The case arose when the company did not want corporate information in the hands of government agencies to become publicly available through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Individuals are protected from that possibility when the documents involve their personal privacy, according to Denniston. 

Information about AT&T's billing practices are on hand at the FCC after a now-resolved investigation. Rival telecommunications companies sought the records, and AT&T protested. A federal appeals court said that AT&T is entitled to the same personal privacy rules that protect individuals, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Sensationalism is rampant in our consolidated news system, where scandal, celebrity gossip and violence (or the threat of looming violence) lead the headlines. Ever wonder why this is all we see and read and hear?

It isn’t simply that scandal and violence are all that’s happening in our communities; in fact, it’s the only news that companies want to cover. And they make it expressly clear to their reporters.

Take a look at the “if it bleeds, it leads” approach expressed with chilling precision in the submission guidelines of the self-described “backbone of the world’s information system” – the Associated Press. On their website, the nation’s oldest news wire describes their mission “…to be the essential global news network, providing distinctive news services of the highest quality, reliability, and objectivity with reports that are accurate, balanced and informed.”

Sounds great. The problem is the AP’s editorial submission guidelines are doomed to produce mind-numbing, paranoia-inducing stories that are neither informed nor newsworthy. For example, here are AP Minnesota’s guidelines for journalists looking to pitch stories:

AP Members Want:
• Train wrecks, airplane crashes, drownings, fatal auto accidents (if there are multiple victims or unusual circumstances) and unusual accidental deaths;
• Meetings where action of regional or statewide interest is taken or where a prominent person speaks;
• Riots, demonstrations, strikes;
• Major fires (involves loss of life, public disruption or destruction of a structure/site known statewide), explosions, oil or other chemical spills.--Unusual bank robberies (exceptionally violent, hostages taken, serial robber, etc.);
• Weather news, including ice and hail storms, heavy snows, damaging rains and floods, record heat and cold, tornadoes; and,
• Human interest stories. The odd, the offbeat, the heart-warming.

Don’t Share:

• Non-fatal auto or boating accidents;
• Motor vehicle chases, unless major damage or loss of life occurs;
• Routine city council, school board or other public meetings, unless an issue being discussed at other meetings around the state -- such as state budget cuts -- is discussed;
• Bomb threats (unless a MAJOR public disruption results), petty crimes, minor drug busts, minor or non-fatal fires;
• Suicides or obituaries unless the person is known regionally or statewide or unusual circumstances are involved; and,
• Publicity handouts, including local pageant winners, fund-raisers and charity events.

The guidelines for AP Ohio, largely the same, had this gem of an addition:

Yes: Single-victim murders that involve unusual circumstances, a prominent person or happen outside the metropolitan areas, where murders are common. Offer stories on the incident, arrests, formal charges and verdicts only, except in high-profile cases of statewide interest when changes in dates, venue or charges occur.

No: Routine one-victim murders in big cities, where murders are more common.

Read: no news coverage of low-income people and people of color being killed in urban areas. Tough luck if your brother/mother/son/daughter gets murdered in the city. Bor-ing. And pay no attention to those city council meetings – you know, where decisions are made about our communities; they’re not worth the column inches.

It’s no secret that the news – especially local news -- often leaves something to be desired. We rarely see coverage of stories that truly matter to our communities, or in-depth reporting that gets to the bottom of an issue, instead of just skimming the surface. And these AP guidelines offer an alarming glimpse into the mentality of our media system.

I think it’s high time we develop our own vision for what we want our news outlets to cover. After all, the news is supposed to be a public good, keeping us informed and engaged.

What might this vision look like? Here’s a start:

We Want:
• Coverage and analysis of local elections, state legislative issues and regional business, education and environmental news;
• Journalism that holds our leaders in government and business accountable;
• News that is as diverse as our country;
• Reporting that prevents wars, economic collapse and environmental disasters, not just covers them after the fact;
• Journalism that empowers communities and promotes personal agency;
• Coverage of issues that are important to women and people of color;
• Hard-hitting investigative journalism and original reporting on issues of community relevance; and,
• In-depth reporting on local issues that is accurate, credible and verifiable.

Don’t Share:

• He-said-she-said journalism (or "balanced reporting") that covers both sides without getting at the truth;
• Horserace election coverage that is more enamored with polls and controversies than real issues;
• Fawning interviews with people in power;
• Press releases transcribed as news;
• Gratuitous blood and gore;
• Oddball human interest stories that teach us nothing useful about the world;
• Coverage that reinforces negative stereotypes;
• Time-wasting in-depth coverage of local weather conditions;
• Celebrity news and gossip; and,
• “News” shilling the latest consumer craze.

To be clear, I’m not asking the AP and others to water down their reporting to shield us from negative news. I just want quality reporting that reflects what’s truly happening in our communities, not the junk news reporters are told to sniff out.

I’m interested to know what you want to see in your local news. If you were to create editorial guidelines for your local newspaper or TV station, what would they include? Use the comment section on the original article to share your thoughts.

Paper Tiger Television explores the social impact of stereotypes in the reality TV genre. With Jennifer Pozner of WIMN and and interview with NY Reality TV school founder Robert Galinsky that reveals how actors get trained to act "real" for television. 

Watch it!

Our friends at KBCS- Seattle, Reclaim The Media and the Prometheus Radio Project present an hour-long program of interviews and feature stories from the Detroit radical media conference that preceded the Social Forum. Listen here.

Fresno community group leaders have joined forces to ask the area's most popular talk radio station, KMJ, to make changes to their programming. According to spokesperson, Les Kimber, the group Citizens for Civility and Accountability in Media (CCAM) was formed in October 2009 out of concern about what is broadcast daily on their local radio station.

KMJ is Fresno’s only 24-hour talk radio station. The station has approximately 80,000 listeners out of the one million residents in its broadcast range across the Central Valley. In March, KMJ expanded its reach by acquiring an FM frequency.

CCAM sent a letter to KMJ in November of last year requesting that the station negotiate "changes in programming that will allow for reasoned discussion and countervailing opinion". The letter was met with a response shortly after from General Manager Patty Hixson, claiming the group was incorrect in their assessment of the station and suggesting they change the channel. CCAM has yet to receive a response to their follow up letter.

                                                                                                                              On May 20th, CCAM held a press conference at the Holiday Inn in Fresno to address their concerns about KMJ to the public. Approximately fifty people attended. News organizations present included KFCF, the California Advocate, KNXT TV, KFTV (Univision) and KMJ. The conveners of CCAM explained why they think KMJ’s current programming is harmful and nonresponsive to the needs of the community.

                                                                                                                           Vickie Fouts, CCAM convener and director of the Uprooting Racism Project complains that corporate media did not cover the story adequately. According to Fouts, the Fresno Bee did not attend the press conference but ran a short piece that reflected KMJ's misunderstanding of their motives. She stated, "They didn’t think we, a local group, were news worthy but a Limbaugh rant against us was".

                                                                                                                         Despite the lack of response from management, a few KMJ DJs caught wind of the press conference and spoke about it on their shows that day. Rush Limbaugh, whose national show is syndicated on KMJ, told listeners, "A typical ACORN type group, a typical Obama type group, is demanding that KMJ remove all conservatives because they incite violence. It's begun." Local DJ Ray Appleton covered the press conference on his show later that day. He said Limbaugh's remarks set off a flurry of calls to KMJ from angry listeners. Appleton also claimed the station gets these types of complaints on a regular basis and normally he wouldn't address them at all.

