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Journalism union chief scores U.S. military for attitude about killing of journalists, conservative blogosphere picks up her remarks

UPDATE: 05-19-2005, 12:57 EDT --

Sinclair Broadcast Group commentator Mark Hyman on Wednesday featured Foley's remarks. Hyman's broadcast  was picked up and turned into a news story at TownHall.ORG, the aggregation website started by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Here is a link the the underlying source: the audio MP3 file of what Foley said, in context.

original story below filed 05-13-2005 at 5:15 p.m.

By Bill Densmore
The Media Girafffe Project

The president of the largest union representing American journalists is criticizing the U.S. military for not paying enough attention to the killing of journalists.

“The brutality and the cavalier nature of the attitude of the U.S. military to the killing of journalists is just a scandal,” Linda K. Foley said during a panel at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis. She said the U.S. military targets the studios of non-American media,  and destroys them “with impunity.”

   

Foley also told the panel audience that research studies are finding that years of shrinking newsrooms at the nation’s newspapers has taken a toll. “There is much less passion among the reporters who are left,” she said, and less willingness to do reporting that may place reporters at odds with management . . . “[t]hey want to make a difference. They don’t like working under these circumstances. It’s terrible. It is very, very frustrating.”      

Journalists are being targeted in a political and professional sense, added Foley. They are targeted “from the right of the political spectrum, blamed for many ills they just report on.”  She said that targeting is unfair.

“What is happening in the media is not the fault of individual journalists,” she added. “What’s wrong is there is a systematic corporate dissolution of what we know as credible reporting and journalism and that is what is wrong and what we have to fight.” 

Moyers rallies media reformers to support public media, PBS

Posted by Bill Densmore
The Media Giraffe Project

ST. LOUIS, Mo.,  (May 15, 2005) -- Author Bill Moyers served notice on Sunday that, six months after his retirement from the "NOW with Bill Moyers" program,  conservative attacks on the Public Broadcasting Service "might compel me back out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair."

In a jarringly personal, hour-long recounting [DOWNLOAD MP3 AUDIO] of alleged political interference in PBS by Corporation for Public Broadcasting board Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson, Moyers called the fight to preserve the political independence of PBS "too important . . . too dangerous" not to be addressed. He said it is critical to continue to focus on keeping the press independent of government.

(LINK: Text of Moyers' speech via Democracy NOW! website)

Moyers, former host of the PBS series “NOW with Bill Moyers”,  spoke on the final day of the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis, a confab of more than 2,000 citizens from 50 states and eight nations. In interviews, attendeeds said they are concerned about what they perceive as lack of coverage of important issues by the nation’s television, newspaper and radio outlets, and policy moves which they fear may restrict public use of the airwaves and the Internet.

"One of the reasons I am in hot water is because I and some of my colleagues didn't play by the rules of the beltway," said Moyers.  " . . . The rules of the game leave Washington officials to set the agenda of journalism."

Moyers said, there are still people within mainstream media trying to do a good job.  But he said the Internet is the real hope for the future of public information.  Said Moyers: "The fight to preserve the web from corporate gatekeepers ....  it is a fight that has only just begun."

Quoting from George Orwell,  Moyers said a public which lacks information "is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical."

Earlier, in his closing talk rallying more than 2,000 attendees, event organizer John Nichols of the group Free Press described the event as the beginning of a movement, not just a conference. He was joined at the podium by Chellie Pingree, president of Common Cause, the non-partisan, Washington, D.C., lobby which has made media reform its primary focus.

“ . . . [I]t is about creating a movement,” said Pingree. “It is a battle about our democracy and who will control access to information in this democracy. . . this is a fight about everything we care about, it is a fight we cannot afford to lose. And we’re not going to.”

Free Press organizers urged conference attendees to go home and join local-reform efforts, whether advocating low-power FM stations, community-wireless systems or other projects.  They also asked activists to promote a “Media Bill of Rights” unveiled May 9 by a coalition of groups. The document has been endorsed by 115 groups representing 20 million Americans gathered as the Media and Democracy Coalition.

“There are millions of Americans who are furious with the media, but they don’t know what to do,” said Amanda Ballantyne, education director for Free Press. “We need to give those people the tools they need to fight back . . . Big media has the money, but we have the numbers and when we combine we are more powerful than all of Rupert Murdoch’s money and all of Rupert Murdoch’s lobbyist.”

LINKS:
Raw Story website version: http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Former_PBSer_Bill_Moyers_rebukes_criticism_that_network_is_liberal;_Slams_radical_right_Judith__05_15_2005_1029pm.html
Bill Moyers bio:  http://provost.syr.edu/lectures/moyers.asp
Media Bill of Rights: http://www.citizensmediarights.org/
CommonCause: http://www.citizensmediarights.org/

http://www.media-alliance.org/medianews/archives/001170.php

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Other conference blog coverage -- HERE.
Link to upcoming STREAMING AUDIO/VIDEO.
Link to Democracy Now! story on community broadband.
Link to Pacifica Foundation's coverage of St. Louis conference.
Link to daily Media Minutes audio reports on the conference -- HERE.

