that they wanted - 
entertainment, sensation, earthy advice on living 
- but not at the expense of news that let them 
know who was on their side against the boodlers 
and bosses.

  Nor did big-time, big-town, big bucks journalism 
extinguish the possibility of a reform-minded 
investigative journalism that took the name of 
muckraking during the Progressive Era. Those days 
of early last century saw a second great 
awakening of the democratic impulse. What brought 
it into being was a reaction against the Social 
Darwinism and unrestrained capitalistic 
exploitation that is back in full force today. 
Certain popular magazines made space for - and 
profited by - the work of such journalists - to 
name only a few - as Lincoln Steffens, Ida 
Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Samuel Hopkins Adams and 
David Graham Phillips. They ripped the veils from 
- among other things - the shame of the cities, 
the crimes of the trusts, the treason of the 
Senate and the villainies of those who sold 
tainted meat and poisonous medicines. And why 
were they given those opportunities? Because, in 
the words of Samuel S. McClure, owner of 
McClure's Magazine, when special interests defied 
the law and flouted the general welfare, there 
was a social debt incurred. And, as he put it: 
"We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And 
in the end, the sum total of the debt will be our 
liberty."

  Muckraking lingers on today, but alas, a good 
deal of it consists of raking personal and sexual 
scandal in high and celebrated places. Surely, if 
democracy is to be served, we have to get back to 
putting the rake where the important dirt lies, 
in the fleecing of the public and the abuse of 
its faith in good government.

  When that landmark Communications Act of 1934 
was under consideration a vigorous public 
movement of educators, labor officials, and 
religious and institutional leaders emerged to 
argue for a broadcast system that would serve the 
interests of citizens and communities. A movement 
like that is coming to life again and we now have 
to build on this momentum.

  It won't be easy, because the tide's been 
flowing the other way for a long time. The 
deregulation pressure began during the Reagan 
era, when then-FCC chairman Mark Fowler, who said 
that TV didn't need much regulation because it 
was just a "toaster with pictures," eliminated 
many public-interest rules. That opened the door 
for networks to cut their news staffs, scuttle 
their documentary units (goodbye to "The Harvest 
of Shame" and "The Selling of the Pentagon"), and 
exile investigative producers and reporters to 
the under-funded hinterlands of independent 
production. It was like turning out searchlights 
on dark and dangerous corners. A crowning 
achievement of that drive was the 
Telecommunications Act of 1996, the largest 
corporate welfare program ever for the most 
powerful media and entertainment conglomerates in 
the world - passed, I must add, with support from 
both parties.

  And the beat of "convergence" between 
once-distinct forms of media goes on at increased 
tempo, with the communications conglomerates and 
the advertisers calling the tune. As safeguards 
to competition fall, an octopus like 
GE-NBC-Vivendi-Universal will be able to secure 
cable channels that can deliver interactive 
multimedia content - text, sound and images - to 
digital TVs, home computers, personal video 
recorders and portable wireless devices like cell 
phones. The goal? To corner the market on new 
ways of selling more things to more people for 
more hours in the day. And in the long run, to 
fill the airwaves with customized pitches to you 
and your children. That will melt down the 
surviving boundaries between editorial and 
marketing divisions and create a hybrid known to 
the new-media hucksters as "branded 
entertainment."

  Let's consider what's happening to newspapers. A 
study by Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation 
of America reports that two-thirds of today's 
newspaper markets are monopolies. And now most of 
the country's powerful newspaper chains are 
lobbying for co-ownership of newspaper and 
broadcast outlets in the same market, increasing 
their grip on community after community. And are 
they up-front about it? Hear this: Last December 
3 such media giants as The New York Times, 
Gannett, Cox, and Tribune, along with the trade 
group representing almost all the country's 
broadcasting stations, filed a petition to the 
FCC making the case for that cross ownership the 
owners so desperately seek. They actually told 
the FCC that lifting the regulation on cross 
ownership would strengthen local journalism. But 
did those same news organizations tell their 
readers what they were doing? Not all. None of 
them on that day believed they had an obligation 
to report in their own news pages what their 
parent companies were asking of the FCC. As these 
huge media conglomerates increase their control 
over what we see, read, and hear, they rarely 
report on how they are themselves are using their 
power to further their own interests and power as 
big business, including their influence over the 
political process.

