Like many communities, San Antonio, Texas, has a split
personality, says Latina student activist DeAnne Cuellar. Although
Hispanics account for 70 percent of the population, they show up time and
again in local news not for their achievements or leadership but in stories
portraying crime, drugs, and violence.
“We felt misrepresentation is erasing our
history, making people forget we exist in society,” Cuellar says.
But instead of shrugging it off, Cuellar and others
organized the Texas Media Empowerment Project to give Hispanics and
“communities of color” the voice she felt they lacked.
Today the project monitors local news channels to
increase awareness of unbalanced reporting, supports new perspectives and
alternative media, nurtures minority leaders, and encourages the community
to participate in the news and set media policy.
“It’s all about building personal
community alliances and networks to share information,” says Cuellar
of the organization, which was started on a shoestring. “If you
don’t have money or funding, what you do have is people, and
that’s unlimited.”
In fact, as newspapers lose readers and consumption of
mainstream media continues to decline, independent media — often run
by volunteers — is sprouting all over America.
Activists say communities are taking the news into
their own hands to combat a corporate media that often replaces in-depth
reporting with entertainment, personalities, and punditry.
“It’s not that I’m uninterested in
the world; it’s the world as covered by this news outlet isn’t
interesting to me,” says wireless expert Sascha Meinrath, who
co-founded Champaign-Urbana’s open-source mesh network community
wireless and Urbana’s soon-to-launch low-power FM station.
“Let’s talk about stories that are not making it into our
newspapers, are not on the radio and are ignored by the national
press.”
In communities as far-flung as Champaign-Urbana and
Bloomington-Normal to Brattleboro, Vt.; Asheville, N.C.; and Oakland,
Calif., local advocates are bypassing corporate-owned media, using a
variety of forms: alternative community-run newspapers, Internet news sites
that follow an “open publishing” format, wireless networks, and
low-power FM radio. Local activists say that media control is often
necessary to ensure that community issues — from politics to zoning
to the environment — are understood, addressed, and debated.
“What is really happening here is a dramatic
democratization of the means of communication in our society,” says
Dr. Mark Cooper, an expert on communication technology and policy at the
Consumer Federation of America. “Computers, communication off the
Internet, and the declining costs of digital production have transformed
consumers into producers [and] listeners into speakers. We are putting the
‘mass’ in the mass media for the first time in our history
— that is a revolution that is just beginning.”
A search for solutions
Cooper, Meinrath, and Cuellar mingled in St. Louis
last weekend with 2,500 other journalists, authors, professors, filmmakers,
politicians, activists, and advocates at the sold-out National Conference
on Media Reform, sponsored by the non-partisan group Free Press. The goal:
to identify media shortcomings and share solutions.
Many national figures at the conference, such as Amy
Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy
Now!, praised grassroots media as
“trickle-up” journalism that can alter corporate coverage. She
singled out Meinrath’s efforts in Urbana-Champaign as part of a
larger “indy media” movement capable of shining a spotlight on
essential issues.
“It is our job to go where the silence
is,” Goodman says. “It is absolutely critical that we have a
media in this country that broadcasts the voices of those at the target end
of U.S. foreign and domestic policy.”
On the national level, Goodman issued a call to
“un-imbed” reporters from one-sided military positions in Iraq
and restore dissent and debate as the cornerstones of a democratic society.
“We have hundreds of reporters imbedded in the
front lines with troops,” she says. “What about in Iraqi
communities and hospitals and in the peace movement around the world to
understand the implications and repercussions of war?”
Two members of the Federal Communications Commission
— Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps — also advised
conference participants to demand that the FCC conduct community meetings
and open debate before rewriting rules that regulate the public airwaves
and media ownership.
“If citizens insist upon their rightful role in
the decision-making process, the citizens will win, but that’s the
only way we will win,” says Copps, adding that the FCC was shocked to
receive 3 million letters on media concentration.
“If we roll up our sleeves — all of us
advocates, creative artists, elected officials, consumers, citizens
everywhere — we can settle this issue of who is going to control the
media and for what purposes, and we can settle it in favor of airwaves of,
by and for the people of this great country.”