                                                                                                                         CCAM maintains they are not asking the station to remove DJs nor calling for censorship. What the group wants is for KMJ to take their powerful position in the community seriously. Richard Stone, the Vice President of the Fresno Center for Non-Violence stated at the press conference, "As a licensee of public air space, KMJ has a responsibility to serve the public welfare by not structuring its programs in a way that fuels extreme disrespect and intolerance. In allowing little or no room for reasoned disagreement, while demeaning those who offer dissent, KMJ's chosen line-up of commentators has created a profoundly undemocratic and potentially dangerous presence in our community."

                                                                                                                           KMJ DJ Chris Daniels spoke about CCAM's requests on his May 20th show as well. He claimed he is first and foremost an entertainer whose job is to make money. Daniels' first caller defended the group’s point that KMJ DJs promote violence. He asked that at least one of the 24 hours of programming on KMJ broadcast something different. Daniels responded "You're literally asking us to cut our profits in order to provide something that we are not in any way obligated to provide."

                                                                                                                       Kimber points out that a large part of KMJ's success is due to their relationship with the public institution, California State Fresno. As the "Home of the Bulldogs," KMJ has the exclusive rights to broadcast CSU sports games. As diversity is a key component of the university's mission statement, Kimber points out "It is a major contradiction for KMJ on the one hand to be the exclusive home of the CSUF Bulldogs and on the other hand be the home of biased daily programming that offers no diversity."

                                                                                                                         CCAM named various examples of what they consider to be hate speech broadcasted on KMJ at their press conference as well as on their website. Examples range from DJ Inga Barks agreeing with a caller who said delivering food to the earthquake victims in Haiti is "like trying to feed a pack of rats" to DJ Ray Appleton suggesting that Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, should be given a reception with a .45 handgun the next time he visits Fresno.

                                                                                                                                A common theme among speakers at the press conference was fear for President Obama's life when DJs like Mark Levin advocate doing "whatever is necessary to stop Obama from destroying our country." Kimber stated, "Not unlike what is happening today, Dr. King was constantly demonized by his opponents which created an atmosphere of hate and violence that convinced his assassin James Earl Ray he would be doing the country a favor by killing Dr. King."

                                                                                                                       CCAM is not alone in their fight against hate speech in the media. This past month a coalition of over 30 organizations requested the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigate the extent of hate speech and its effects. Led by the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), the groups claim many radio and cable television programs “masquerading as news” are using hate as a profit model. They are asking the FCC “to examine the extent and effects of hate speech in media, including the likely link between hate speech and hate crimes, and to explore non-regulatory ways to counteract negative impacts.”

                                                                                                                         Since the press conference, CCAM has received a slew of negative messages from KMJ listeners. Kimber says some of the messages are irrational and threatening, proving their point that KMJ may incite people to act violently. Multiple attempts were made to contact KMJ management for comment with no success.

                                                                                                                        Kimber claims the community KMJ serves is very diverse and not overwhelmingly conservative. He urges other concerned community members to sign their petition to KMJ asking that their programming reflect the diversity of the area it serves. In addition people can write letters to KMJ and other news organizations.

                                                                                                                       Kimber says, "Our main objective is to enlighten folks about the negative impact the constant hate messages have in our area."

                                                                                                                             For more information visit:

http://www.FresnoStopHate.org

http://www.NHMC.org

The results came up quite short of recommending assertive action by the city to deliver Internet access to all.

A video from the Oakland City Council Meeting where the summary was presented.

The full report from Tellus Ventures, the consultant hired to do a comprehensive study is below, available as a PDF file.

National Public Radio's ombudsman has released a report headlined "Where Are The Women?".

Elsewhere, it seems. 

The article, published April 2, 2010, examines 104 shows between April 13, 2009 and January 9, 2010, and documents 2,502 male sources and 877 female sources, a discrepancy of 74% to 26%.

This is a slight improvement over previous studies: in 1991, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found the female source rate to be 19%. In 2003, the same organization reported it at 21%.

Read the full report here.

MA teamed with the LA Media Reform group to travel down to Orange County and the Inland Empire and speak to Dems who aren't supporting net neutrality. 

Using the 3rd Annual LA Media Justice Summit as our organizing platform, a week later on April 6th, a team of intrepid media reformers went out to visit Representative Joe Baca- San Bernardino and Representative Loretta Sanchez-Garden Grove to say net neutrality now.

The visits were good conversations and left us hopeful that our Internet future may be bright.

If we've inspired *you* to pay a visit to your representatives and make sure they are on board with net neutrality: here's a handy guide to legislative visits:

This weekend is the 95th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian genocide. Lucine Kasbarian writes on media coverage of recent Turkish tantrums.  

****

Recent articles in the mainstream media would have us believe that governments around the world somehow question the factuality of the 1915 Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides committed by Turkey. These articles would also have us believe that the Turkish government’s latest temper tantrums over these genocides are justified. Turkey, of course, just recalled its ambassadors to protest the passage of resolutions by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee and the Swedish Parliament that acknowledged Turkish culpability for these genocides.

Despite what today’s mainstream media are declaring, the evidence proving the 1915 genocides is overwhelming. And formal resolutions affirming these unpunished crimes against humanity made appearances around the world long before 2010. Regardless of what pro-Turkish apologists would have us believe, the issue has never been about whether the Turkish regime carried out genocide. Rather, it has always been about when Turkey would be punished and deliver reparations and restitution to the rightful, indigenous inhabitants.

Powerful media elites would have us believe that the mainstream media universe has been devoid of criticism for Turkey’s unpunished crimes because such voices are either non-existent, marginal, irrelevant, fabricated or some combination thereof.

What the media elites fail to tell us is that when these critical voices -- from victim ethnic groups or elsewhere -- come forward to submit letters, opinion pieces, or quotes, they are usually denied access.

Media elites also neglect to tell us that opinions that do not reflect the official narrative spun by Turkey -- not to mention Israel and the U.S. -- largely go unpublished. Authoritative voices that would discredit mainstream media’s official narrative of the genocide issue are removed from the elite’s “golden rolodex” -- the name given to describe the small group of establishment-approved “experts” who are most frequently quoted in news stories or asked to appear on television.

The absence of dissent in the mainstream media and in the halls of power does not mean that the victims of the genocides and their descendants are insignificant, apathetic or deceitful. No, we are alive, awake and infuriated.

The media are also telling us that we should sympathize with Turkey because it feels “humiliated” by accusations of genocide. Turkey uses this word to describe its anger that its national honor has somehow been injured by such accusations. Do Turkish, Israeli and American officials know what “humiliation” means to the survivors and descendants of the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides who experienced debasement and degradation during the genocidal ordeals and are forced to endure denials and demeaning treatment right up to the present day?

And how did humiliation of the victims occur? By order of the Young Turk regime, unarmed civilian subjects -- Armenian, Assyrian and Greek men, women and children -- were raped in broad daylight, in front of their families and neighbors. The tortures and violations were beyond one’s wildest imagination. Innocents were skinned and burned alive. Their tongues and fingernails were torn out. Horseshoes were nailed to their feet. They were stripped naked and sent on death marches into the desert. Women’s breasts were cut off and their pregnant bellies bayoneted. Fetuses were thrown up into the air and impaled on swords and bayonets for sport. Men were tied to tree limbs that were bent towards one another. When the tree’s limbs were released, the men’s bodies were torn in half. Women were tied to horses and dragged to their deaths.