  Take a look at a new book called Leaving Readers 
Behind: The Age of Corporate Newspapering 
published as part of the Project on the State of 
the American Newspaper under the auspices of the 
Pew Charitable Trusts. The people who produced 
the book all love newspapers - Gene Roberts, 
former managing editor of The New York Times; 
Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College 
of Journalism; Charles Layton, a veteran wire 
service reporter and news and feature editor at 
the Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as 
contributors such as Ken Auletta, Geneva 
Overholser, and Roy Reed. Their conclusion: the 
newspaper industry is in the middle of the most 
momentous change in its three hundred year 
history - a change that is diminishing the amount 
of real news available to the consumer. A 
generation of relentless corporatization is now 
culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz of 
buying, selling and consolidating of newspapers, 
from the mightiest dailies to the humblest 
weeklies. It is a world where "small hometown 
dailies in particular are being bought and sold 
like hog futures. Where chains, once content to 
grow one property at a time, now devour other 
chains whole. Where they are effectively ceding 
whole regions of the country to one another, 
further minimizing competition. Where money is 
pouring into the business from interests with 
little knowledge and even less concern about the 
special obligations newspapers have to 
democracy." They go on to describe the toll that 
the never-ending drive for profits is taking on 
the news. In Cumberland, Maryland, for example, 
the police reporter had so many duties piled upon 
him he no longer had time to go to the police 
station for the daily reports. But newspaper 
management had a cost-saving solution: put a fax 
machine in the police station and let the cops 
send over the news they thought the paper should 
have. In New Jersey, the Gannett chain bought the 
Asbury Park Press, then sent in a publisher who 
slashed fifty five people from the staff and cut 
the space for news, and was rewarded by being 
named Gannett's Manager of the Year. In New 
Jersey, by the way, the Newhouse and Gannett 
chains between them now own thirteen of the 
state's nineteen dailies, or seventy three 
percent of all the circulation of New 
Jersey-based papers. Then there is The 
Northwestern in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with a 
circulation of 23,500. Here, the authors report, 
is a paper that prided itself on being in 
hometown hands since the Johnson administration - 
the Andrew Johnson administration. But in 1998 it 
was sold not once but twice, within the space of 
two months. Two years later it was sold again: 
four owners in less than three years.

  You'd better get used to it, concluded Leaving 
Readers Behind, because the real momentum of 
consolidation is just beginning - it won't be 
long now before America is reduced to half a 
dozen major print conglomerates.

  You can see the results even now in the waning 
of robust journalism. In the dearth of in-depth 
reporting as news organizations try to do more 
with fewer resources. In the failure of the major 
news organizations to cover their own corporate 
deals and lobbying as well as other forms of 
"crime in the suites" such as Enron story. And in 
helping people understand what their government 
is up to. The report by the Roberts team includes 
a survey in l999 that showed a wholesale retreat 
in coverage of nineteen key departments and 
agencies in Washington. Regular reporting of the 
Supreme Court and State Department dropped off 
considerably through the decade. At the Social 
Security Administration, whose activities 
literally affect every American, only the New 
York Times was maintaining a full-time reporter 
and, incredibly, at the Interior Department, 
which controls five to six hundred million acres 
of public land and looks after everything from 
the National Park Service to the Bureau of Indian 
Affairs, there were no full-time reporters around.