But Adelstein and Copps tend to be the FCC’s
dissenting voices. It took Meinrath more than three years of lobbying to
win a low-power FM station license for WRFU (104.5 FM), which will launch
June 19 with public affairs and local programming. First he had to fight
off objections from the National Association of Broadcasters that
Urbana’s 100-watt station would interfere with the signals of
100,000-watt commercial broadcasters.
“When they have you outgunned in Washington
100-1, it’s hard to even get the ears of the policymakers who make
these decisions,” Meinrath says.
Unlike expensive radio conglomerates, low-power
stations are often staffed by volunteers and are “incredibly cheap to
build and to run,” he says, costing about $2,000 per year. The new
station will tie into the local area network with media-production and
storage capabilities and will be housed along with a resource library,
audio- and video-production facilities, and other community resources in a
downtown Urbana building recently purchased by the Urbana-Champaign
Independent Media Center Foundation.
Radio Free Brattleboro, in southern Vermont, took a
different route to community broadcasting. The station started with a
single watt — later increasing to 10 watts — on the unused FM
frequency 107.9 for almost five years before FCC agents knocked on the
station’s door.
“In this case, we feel we are doing what we are
obliged to do — that is, assert and exercise our rights to the
airwaves,” says RFB organizer and activist Sara Longsmith.
“Every community has the right to broadcast the voices of the
community to itself.”
But the station was unable to produce the license or
“authority to broadcast” that the FCC demanded, so Longsmith
spearheaded an effort to demonstrate its “authority” through a
petition drive, Town Council support, and a community-wide referendum.
Hitting the streets for signatures, the drive connected the station’s
volunteer staff to the town’s passive listeners, gathering widespread
support along with 3,000 signatures that would be court evidence of the
station’s right to broadcast. Although a final verdict has not been
rendered, the station won a victory and remains on the air.
“The federal judge was not convinced by the FCC
that we harmed the federal government enough,” she says.
“Basically he said that shutting us down would harm the community
more.”
Thinking, acting locally
Many activists say that they’re less alarmed
about access to alternative national and international news, which can be
found on the Internet. But what drove them to community media was a lack of
information and insight on issues in their own back yards.
For John K. Wilson, founder of the Indy in Bloomington-Normal and a
contributor to Illinois Times, community media can explore and continually update local
issues long after that topic has faded from the pages of the mainstream
press.
The print and Web versions of the Indy are funded as a student club
within Illinois State University but were recently granted IMC affiliation
because the open-access Web site invites community-wide opinions and
participation. The newspaper is printed 25 to 30 times a year, entirely
from community posts on the Indy’s Web site, and some 4,000 copies per issue are
distributed on a budget of $10,000 annually, according to Wilson.
“I don’t have a problem with
‘infotainment’ news that some people do,” he explains.
“My concern is not that that kind of news exists but that other kinds
of news are dying away — the kind of investigative news, the kind of
alternative viewpoints that are not getting heard.”
Wally Bowen brings a similar vision to Asheville,
N.C.’s Mountain Area Information Network, which builds infrastructure
such as low-power FM, free radio, and community Internet that links to
alternative print media.
“Our vision is to be able to take the
independent progressive voices that will appear on public-access television
and make them available online 24/7, so if you have a group that does an
independent program video on clean air or whatever the issue is, they
don’t just get that one appearance on public-access TV but that voice
continues to be online through video streaming,” Bowen says.
Conference speakers both national and local called
for a free press that can withstand debate, help the public make sense of
the issues, and enable the best ideas and solutions to emerge.
Journalist Bill Moyers joined those urging an
independent press unfettered by partisan politics. He and his PBS news show
NOW have
been under continuous Republican attack even after he stepped down in
December, he said. So he altered travel plans to address the conference and
beseech PBS to stand by its charter of airing alternative and
underrepresented viewpoints.
“An unconscious people, an indoctrinated
people, a people only fed partisan information and opinion that confirm
their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk
food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be
skeptical,” Moyers observed in a speech that closed the conference.
“Just as a democracy can die of too many lies,
that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.”
This article appears in May 19-25, 2005.