Those Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks who were not exterminated, enslaved in harems, or kidnapped and forcibly converted to Islam were driven from their indigenous lands. Those who survived the death marches spent the rest of their lives in exile, uprooted from their culture and civilization, grieving for their slaughtered families and yearning for their ancestral homeland.

Media elites are giving voice to embroidered Turkish “humiliation” and not to the real humiliation of the victims, survivors and heirs who live with constant anguish in the face of torture, dispossession, contempt and indifference. Media elites are defending Turkey when it is the martyrs and their heirs who deserve mercy and compassion.

In spite of Turkey’s efforts to humiliate the victims at the time of the genocides -- and to prolong this humiliation up to the present day with cultural theft, trivialization and scape-goating -- the dignity of the victims and their descendants has, remarkably, remained intact.

Turkey’s genocidal crimes have gone unpunished. While continually profiting from the homes, farms, lands, properties, institutions and possessions confiscated in 1915, Turkey even accuses the victims and survivors of the crimes that it itself committed. And media elites portray ongoing survivor grievances as nuisances that impede “progress.”

It is the genocide deniers -- the rulers and lobbies of the U.S., Turkey, Israel, and Azerbaijan -- who are the ones impeding progress. Their denial, duplicity and audacity do not mean that the genocides’ victims and their heirs have been defeated. Denying the truth does not invalidate it. Fictional Turkish “reconciliation” initiatives foisted upon Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks will never take the place of genuine atonement and restitution, which are necessary for true progress to be made.

To these deniers and obstructionists we say: “Your tactics are transparent. The perpetrators, beneficiaries and enablers of the ongoing genocide against the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek peoples will be brought to justice. You can hide from the truth, but you can't hide the truth. We will persist, and the truth will prevail.”

In May of 2009, I became a public access television producer. Couldn’t have picked a worse time.

Not because I don’t enjoy hosting and co-producing Media News. It’s a great joy to interview guests and try to shed a little light on the issues closest to my heart including: net neutrality and the digital divide, coverage of turmoil abroad and at home, the loss of local public affairs coverage and the rise in citizen journalism. I feel privileged to bring voices that need to be heard onto my local TV dial.

The reason it was bad timing is that the nation’s more than 3,000 public access centers are on the verge of extinction. Yours may go next week, next month or next year, but their days are numbered due to statewide cable franchising.

Statewide cable franchising is a term designed to put just about anybody to sleep, but here is what it really means. In the good old days, your local cable oligopoly, be it Comcast, AT&T or Time Warner, was required to go from county to county and negotiate for the right to be the cable provider of choice. In exchange for this mini-monopoly (whose value has been somewhat, but not entirely, degraded by the entrance of satellite providers like Dish and DirecTV), cities and counties could ask for things. Some were more or less asleep at the wheel, but many of them negotiated lots of great amenities: channels for governmental meetings to be aired, educational channels for the local schools and public channels for the citizens-at-large, sometimes including fully-staffed production studios that trained thousands of people in media making and citizen journalism.

Then AT&T decided this wouldn’t do, and launched their massive lobbying machine at the spunky and seriously undermanned PEGs (public, educational and governmental channels). They went state-by-state, legislature-by-legislature, and made their case that ever-rising cable rates could only be stemmed by more competition in the marketplace. The way to get more competition in the marketplace? End all this tiresome local negotiating and allow the giants to negotiate with one entity for all their franchises in the entire state. In my state, California, the law that became AB 2987 – The Digital Infrastructure and Video Competition Act, assigned the Public Utilities Commission to that task. In the end, similar laws passed in 28 of the 50 states between 2004 and 2009.

The results are predictable. The laws and the outcomes vary from state to state, but essentially operational funds were gutted and channel-slamming, the act of layering multiple local PEG channels behind one menu so nobody will ever find them, became the rule. The lowest common denominator won out.

You can see why this might matter to me. But you might be wondering why this matters to you. After all, many of us are pretty overwhelmed with the amount of information we’re already sorting through and we may have never watched a public access television program.

But lets not forget a few things. In my state, only 66% of households have high speed Internet access in their homes. The other 34% don’t. Polls consistently show that more than 51% of American adults still cite the television as their primary source for news and information. There are a lot of people sitting around flipping their remotes looking for stuff to watch. And there’s not always much out there.

Even for those of us busily carting our laptops about, the Internet is a land of affinities. Sites emerge from Google searches you initiate or as links from places you already frequent and people you know. In some ways, it’s a bit of a closed circle.

I was once channel surfing with a friend late one night. All of a sudden she yelled out “that’s my hairdresser”. Turned out her hairdresser was a pesticides activist in her spare time and hosted a once-a-month program on the dangers of common household products. We weren’t looking for information on toxins in cosmetics. We started watching because we knew this person. And we stayed watching because we learned something: both about the subject and about someone who lived in our neighborhood.

That’s the importance of community media: the proximity that brings issues and people together that might never ordinarily bump into each other though they live side by side.

It is only mass communications that provides the opportunity for someone to stumble upon something unique when they tire of watching Inside Edition. Every time it happens, it’s a little miracle.

These are not miracles we can afford to lose and its not looking too good right now. There is a bill, H.R 3457, the Community Access Preservation Act in the House of Representatives, which will go a long ways toward blunting the most damaging effects of the statewide franchising laws. But it needs support. It’s not a partisan thing. Call or write your representative today and tell them “Hey, I want to be able to watch my county board of supervisors duke it out till all hours of the night. I want that working mom to be able to take GED prep courses on the TV around here. And I want my hairdresser to make the world just a little safer for teenage girls buying their first makeup products”.

It doesn’t totally compensate for those ever-rising cable television bills, but it helps.

And if you still have one, check out your local public access television channel. You won’t be sorry you did.

Media justice organizers at the Center for Media Justice (CMJ) and MAG-Net have recently produced a brilliant campaign plan ("The Campaign for universal broadband") to win three policies crucial for just and democratic communication: network neutrality, universal broadband and universal service fund reform. Considering the renewed struggle required to win these goals, and to protect them afterwards, two questions seem particularly important. First, to win media access rights, social justice movements need media access. So, how do we get the kind of access that can allow us to succeed? Second, as net neutrality and universal broadband are not ends in themselves, but rather the means to enable a just and democratic media system, who should produce that system? Open access to a media system controlled by the status quo will not provide the necessary means for disadvantaged communities and social justice movements to change power relations.

To win and protect the three central policies of the MAG-Net plan, media justice movements must have allies at radio and TV stations - the leading sources of news for most people, especially those without the Internet (Pew Center for People and the Press). Mainstream commercial channels will not provide that access as they are also agents defending corporate power and driving social justice movements to the margins. So, what about public media? The problem is that too often public broadcasting outlets have boards populated by elite and corporate representatives, who historically have used their power to filter out the very perspectives we seek to extend. However, a movement of active publics could restructure governance at public media and demand democratically elected boards. This change could enable representatives from diverse communities to make decisions about programming and provide new access for marginalized and oppressed social groups to shape and produce content, self-organize and build just social relationships.