OTHER LINKS:
Institute for Public Accuracy links to available media-reform contacts:
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=1048

MORE COVERAGE: From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. . . . 
                               From MediaChannel's Danny Schecter . . .
                               From Be the Media blog . . .

Other conference blog coverage -- HERE.
Link to upcoming STREAMING AUDIO/VIDEO.
Link to Democracy Now! story on community broadband.
Link to Pacifica Foundation's coverage of St. Louis conference.
Link to daily Media Minutes audio reports on the conference -- HERE.

OTHER LINKS:
Institute for Public Accuracy links to available media-reform contacts:
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=1048

MORE COVERAGE: From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. . . . 
                               From MediaChannel's Danny Schecter . . .
                               From Be the Media blog . . .

Journalists suggests solutions for media crisis; website for un-reported stories

A website or other resource which would research and publicize stories which aren’t making it into established newspapers was suggested today during a caucus of some 100 journalists.

The journalists caucused in a moderated session at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis.  The session was moderated by Linda Foley, president of the The Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America.

Jessica Lee, a writer at Arizona Indymedia in Tucson, Ariz., urged fellow reporters who are having trouble getting stories printed or broadcast to contact their local Indymedia organization and offer the story to them. “The commercial media is paying attention to Indy Media,” said Lee. “The New York Times and the Washington Post picks up stories from Indymedia. “If you face a brick wall, publish to our sites first and then go to your newspaper so it can get onto two sites, but your newspaper won’t take control of your story,” said Lee.

Lee’s suggestion was picked up by other commentators during the 90-minute give-and-take session, including Roldo Bartimole, a newsletter writer from Cleveland Heights, Ohio. “Undermine those people that are stopping you. Undermine them by telling your story.”

“I’d like to second, or third the motion to create a place where you put all the things,” said Brecken Chinn Swartz, a TV producer at the Voice of America.  “This could become a very exciting thing.” 

Journalists need to support each other, said Foley. “When there are stories about media diversity that need reporting, make sure they get in print. We should get stories about media atrocities or media grievances aired or run.”  And when journalists are ganged up upon by people in power, including politicians, “we need to support them.”

“The vast majority of our peers working at corporate daily newspapers are not here,” said Matt Peiken, an arts and feature writer at the St. Paul [Minn.] Pioneer Press, a Knight Ridder Corp.-owned daily. “A lot of reporters and a lot of editors are afraid,” said Peiken. “We need to go back to our newsrooms and tell people about this conference and the possibilities out there of what we could be doing.”  Peiken said reporters should not be afraid to take positions in stories that are values based, not politically partisan. “Journalism is now being driven by profit, it is not being driven by the story.”

“I don’t think we as writers are having a problem coming up with these issues,” said a California based reporter. She said the problem was that editors don’t want to run the stories.

Linda Chue, of the Independent Press Association, asked how many journalists in the room had dropped their membership in the Society of Professional Journalists.  “I am profounded disturbed that SPJ is not taking any kind of leadership position on these issues that we are facing," she said, asking others with similar concerns to speak with her.

Michael Stoll, of the Grade the News project in San Francisco, urged journalists to be open to criticism. “There is a lot of defensiveness from journalists from anybody coming from the outside and criticizing,” Stoll said. “There is a sense that this is a fraternity that we all have to circle the wagons and defend ourselves from these non-journalists. I think that is the wrong attitude and most of you don’t have that attitude coming to a conference like this. Don’t be a defensive when a blogger calls you up and says ‘I want to talk to you about what you wrote.’ There are all these horrible stories about what owners are doing to beat back journalism. Don’t be silent about it. Leak it to a blogger.”

Sandra Padgett, of Defuniak Springs, Fla., described herself as a non-journalist but an active Democrat who became enraged by what she saw as partisan coverage in her community’s newspaper. She said she and other Democrats began boycotting the newspaper’s major advertisers. Three of them are nearly out of business now, and “eventually I will buy his paper,” she said. “That is the way to hurt them.”

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Other conference blog coverage -- HERE.
Link to upcoming STREAMING AUDIO/VIDEO.
Link to Democracy Now! story on community broadband.
Link to Pacifica Foundation's coverage of St. Louis conference.
Link to daily Media Minutes audio reports on the conference -- HERE.

OTHER LINKS:
Institute for Public Accuracy links to available media-reform contacts:
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=1048

MORE COVERAGE: From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. . . . 
                               From MediaChannel's Danny Schecter . . .
                               From Be the Media blog . . .