  That's in Washington, our nation's capital. Out 
across the country there is simultaneously a near 
blackout of local politics by broadcasters. The 
public interest group Alliance for Better 
Campaigns studied forty-five stations in six 
cities in one week in October. Out of 7,560 hours 
of programming analyzed, only 13 were devoted to 
local public affairs - less than one-half of 1% 
of local programming nationwide. Mayors, town 
councils, school boards, civic leaders get no 
time from broadcasters who have filled their 
coffers by looting the public airwaves over which 
they were placed as stewards. Last year, when a 
movement sprang up in the House of 
Representatives to require these broadcasters to 
obey the law that says they must sell campaign 
advertising to candidates for office at the 
lowest commercial rate, the powerful broadcast 
lobby brought the Congress to heel. So much for 
the "public interest, convenience, and necessity."

  So what do we do? What is our strategy for 
taking on what seems a hopeless fight for a media 
system that serves as effectively as it sells - 
one that holds all the institutions of society, 
itself included, accountable?

  There's plenty we can do. Here's one 
journalist's list of some of the overlapping and 
connected goals that a vital media reform 
movement might pursue.

  First, we have to take Tom Paine's example - and 
Danny Schecter's advice - and reach out to 
regular citizens. We have to raise an even bigger 
tent than you have here. Those of us in this 
place speak a common language about the "media." 
We must reach the audience that's not here - 
carry the fight to radio talk shows, local 
television, and the letters columns of our 
newspapers. As Danny says, we must engage the 
mainstream, not retreat from it. We have to get 
our fellow citizens to understand that what they 
see, hear, and read is not only the taste of 
programmers and producers but also a set of 
policy decisions made by the people we vote for.

  We have to fight to keep the gates to the 
Internet open to all. The web has enabled many 
new voices in our democracy - and globally - to 
be heard: advocacy groups, artists, individuals, 
non-profit organizations. Just about anyone can 
speak online, and often with an impact greater 
than in the days when orators had to climb on 
soap box in a park. The media industry lobbyists 
point to the Internet and say it's why concerns 
about media concentration are ill founded in an 
environment where anyone can speak and where 
there are literally hundreds of competing 
channels. What those lobbyists for big media 
don't tell you is that the traffic patterns of 
the online world are beginning to resemble those 
of television and radio. In one study, for 
example, AOL Time Warner (as it was then known) 
accounted for nearly a third of all user time 
spent online. And two others companies - Yahoo 
and Microsoft - bring that figure to fully 50%. 
As for the growing number of channels available 
on today's cable systems, most are owned by a 
small handful of companies. Of the ninety-one 
major networks that appear on most cable systems, 
79 are part of such multiple network groups such 
as Time Warner, Viacom, Liberty Media, NBC, and 
Disney. In order to program a channel on cable 
today, you must either be owned by or affiliated 
with one of the giants. If we're not vigilant the 
wide-open spaces of the Internet could be 
transformed into a system in which a handful of 
companies use their control over high-speed 
access to ensure they remain at the top of the 
digital heap in the broadband era at the expense 
of the democratic potential of this amazing 
technology. So we must fight to make sure the 
Internet remains open to all as the present-day 
analogue of that many-tongued world of small 
newspapers so admired by de Tocqueville.

  We must fight for a regulatory, market and 
public opinion environment that lets local and 
community-based content be heard rather than 
drowned out by nationwide commercial programming.

  We must fight to limit conglomerate swallowing 
of media outlets by sensible limits on multiple 
and cross-ownership of TV and radio stations, 
newspapers, magazines, publishing companies and 
other information sources. Let the message go 
forth: No Berlusconis in America!

  We must fight to expand a noncommercial media 
system - something made possible in part by new 
digital spectrum awarded to PBS stations - and 
fight off attempts to privatize what's left of 
public broadcasting. Commercial speech must not 
be the only free speech in America!

  We must fight to create new opportunities, 
through public policies and private agreements, 
to let historically marginalized media players 
into more ownership of channels and control of 
content.