So, like network neutrality and universal broadband, should social justice movements also consider control over public media to be a racial and economic justice issue? In the effort to constitute a just and a ubiquitous public media system, should a high priority be to demand direct, democratic community governance of publicly funded outlets, especially local NPR and PBS affiliates? Though flawed, badly funded and commercialized, CPB outlets are the material of an existing system that could - if under community control - be a new means for self-organization by diverse publics.

What do you think the priority is or should be for synergizing isolated community print, online, radio, PEG and other media producers into a new public system - creating a publicly controlled, radically reorganized, public media system that could enable social justice movements to change social conditions?

There are excellent reasons to conceive of network neutrality as a social justice issue. The Center for Media Justice made particularly important contributions to this understanding with their document "Network Neutrality, Universal Broadband, and Racial Justice," as did CMJ's Malkia Cyril and co-authors Joseph Torres and Chris Rabb with their statement, "The Internet Must Not Become a Segregated Community." Both works powerfully clarify that the Internet system envisioned by corporate and state officials would create first- and second-class Netizens. As the net neutrality struggle continues to demonstrate, diverse publics must communicate and act on their own behalf to establish and preserve a policy for digital technology based on equal access.

However, marginalized communities must not hope that a neutral Internet will build a media system to meet their needs. It is time to give up any remaining illusions of technological determinism. There is no political orientation inherent in technology - not even a neutral digital network. Only the creative labor of our communities and our movements can produce the spaces we need to collaboratively create new understandings of ourselves and our purposes; to communicate, coordinate and act. Lacking creative action by our communities and movements, universal broadband would only enable widespread access to a system dominated by the same corporate and racist forces that dominate the current system. After all, war and injustice continue irrespective of Facebook, Twitter and Digg. Though perhaps it seems obvious, it is crucial to remember that it was primarily the culture of the producers - not the users - that shaped the Internet medium (Castells, The Internet Galaxy, 2003).

Historically marginalized communities now, at this crucial juncture, could wield power as producers to shape the Internet into a new media network to increase equity in media access and political participation. Movements for media justice could struggle to develop the Internet as a platform where marginalized communities can speak to themselves and to wider audiences.

As the CMJ's statements on network neutrality and universal broadband remind us, social justice movements cannot simply trust professionals employed by either corporations or the state to decide which social groups get broadband access or what digital content we can access once online. That same critical logic applies to control over public media and public news production. Unfortunately, it is evident that professional journalists and their allies are organizing to create a revitalized public media system that they, state officials and corporate, elite, station trustees will largely control with little or no role for historically marginalized communities as decision makers or as content producers.

Professional news models of production are collapsing - or rather transforming. Professional journalists themselves are engaged in a desperate struggle to maintain their social position as elite interpreters of daily life through controlling access to the occupation of reporting. As professional journalists seek to reconstruct their gatekeeping authority over online news production, they are also rebuilding barriers to access that historically excluded people of color, the poor and working classes, political dissidents, LGBT communities, and other groups. In short, virtually every emerging model to "save journalism" presented by commercial - and public - media professionals (as well as some academics) reproduces old hierarchies that exclude disadvantaged communities from decision making.

For example, in December of 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held a workshop deep within the beltway titled "How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?" These meetings attempted to make sure that journalism's future will be market based. Of course, when market forces shape news production they inevitably shape the content and the political meaning of news. Renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow acknowledged as much when he warned, if "news is to be regarded as a commodity, only acceptable when saleable, then I don't care what you call it - I say it isn't news" (Speech to the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) convention, Chicago, 10/15/1958). Murrow's concern over corporate influence on news did not seem to be shared by the many FTC participants, who, instead, struggled to find ways that the government could help shore up the declining commodity value of news.

Even a workshop panel that explored noncommercial options, "Public- and Foundation-Funded Journalism," (starts at about the 1:18:00 mark here; transcript starts at page 23 here) raised little criticism of corporate influence on news production. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the panel also displayed some of the same exclusions that media activists have critiqued for years, namely a lack of diversity: seven white men, two white women, and one male of color. This translates to 90 percent white, 80 percent male. Lacking representatives from disenfranchised communities, and entertaining no questions from the audience, there was almost no consideration of the issues important to historically marginalized social groups. It was almost as if the panelists had never read the Carnegie Commission report that founded public broadcasting and were unaware of the central role it defined for such groups. The Carnegie report called for a system that will "bring into the home" people's "protests"; "provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard"; "increase our understanding of the world, of other nations and cultures, of the whole commonwealth of man"; and "help us to see America whole, in all its diversity."

This is not to say that the word "diversity" was missing from their vocabularies, but that they used the word in restricted ways. The panelists did support a greater diversity of audiences and content. Panelists also advocated for "technological diversity" and the need for government money to fund it, as well as the need for new productive relationships with software developers. But never did they consider the possibility that the diverse communities they view as audiences also have a legitimate role to play making decisions about public media. Nor did panelists consider opening up new productive relationships - and, thus, career paths - to historically marginalized communities.

There was a little critical discussion about the influence of powerful commercial or state funders, but there was virtually no discussion about the difficulty of making journalism accountable to diverse publics. Instead, some of the most powerful representatives of journalism on the panel argued that the old system simply "worked," and all that's needed is more public money for journalists and technology. The best kind of accountability, they claimed, was for journalists to govern themselves using professional ethics and a strong "firewall" between the newsroom and funding.

To most of us, a firewall is that impenetrable metal barrier that protects the driver and passengers in a car from a conflagration in the engine compartment. There is no such physical divide when it comes to news production, as evidenced by decades of academic research, the work of groups such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and common experience. Instead of the mythical firewall, a more honest depiction should acknowledge a historic and ongoing social struggle among publishers, journalists, designers, and powerful sources to shape the news to their own vision. Lacking power, disadvantaged communities are largely excluded from this struggle.

Panelist Jon McTaggart, the senior vice president & COO of American Public Media (producer of NPR's MarketPlace), said, "I think that any serious news organization has a fire wall in place where organizational funding is certainly distinct from the activities of the journalists themselves."

NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller went farther and argued that firewalls truly do provide genuine accountability: "Advertising subsidizes the newspaper and all commercial media. You know, does that mean that newspapers have pulled their punches about those advertisers? Certainly not." Astoundingly, she even claimed that there has never been "any instance in the history, at least, of NPR where a story has been slanted or, you know, favorable to a foundation funder."

Eric Newton, vice president of the journalism program at the Knight Foundation, also argued that the old system successfully held commercial news media accountable. "It's about professional ethics. And one of the great things about the commercial newspaper industry is how many hundreds of major newspapers have fantastic codes of ethics that they do hold each other accountable for and the professional organizations and journalism schools do hold them accountable." He even made false and misleading claims that libraries and schools rely on professional ethics and self-governance to be accountable to their communities. Citizens in voting booths looking at their ballots may disagree. Publicly elected boards often govern public libraries and schools.

Even Josh Silver, executive director of Free Press, did little to challenge the clearly self-serving assertions raised by news producers and industry representatives, but, instead, reinforced their frames and ideas. For example, his statement, "we have to know that the firewall is rock-solid" accepts that firewalls could actually be "rock-solid," that professional ethics and best practices could truly be a concrete substitute for public participation. Other statements he made further reinforced a conceptual division between expert professionals and the public, this time casting the FTC participants as legitimate decision makers over community needs: "[W]e need to figure out ... what do communities really need" so that "we" can "really engage the public." Who is this "we" that stands apart from the public, yet decides what that public truly needs?