LINKS: Blogs, streaming video of media-reform conference

Other conference blog coverage -- HERE.
Link to upcoming STREAMING AUDIO/VIDEO.
Link to Democracy Now! story on community broadband.
Link to Pacifica Foundation's coverage of St. Louis conference.
Link to daily Media Minutes audio reports on the conference -- HERE.

OTHER LINKS:
Institute for Public Accuracy links to available media-reform contacts:
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=1048

MORE COVERAGE: From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. . . . 
                               From MediaChannel's Danny Schecter . . .
                               From Be the Media blog . . .

Give us reality, Sanders tells media, asking reformers to lobby publishers, broadcasters -- and advertisers

U.S. Rep. Bernard Sanders says reformers need to prevail upon America’s media to report the reality of the “collapse of the middle class” and other issues which are at the center of the lives of 60 million working-class Americans. Otherwise, Sanders told attendees to the National Conference for Media Reform, mainstream Americans won’t understand that their problems are political problems, not personal problems.

Sanders joined three other congressmen today on a panel, “Citizen Pressure and Media Policy – Tips from Legislatures.”  He said activists should talk to publishers, broadcasters and advertisers to ask that reality be covered. Joining Sanders on the panel were Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., and Rep. Diane Watson, D-Calif.  "Do that hard work of knocking on doors and talking to everybody in your community," added Sanders.

Hinchey noted formation on Thursday of the Future of American Media Caucus , highlighted at a Washington news conference.  It includes 12 Democrats in the House, plus Sanders, who is an independent from Vermont. 

“Now we have to go back and do the real work," said Hinchey. "We have to put this message on the table everywhere in America. Everyone has got to assume a larger leadership role. We are not going to stop illegal wars without an honest and true media, or solve the problems of health care without an honest and true media.”

Sanders said media managers “have decided the Michael Jackson trial is one of the significant events of our time,”  said Sanders. “And if it is not Michael Jackson, it is some poor woman who decided not to get married.”  But far more important than what “corporate media” covers is what it does not cover, said Sanders. 

“The No. 1 issue is the collapse of the middle class,” said Sanders.  During an explosion of technology and productivity, said Sanders, “the reality today is the average American worker is working more hours for lower pay than they did 30 years ago.” He continued: “A two-worker family today has less disposable income than a one-worker family did 30 years ago.”   

Continued Sanders: “People are strung out, husbands and wives are working incredible hours. But they turn on the television and there is virtually no reflection of that reality on the TV or radio. What happens when that occurs – what happens is that people say I am working 50 hours a week  . . . and it is not a political issue, it is a personal issue, there must be something wrong with me . . . they say, ‘I am the only person who is experiencing that, the only person in America who is seeing my job go to China.”

“When the reality of tens of millions of peoples lives are being ignored then people become depoliticized,” Sander said. “That is the worst thing that the corporate media is doing.”

“Not one reporter has ever come up to me and said, Bernie what are you going to do about the obscene increase between the rich and the poor in the America. What are you going to do about the fact that corporate executives make 500 times more than the workers?   I have never been asked that question. It’s a reasonable question . . . it is just not discussed at all.”
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Other conference blog coverage -- HERE.
Link to upcoming STREAMING AUDIO/VIDEO.
Link to Democracy Now! story on community broadband.
Link to Pacifica Foundation's coverage of St. Louis conference.
Link to daily Media Minutes audio reports on the conference -- HERE.

OTHER LINKS:
Institute for Public Accuracy links to available media-reform contacts:
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=1048

MORE COVERAGE: From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. . . . 
                               From MediaChannel's Danny Schecter . . .
                               From Be the Media blog . . .

Ex-mainstream journalist says: Please criticize us so we can battle corporate owners

A former mainstream journalist, who shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for coverage at the Orlando Sentinel of unconstitutional contraband seizures, spoke up today at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis saying line reporters need criticism in order to keep heat on corporate owners.

“Up until about two years ago, I was a dyed-in-the-wool member of the mainstream media at the Los Angeles Times,” said Stephen Berry, now a journalism professor at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.  “I want to congratulate [media watchdogs] and say keep on keeping on.”

Journalists need the public to pressure them to do better, said Berry, because that gives the journalists and line editors ammunition to take to corporate managers and owners.

We long for, we desire the type of criticism that you bring,” Berry said. “Our line editors and reporters are in a constant battle day in and day out with the constraints of the growing corporate ownership of our profession. And the only way to change it is not through diatribes, but through well-researched, trolled criticisms pointing outour mistakes, pointing our the stories that we missed. We crave that kind of criticism. It gives us material that we can use to fight our own managements.”