  Let us encourage traditional mainstream 
journalism to get tougher about keeping a 
critical eye on those in public and private power 
and keeping us all informed of what's important - 
not necessarily simple or entertaining or good 
for the bottom line. Not all news is 
"Entertainment Tonight." And news departments are 
trustees of the public, not the corporate media's 
stockholders

  In that last job, schools of journalism and 
professional news associations have their work 
cut out. We need journalism graduates who are not 
only better informed in a whole spectrum of 
special fields - and the schools do a competent 
job there - but who take from their training a 
strong sense of public service. And also 
graduates who are perhaps a little more 
hard-boiled and street-smart than the present 
crop, though that's hard to teach. Thanks to the 
high cost of education, we get very few recruits 
from the ranks of those who do the world's 
unglamorous and low-paid work. But as a onetime 
"cub" in a very different kind of setting, I 
cherish H.L. Mencken's description of what being 
a young Baltimore reporter a hundred years ago 
meant to him. "I was at large," he wrote,

  in a wicked seaport of half a million people 
with a front seat at every public . . [B]y all 
orthodox cultural standards I probably reached my 
all-time low, for the heavy reading of my teens 
had been abandoned in favor of life itself. . 
.But it would be an exaggeration to say I was 
ignorant, for if I neglected the humanities I was 
meanwhile laying in all the worldly wisdom of a 
police lieutenant, a bartender, a shyster lawyer 
or a midwife.

  We need some of that worldly wisdom in our 
newsrooms. Let's figure out how to attract 
youngsters who have acquired it.

  And as for those professional associations of 
editors they might remember that in union there 
is strength. One journalist alone can't extract 
from an employer a commitment to let editors and 
not accountants choose the appropriate subject 
matter for coverage. But what if news councils 
blew the whistle on shoddy or cowardly 
managements? What if foundations gave magazines 
such as the Columbia Journalism Review sufficient 
resources to spread their stories of journalistic 
bias, failure or incompetence? What if entire 
editorial departments simply refused any longer 
to quote anonymous sources - or give Kobe 
Bryant's trial more than the minimal space it 
rates by any reasonable standard - or to run 
stories planted by the Defense Department and 
impossible, for alleged security reasons, to 
verify? What if a professional association backed 
them to the hilt? Or required the same stance 
from all its members? It would take courage to 
confront powerful ownerships that way. But not as 
much courage as is asked of those brave 
journalists in some countries who face the 
dungeon, the executioner or the secret assassin 
for speaking out.

  All this may be in the domain of fantasy. And 
then again, maybe not. What I know to be real is 
that we are in for the fight of our lives. I am 
not a romantic about democracy or journalism; the 
writer Andre Gide may have been right when he 
said that all things human, given time, go badly. 
But I know journalism and democracy are deeply 
linked in whatever chance we human beings have to 
redress our grievances, renew our politics, and 
reclaim our revolutionary ideals. Those are 
difficult tasks at any time, and they are even 
more difficult in a cynical age as this, when a 
deep and pervasive corruption has settled upon 
the republic. But too much is at stake for our 
spirits to flag. Earlier this week the Library of 
Congress gave the first Kluge Lifetime Award in 
the Humanities to the Polish philosopher Leslie 
Kolakowski. In an interview Kolakowski said: 
"There is one freedom on which all other 
liberties depend - and that is freedom of 
expression, freedom of speech, of print. If this 
is taken away, no other freedom can exist, or at 
least it would be soon suppressed."

  That's the flame of truth your movement must 
carry forward. I am older than almost all of you 
and am not likely to be around for the duration; 
I have said for several years now that I will 
retire from active journalism when I turn 70 next 
year. But I take heart from the presence in this 
room, unseen, of Peter Zenger, Thomas Paine, the 
muckrakers, I.F. Stone and all those heroes and 
heroines, celebrated or forgotten, who faced odds 
no less than ours and did not flinch. I take 
heart in your presence here. It's your fight now. 
Look around. You are not alone.




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