As the only representative from a media activism movement on the panel, Silver should have defended public participation in the public media system. Instead, Silver's only suggestions for "structural change" were for better ombudsmen, a different appointment process for CPB board members and an abandonment of the appropriations process. But as none of these ideas expose professionals or officials to any meaningful consequences from diverse publics, these ideas would in fact continue to structure public media as a domain of elite control. These changes would, he said, help to insulate public media from too much politics - and on this point he has it all upside down. After all, limiting decision making over public media to officials and insiders is to ensure that it is their political culture that will shape the medium. Should not media justice and democracy activists instead increasingly expose public media to the politics of economic and racial justice and democratic participation?

We need a media system that is partial to justice and the health of our communities. The media justice community and its allies need to critically analyze proposals to remake public media - most importantly those from the Knight Foundation and from Schudson and Downie. Despite the claims of media professionals, industry reps, and some academics, we cannot leave the development of public media to their expertise alone. Professional journalists, corporations, and state officials seem poised to produce a system that represents the relationships they need - not what marginalized communities and social justice movements need. They will give us a marketplace of their ideas and call it just.

(This article was published 4/12/10 as an op-ed at the Editor & Publisher web site.)

We must first understand that the U.S. public media system has been purposefully and severely handicapped by the professional culture of journalism, and by corporate and government powers, and philanthropies, from the beginning. Only with this knowledge can we discover that the primary solution to this problem is not simply more money and technology for public media but rather the direct, democratic, community control of public media. Only with this knowledge can we take action to create a public media system that enables marginalized groups to speak to themselves and to wider audiences.

The ideal public service media system would be nonprofit, noncommercial, accountable and independent, available on multiple platforms, and require ubiquitous broadband and internet freedom. It would include public, educational and government access, community and low power radio, other community media centers, and community print and text, and have public and community media working together in new ways. Those who have historically subjugated U.S. public media have something else planned for us however. 

Professional control, corporate control, government control, and philanthropic control over public media in the U.S. together have created a system of social control and not one of social justice. I will offer governance models as solutions that I want you to keep in mind. I’ll focus on activism aimed at achieving community control over public media during two eras, 1920-1960 and 1960-present, and then upon today’s situation.

It is important to understand that by the time commercial radio gained dominance in the 1930s, journalists and publishers had won widespread acceptance of professional norms over independent news models. The journalists’ and publishers’ culture of “detached” “science” “without ideology” determined they would control media for generations.

It is crucial to recognize the racism in professional culture of the 1920’s and 30’s. Lagemann says the trustees of the Carnegie Corporation worried about and financed eugenics projects intended to help preserve the racial purity of American Society. They were convinced of the superiority of the white Anglo-Saxon “race” and were determined to preserve this nowhere more than in the “public profession of the law”. This is the same foundation that helped shape U.S. media at every key step and whose 1967 report led to the creation of U.S. public broadcasting.

The 1927 Radio Act created the Federal Radio Commission, which shoved educational stations around the dial as a cop would a vagrant, and slashed their power allotments. 128 educational stations in 1925 fell to 48 in 1930. Those left got daytime hours only.

NBC parent RCA, and CBS, in collusion with the Carnegie Corporation and J.P. Rockefeller, created the National Advisory Council on Radio Education in 1930, which advised educators to work with (surrender to?) the networks. Other educators formed the National Committee on Education by Radio, a vanguard attempting to establish a U.S. broadcasting system with the nonprofit and noncommercial sector dominant. The passage of the 1934 Radio Act was both a complete defeat of public media in the U.S. and an archetype for media governance extending to the present.

Another path was possible. In the mid-1930’s, the French government decreed each community with a state owned station would hold an annual meeting to elect a community council of program management. All persons who owned radio sets and had paid the use tax would be eligible to participate.

In 1946, pacifist Lewis Hill incorporated what became the independent Pacifica radio network, a pioneer in listener-supported radio. During the 1950’s however, the only new educational radio licenses authorized by the FCC were for itty-bitty ten-watt stations. No educators initially accepted the FCC’s 1948 invitation to request tv channels. In 1952, the FCC reserved 242 for education. By 1960, only 1/5th were in use.

Surprisingly, there was no grassroots struggle for public tv channels or funding for public tv or radio. The prime movers of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 were educational broadcasters, the Carnegie Corporation, Ford Foundation, the Johnson administration, commercial networks, AT&T, media union officials, and some academics. Virtually 100% absent from the 1967 testimony in the House and Senate were diverse and marginalized groups advocating for civil rights, peace, the environment, the poor, and so on. Professionals and elites made a severely handicapped, small system that they could control. The handful of letters from the public in the legislative record show the people felt a government propaganda machine was being shoved down their throats. They were right.

From the start, public broadcasting was unambiguously part of the military-industrial complex. Carnegie Commission chairman James Killian was Kennedy’s chief intelligence advisor and held top posts at MIT, GM, and AT&T; Killian didn’t want public broadcasting to have independent, permanent funding. The first chair of the CPB was General Frank Pace, former army secretary, nuclear weapon technology pioneer, and head of General Dynamics. Yes, even Sesame Street co-founder Joan Ganz Cooney had worked at the US Information Agency, the government propaganda office.

Similar links occur at elite neo-liberal philanthropies, including major early public broadcasting funder the Ford Foundation. Its co-founder Henry Ford’s Nazi ties have been researched in depth elsewhere and its history of collaboration and interlock with the CIA is almost as well known. More obscured is the fact that the first head of the Ford Foundation’s Fund for Adult Education was the president of Shell Oil and that later, in 1965, Shell became public tv’s first “enhanced underwriter.” It is also important to point out that the Ford Foundation has been linked in the past by researchers to CIA and CIA-like projects including the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Student Association, and (along with the Carnegie Corporation) the CIA-founded African-American Institute, a group active on campuses in Africa.

In 1972, African Americans picketed outside a CPB board meeting because only 7 of 887 NPR station managers were black. In 1975, women’s groups, people of color, labor and others successfully fought Nixon’s nomination of conservative funder and John Birch pamphleteer Joseph Coors to the CPB. Nixon’s disdain for public broadcasting is widely understood, but less known is the fact that activists worked very hard in the 1970’s to correct public broadcasting’s serious shortcomings.

Filmmaker DeeDee Halleck and physicist Larry Hall organized The National Task Force for Public Broadcasting in the late 1970’s. They characterized public broadcasting as a system closed to creative staff, independent producers, and interested citizens. It assembled the powerful grass roots coalition missing from the 1967 deliberations. Its most significant victories were requirements for open meetings and access to records. Similar movements emerged in Boston, New York, St. Louis, and Washington D.C. and addressed lack of diversity on boards, neglect of local programming, censorship of controversial programming, under-representation of minorities in employment and programming, and insufficient citizen participation generally.

1978’s A Public Trust: The Report of the Carnegie Commission on the Future of Public Broadcasting called for public involvement in station governance, mixed boards with staff appointed and elected seats, and funding from spectrum fees. Congress and the FCC ignored these, its most important recommendations.

President Reagan and the Congress imposed major cuts to CPB. The Cable Act of 1984, befitting its Orwellian year, gave municipalities the right to request funding for public access channels but Aufderheide tells us that by 1990 only 17% of cable systems actually had public access channels. The unrelenting campaign by cable companies and municipalities against community television would have had far worse consequences were it not for activist organizing to save public access (PEG).

That’s where my personal story begins. I became an active community tv producer in Evanston, Illinois in the mid-eighties, co-creating a progressive news program. But the cable provider wanted to eliminate our access. My co-producer and I were banned — almost permanently. Instead of walking away, I organized for an independent democratic governance structure, akin to the models forged earlier in Canada and elsewhere, and helped carry the nonprofit Evanston Community Media Center through the legislative course — and we won. I know how that’s done. In the process, I was threatened with arrest several times and arrested for loitering.

Congress heard the complaints of independent producers in 1987 when it directed the CPB to establish the Independent Television Service to address the concerns of minorities and working people. Activism increased in the 1990’s in Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Phoenix, and elsewhere. I led Chicago efforts, which included a large coalition to press for programming and structural reforms. We increased the diversity of Chicago public tv station WTTW’s trustees, but the lock local elites have on the station is formidable. An FCC warning concerning home shopping with my name on it was cited in an FCC fine levied against WTTW for airing commercials — the first and only such fine ever involving a large public tv station.

More recently, Chicago Media Action activists issued a study of WTTW’s nightly news show that swept out three elite news execs. And while co-panelist Cass Sunstein nodded in approval at a 2005 event, I told the entire public broadcasting system that it had failed on the run up to the Iraq invasion. We’ve sought wider distribution of “Democracy Now!”, and advocated for Chicago Access Network TV, low power radio, and other needs. A critical public radio fight holds the remaining key we need.

In 1999, the CPB insisted Pacifica radio centralize and be more secretive. Program hosts and the station manager at Berkeley’s KPFA were fired. A network gag rule was implemented. Listeners issued thousands of protests. In June 1999, activists who staged a sit-in at Pacifica’s offices were arrested and charged with trespassing. In July, a Pacifica veteran was physically removed by guards in the middle of a broadcast. Some 400 staged a sit-in. 53 were arrested. Next, some 10-15,000 rallied and a lawsuit was filed.

Pacifica ‘s struggle created a governance model of great importance. Today, 2/3 of each Pacifica station board is member elected using instant runoff voting and proportional representation. The remainder are staff appointed. The station boards select the national board. This structure is unique and, on this scale, unprecedented. But virtually no other models of direct action aimed at public media in the U.S. have been found — to date.

So the early movement to create community controlled public media in the U.S. failed miserably. Then the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation and U.S. government funded and shaped public media to their purposes. Since, corporations have dominated it. Now, some tell us that new funding and technology will fix it.

The rotary press, telegraph, radio, and tv were each proclaimed to be democratic when first introduced; it may be easy to speak in cyberspace, but it remains difficult to be heard. That fact will not change until we win the capacity to shape at least the public part of that system, as it is vulnerable to sustained local organizing in ways that commercial media is not.

To be very clear, social justice movements need a radically re-envisioned U.S. public service media system that would be almost unrecognizable alongside the current version. Public service media’s governance could resemble Pacifica’s, the French model, public access models, or the publicly elected boards of many public schools, public libraries, community colleges, and public utilities. Gale research says about 94% of Americans living in school districts elect their public school trustees. But 0% of Americans watching or listening to CPB funded outlets — except the five owned by Pacifica — have any direct say about the selection of public station trustees. 

Public media elites offer us a “partnership” in which they’re the parents and we’re the children, anxiously waiting with our bibs on for our media to be spoon fed to us. Unless we change this power relationship, we will remain subject to the arbitrary dominance of wealthy, racist, militarists shaping new technologies to sustain their power.

Democratic participation in civic and cultural media production only happens when the powerless can speak to themselves and to wider audiences. The oppressed and marginalized have a rare historic opportunity to wholly re-envision our public service media system. We could use it to create stories, produce culture, and change conditions.

Will we? 

- – - – -

Scott Sanders has co-founded a number of media activist organizations including Chicago Media Action, and led efforts to constitute public community media centers with member elected boards and to increase diversity on non-elected public media boards. He also led campaigns resulting in the only FCC fine of a major public tv station concerning commercialism. He is a video documentarian and periodicals and technology librarian producing research for MMTC, MAP, and the University of Chicago, and author of articles for Truthout, Counterpunch, Z magazine, FAIR Extra!, and a number of daily newspapers.

For part I of this series see: http://www.media-alliance.org/article.php?id=1908

MA started a new twice-monthly show on public access television on media democracy and media justice. Watch the videos! Hour-long version is in the works.

December 17, 2009 Subject: Citizen Journalism and Oakland Local Guest: Kwan Booth  Watch

December 3, 2009 Subject: Media Alliance and the Changing Nature of Media Advocacy Guest: Tracy Rosenberg, Media Alliance  Watch

November 19th, 2009 Subject: Net Neutrality and The Battle for an Open Internet Future Guest:Regina Costa, TURN  Watch

November 5th, 2009 Subject: Proposition 8, The Media and the LGBT Community Guest: Juan Barajas, Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Watch 

October 15th, 2009 Subject: One Web Day Guest: Nathan James, Executive Director Onewebday.org Watch

October 1st, 2009 Subject: Media Coverage of ACORN Guest: Richard Hopson, ACORN Watch

September 17th, 2009 Subject: Community Radio and Media Democracy: KPFA Elections Guest: Henry Norr Watch

September 3rd, 2009 Subject: SF Hate Speech Resolution Guest: Aurora Grajeda, Hispanic/Latino Anti-Defamation Coalition Watch

August 20, 2009 Subject: The Loss of Public Affairs in Broadcast Television Guest: Jackie Wright Watch

August 6, 2009 Subject: The Allied Media Conference Guest: Shanina Shumate, TEMPO - Technological and Media Empowerment Project in Oakland Watch

July 30, 2009 Subject: Public Access in San Francisco Guest: Ron Vincent, City of San Francisco Watch

July 16, 2009 Subject: Media Coverage of Iranian Election Guest: Roshan Pourabdollah - United for Iran Northern California Watch

July 2, 2009 Subject: The Media and Male Body Image Guest: Tommy Morahan, San Francisco State University Watch

All shows produced by Lars Aaberg with assistance from Alfred Kielwasser and Oriana Saportas. Thanks to Arnel Valle and Chris Ferrejohn with SF Commons/Access and Howard Vicini.

Based upon comments delivered on June 24, 2010 at the U.S. Social Forum workshop, “Control of Public Media as a Social Justice Issue: Lessons from the U.S. and Latin America.”

Who produces media systems? Answering that question is the only way to understand the culture and politics that such systems will reproduce. If communities in struggle seek to survive and build movements for justice we must win two essential communicative capacities: the capacity to communicate with each other and the capacity to communicate our perspectives across society. No community can effectively reproduce culture or defend its material conditions if it lacks the abilities to communicate internally as well as to project their perspectives externally.

To enable communication between, and therefore strengthen, movements in the U.S. and the Global South we need movement-based media producers organized in a network. In order to participate in and co-produce that network we need to strengthen local movement-based media by increasing its relevance to local community life. Lastly, to communicate movement perspectives across society we need to claim the right to participate in governing local public media outlets. That means organizing to demand and win democratically elected boards at publicly supported television and radio stations, especially PBS and NPR stations in the U.S.

Today we see professional journalists poised to claim control over a technologically and financially rejuvenated multi-media public broadcasting system. Can a professionally controlled system provide the communicative capacity our movements so desperately need? Professional journalists are themselves in a life or death battle to save their jobs – and as they describe it, their job is to produce the quality journalism that democracy itself depends on. However, the fact that professional journalists turn to democracy activists to help them “save the news” (the name of FreePress’s project) shows that journalism depends on democracy –  the kind of democracy that unfolds from organized citizen’s actions. Journalism practitioners rarely acknowledge this fact, because it indicates that despite professional methods, training, and ethics, news production remains situated in politics and culture. I am going to briefly describe these political and cultural conditions and argue that professional journalists and administrators are not fit to control public media systems in the U.S. or elsewhere.

The culture of professionalism – its learned values, identities, and purposes – orients practitioners to serve the perceived needs of their profession; that is, to defend the interests and relationships the profession depends on.  The consequence, in the case of journalism, is that journalists produce news that accords representation to the social order that maintains journalists’ social position as professionals. A different culture of direct participation has emerged from peoples movements and community radio projects in Honduras, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Albuquerque, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Greece, and elsewhere. These social movements seek to transform the existing social order to promote human rights, self-government, sustainable and shared management of environments and resources, and respect for plurality. In the words of Sub-Commandante Marcos, these movements share a commitment to “Dignity,” which he defines as “a house that includes the Other and Ourselves . . . a world where many worlds fit.”  Unlike professional culture, cultures of direct participation orient members to serve community needs over individual careers and to share resources and responsibilities rather than accumulate personal prestige.

To understand the vital necessity for dispossessed communities to take decision making over media systems away from professional journalists and administrators it is also necessary to examine professionalism’s historical origins. Professionalism emerged in the US and Europe as a social response to the rise of industrial capitalism in the 19^th century. New divisions of labor and centralized production transformed agrarian and immigrant communities into an urban working class. For subsistence wages, unskilled workers endured menial factory labor under desperately inhumane working conditions. Professionalism emerged from the attempts by working class people to escape those conditions and the efforts of academic institutions to become the central means to attain middle-class wealth and social standing. Aspiring professionals modeled themselves on specialized workers, such as doctors, lawyers, chemists, who by the mid-1800s won increased prestige and income through formal training in scientific discourses and methods. They constituted new collective agency by creating associations of practitioners.

Professionalism was a social movement to adapt to, not resist, the division of labor imposed by the industrial revolution. Professionals who sought occupational and personal improvement tended to conceive of democracy as a system of individual rights in which freedom consists of opportunities for personal advancement up an established social ladder. Professionalized occupations construct their authority over social systems by using scientific and liberal discourses to claim the mantle of “objectivity” for themselves and represent non-professional cultures as partial or biased.  To access professionally controlled systems thus requires other cultures to portray themselves, their perspectives, and causes in a ‘professional’ manner. Professional culture thus demands uniformity while portraying itself as a form of pluralism.

The power of professional culture to re-orient adherents to conservative political practices is all the more compelling in the case of journalism, where many aspiring news workers enter the field seeking not to defend the status quo but to defend the capacity of the powerless to hold the powerful in check. Nonetheless, cultural values such as impartiality and objectivity pressure journalists and administrators to detach themselves from social justice movements and rationalize the profession’s exclusive claim on news production.

In contrast to the claims of some journalists and academics, journalism did not always exist in some form at all times of human history. Rather, it emerged from the historically specific conditions of 19^th century industrial capitalism, shaped by the period’s increased commercialization, complex production machinery, and division of labor – in this case the rise of specialized roles for reporters, writers, editors, and other news workers. Journalism properly speaking, the set of special occupations required to generate and distribute news content beginning in the era of the industrial press of the mid to late nineteenth century.

The project of professionalizing journalism was itself political. Beginning in the 1850s,journalists organized into associations to lobby government officials to establish programs of journalism in state universities. For example, press associations influenced the Illinois governor and legislature to create the journalism program at the University of Illinois. At the same time, publishers directly engaged private universities to found schools of journalism, often providing large endowments and dictating the framework for study.  Joseph Pulitzer accompanied his 1902 proposal for a college of journalism at Columbia University with a $2M endowment; the program opened in 1912 based on Pulitzer’s own pedagogies.  As journalism scholar James Carey describes them, such “schools of journalism . . . were less attempts to educate for a profession, than to call one into existence.” The attempts worked:  journalism gained social recognition as a profession between WWI and WWII.

Not only was the professionalization of journalism a political accomplishment, it was a means to political power. Professionalized news production enabled journalists to construct new social authority for themselves, new credibility for the news they produced, while increasing the commodity value of news for publishers. Institutions of news publishers and press associations relied on the discourse of professionalism to negotiate and claim power in their contestory but symbiotic relationship: Journalists relied on the monopoly power of the newspaper to establish and defend the authority of the profession  while news corporations used professionalism to control journalists.

Journalists’ new social authority thus depended not only on the power of news corporations but on the broader material relationships that enabled that corporate power. Intentionally or not, news professionals subsist in a symbiotic relationship with elites, officials, and corporate owners. These dependencies encourage journalists to use their gatekeeping and interpretive practices to reflect the needs of the powerful social forces that sustain the profession. There is ample evidence to support this point: Over the 100 years from 1900-2000, journalists spoke more while all sources spoke less, reports focused less on events and more on interpretation, and stories increasingly originated from official and PR entities.

While public perception of news credibility increased from the 1930s-1970s, it has fallen ever since, along with audiences. Creative human labor focused more on digital technologies that further fragmented the gate-keeping power of professional media managers. Journalists are now attempting to recreate their gate-keeping power in the online world. As Washington Post Senior Editor Leonard Downie explained it to Frontline:

This is just a new technology, a new technological form of citizen participation . . . But the important thing is: Label the professional stuff; label the stuff that’s not professional; and have certain filters, even for the non-professional stuff. So we don’t let people libel people online or use the wrong language online, a variety of ways in which you kind of police the citizen participation.

Professional journalists are now organizing to control the next generation of public media in the U.S. They continue to use the discourse of professionalism to rationalize their claims over the CPB system, depicting themselves as immune to influence by the corporate funders they depend on.  In a December 2009 Federal Trade Commission workshop on journalism and public media, NPR President and CEO Vivian Schiller stated, “Advertising subsidizes the newspaper and all commercial media. You know, does that mean that newspapers have pulled their punches about those advertisers? Certainly not.” Astoundingly, she even claimed that there has never been “any instance in the history, at least, of NPR where a story has been slanted or, you know, favorable to a foundation funder.”

Others argue that professionalism already provides sufficient accountability. On the same FTC panel, the vice president of the Knight Foundation’s journalism program stated, “one of the great things about the commercial newspaper industry is how many hundreds of major newspapers have fantastic codes of ethics that they do hold each other accountable.” Note that he said they hold each other accountable – a reminder that professional journalism offers no mechanism for audiences to hold practitioners or publishers to account.

Sadly, some activist organizations, most prominently FreePress, have devoted themselves to helping professional journalists to control public media. Meanwhile, Social justice movements don’t have a dog in the fight. Fortunately, struggles in Latin American exemplify the power of social justice movements to lay claim to, and sometimes win, increased control over the means of communication. Latin American journalists and publishers followed the U.S. model for professionalization during the 1930s. However, through local struggles and with the aid of international funders, Latin American producers and activists created alternatives to professionalism.

Projects funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in the 1950s and 60s greatly expanded access to equipment and training and may have created temporary material support for journalists to ally with popular struggles against military dictatorships. Some journalists sacrificed their relationships with the powerful to cover the stories of the liberation movements, in the process entrusting their own lives and futures to the fate of those movements.

During the 1980s, UNESCO also provided funding for Latin American indigenous radio and video production. In Columbia, Mexico, Brazil and elsewhere, years of activism by indigenous communities and media reform and human rights groups yielded legislative reforms that recognized both the collective rights of indigenous peoples and the right to create and receive communication. In some of these cases, activists even won government funding for local- or indigenous-controlled media centers that then become the locus of new battles. La lucha continúa.

Struggles for community controlled media in Latin America express recognition that creating media is part of the process of creating cultural practices and shaping social life. Therefore, diverse communities must themselves participate in producing both media content and systems in order to survive. The culture of professionalism, with its values of expert control and technical perfection, refuses to acknowledge these facts, instead casting marginalized communities’ efforts to shape media as inappropriate attempts to bias the independence of the press. Professional culture obligates producers seeking professional credibility to ‘distance’ themselves from those they cover and to fulfill high production aesthetics that signify news commodity value.

The goal of social justice movements should not be state-of-the-art mastery over these techniques and technologies, but rather the creation of “citizens’ media” (in Clemencia Rodriguez’s terms): a new communication order that enables the powerless to shape media production, to use it to produce cultures of direct participation, and in so doing to constitute a new social force. To borrow from the ideals of filmmaker Garcia Espinoza, ‘any attempt to match the perfection of commercial journalism contradicts the implicit objective of a revolutionary journalism – that is, the call for an active and participatory audience.’  I can only add that active audiences are not only the goal of a democratic media system but the means to it as well.

James Owens is an organizer, media coordinator and researcher active in movements for human rights and against war. His master’s thesis researched the racial and economic politics of professional journalism. He authored “Chicago Tonight: Elites, Affluence, and Advertising” (Extra!), “Mumia Abu-Jamal: The ABC Hatchet Job” (CovertAction Quarterly)), and co-authored “Journalism” for the International Encyclopedia of Communication. He also co-founded peace and media organizations, including Chicago Media Action.

The nature of non-profit journalism invites ethical dilemmas.

Over the past few years, dozens of centers of investigative journalism and non-profit websites have been started using money from foundations, individual donors and membership fees. The latest trend is non-profit networks that share resources.

Collaboration is a good thing, but it can lead to tensions among collaborators.

How can such centers and networks, with their many types of journalists, agree on editorial standards and practices? How can non-profit enterprises be independent if they are closer to, and more dependent on, a small number of supporters? This puts power in the hands of donors.

To avoid the problems and scandals that have rocked mainstream media, the non-profit sector will have to be smarter about its ethics. But how?

A Growing Concern

Many of the journalists who have spent the last few years starting non-profit centers of journalism are increasingly concerned about emerging ethical issues.

Brant Houston, Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois, is a leading figure in the "new models" movement. In a recent article, Houston described the rise of domestic and international non-profit networks, such as the Investigative News Network.

He writes:

As newspapers and other journalism institutions falter, networks of investigative and alternative newsrooms are rising up, sharing resources and finding ways to more widely distribute their work...The result is they are working on stories ranging from homeland security to campus assaults to human trafficking.

Sounds positive. Exciting.

Yet Houston also knows that ethics should not be ignored. He thinks INN members need a thoughtful approach to a range of issues, from defining network membership to "questions on funding and supporters." The network has established a permanent membership and standards committee to deal with ethical concerns.

For Houston, investigative news networks, given their visibility and influence, "should represent the highest professional standards in reporting, editing, and ethical conduct. One idea is to have periodic reviews of networks by experienced investigative journalists."

Adopting a Code

Andy Hall is a leader in non-profit centers for investigative journalism. Hall is director of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. Hall's center adopted the code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists. But he is anxious to examine more specific issues that go beyond the general principles of the SPJ code.

In conversations with me, Hall categorized the issues into several kinds, which include:

> Agenda-setting and advocacy
> Conflicts of interest
> Fundraising

The issues of agenda-setting and advocacy challenge the new investigative centers because their journalists come from many traditions -- from impartial reporting, advocacy journalism and investigative journalism. In an eclectic newsroom, will objectivity and fairness be major values? How will editors draw the line between engaged reporting and partisan advocacy?

If non-profit journalists promote social reform, should the public worry about the agendas of these journalists or their funders? In non-profit journalism, even the attempt to define one's journalism as "non-partisan" can be contentious.

Multiple Conflicts

The potential for conflicts of interest in non-profit journalism is high because, as mentioned, the journalists are dependent on relatively few funders. The old adage that whoever pays the piper calls the tune is a warning for any form of journalism.

It is encouraging to see non-profit news sites support editorial independence. Andrew Donohue, editor of Voice of San Diego, said his site has not experienced problems with donors.

"Not everyone knows the rules of journalism, but if you're very clear and open with funders about your rules, you should be all right," he said in an interview with Poynter. "Funders don't have special access to reporters, don't control what stories get written and don't say how the stories are written."

I hope Donohue's good luck with donors continues.

For non-profits, the line between funder and journalist is a wandering boundary that is difficult to honor. For example, how should editors handle stories involving a non-profit's donor or its journalistic collaborator?

Take the Money and Run?

Consider questions about fundraising. Should non-profit newsrooms accept money from corporations, foundations, unions, or government? If you think foundations are appropriate funders, will you take money from any foundation? Does it matter if the funder is on the extreme left or right politically? Should newsrooms take the money and run?

Fundraising leads to questions of transparency. How open should non-profit organizations be about their sources of money? Already, there is disagreement. Many networks, like the INN, are committed to transparency. But not all.

For example, the Sam Adams Alliance wants to create a conservative non-profit network in the United States under the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. The Franklin Center states on its website that it supports transparency in government, but not transparency about its own donors. "The Franklin Center protects the identification of its generous donors and ensures anonymity of all contributions."

As a result, Houston said, one state group formed under the Franklin Center, the Illinois Statehouse News, "has been denied a spot in the Illinois capitol press bureau and is regarded with suspicion by the press."

What's to Be Done?

The nature of non-profit journalism means that new ethical policies and standards should be created and enforced. Adherence to these standards should be open to public scrutiny.

Leaders in the non-profit area need to start an intense round of discussions aiming to lay down ethical foundations for this form of journalism. The discussions should culminate in the articulation of principles and the development of manuals of best practice.

Given their expertise in online media, non-profit centers have a unique opportunity to introduce new and interactive means by which the public can comment on and monitor editorial decisions. Non-profit centers can be pioneers in media accountability and transparency.

If non-profit leaders do not take advantage of this historical opportunity to create an ethic, they will regret it. Today, many people support these experiments. But this support will dissipate if experimenters do not show a greater concern for ethics than some of their predecessors in mainstream news media.

Declining public confidence in news media will be extended to these new journalists on the block if non-profit leaders do not put transparent ethical policies into place.