Other conference blog coverage -- HERE.
Link to upcoming STREAMING AUDIO/VIDEO.
Link to Democracy Now! story on community broadband.
Link to Pacifica Foundation's coverage of St. Louis conference.

OTHER LINKS:
Institute for Public Accuracy links to available media-reform contacts:
http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=1048

MORE COVERAGE: From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. . . . 
                               From MediaChannel's Danny Schecter . . .
                               From Be the Media blog . . .

Distribution, quality are key challenges for "progressive" media creators, panelist says

Lack of distribution and lack of quality are preventing progressive ideas from achieving main-stream status, media activists gathered in St. Louis were told today.  The observation came from Adam Werbach, of the Common Assets Defense Fund.  “It’s time for us to stop carping about how bad the media is and start taking it over,” said Werbach, a former Sierra Club president and author of the book, “Act Now, Apologize Later.”  Werbach said municipally owned broadband wireless – not “rocket science” to create -- can solve the distribution problem, and media creators need to learn how to make entertaining programming.

“Progressive media – it’s just not that good,” Werbach told a panel at the National Conference for Media Reform. “There are great exceptions. Amy Goodman – the reason she is good because she is entertaining. You want to listen to her. But for some reason we have lost the quality control . . . our challenge is to start creating content that is compelling as mainstream media which contains a progressive world view.”

“How many of you are media makers of one sort or another,” Werbach asked to an audience of about 300 people at a panel, “Holding Media Accountable through Policy and Activism?”   Some 50 or so hands went up.

Distribution for conservative views has expanded dramatically in the last 20 years, said another panelist, David Brock, executive director of the media-watchdog website, Media Matters for America. Brock, a former conservative author and strategist, has written two books about his conversion to progressive views. 

Conservative media has developed megaphones for reaching the masses and manipulating main-stream media, Brock said.  “Over 20 years the situation has gotten much worse,” he said.  In the mid-1980s the conservative Washington Times and a circulation of about 100,000 papers daily, Brock said. In the 1985-1986 time frame, a false, wrong and dishonest article “really just reached that 100,000 subscribers,” he said.

Twenty years later, Brock said, the Washington Times still has a circulation of about 100,000. “But the difference is Rush Limbaugh reads that false and dishonest article on the air and reaches 20 million people,” said Brock. “And Matt Drudge will post that false and dishonest article and will reach another 6 million people. So the capacity of the conservations to deliver their messages, their attacks and their smears has increased immensely over that time.”

Brock said Media that Matters has become very effective at spotlight errors by conservative media. And he said many of their investigations of inaccuracies are the result of tips from citizens media consumers. “If you have your facts right and you are picking your targets well, you really can have an effect,” he said. “A lot of things we end up investigating come from tips."

Talk-show host Phil Donahue rallies media activists with appeals to patriotism, flag

Taking on language and symbols favored by the right, ex-TV talk show host Phil Donahue rallied media-reform activists with a short anti-war speech at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis. "We are hear because we believe we are the patriots," Donahue told nearly 2,000 attendees during a evening music-and-conversation session at the three-day event.  "We believe conservative voices should be heard. But we are hear because we also believe there is another voice that needs to be heard."

Donahue called the Iraq war "unnecessary, unaffordable, unconstitutional and unwinable" and he said that the Bush administration "have called a war and sent other peoples' kids to fight it."  He said the war was a "terrible idea and we have got to fight the carnage."

"We are here because we want an America where the red states talk to the blue states," said Donahue. "It's our flag, too . . . we are proud to be American and we will salute the flag . . . God bless this, God bless that, God bless my dog and God bless my cat . . . oh, God must be wincing!"

"Here's to the beginning of a new media in America," he concluded.

(LISTEN to Phil Donahue during a March 25, 2005 interview on Democracy NOW!)

Grassroots media reform? Talk to sponsors and don't just rely on Democratic Party, Greenwald says

Independent political filmmaker Robert Greenwald had two pieces of advice this afternoon for media activists who want to change what they see on television – write a letter to a sponsor, and don't hitch their goals to a particular political party.

"I think it is a fatal flaw if we become a wing of the Democratic party,"  Greenwald said in response to one question.

Greenwald also responded to an audience comment during a panel at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis.  the commentator said: "I don't have time, with three kids and a traveling job, to create content. [But] I urge people who aren't journalists and can't get involved at that level to be a conscious consumer and try to by products from companies and support companies who are supporting this movement."

Greenwald said that in his years of working in the commercial Hollywood environment, he was amazed how as few as severn letters to a sponsor would cause a sponsor of a television program to worry about backing a show.  "It's amazing, amazing  how few lettres scare these people off. [So], instead of sending a letter to your friends, send a letter to a sponsor."

Greenwald is the producer/director of a series of political documentaries, including "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," and "Unconstitutional: The War on our Civil Liberties."

Independent press has to learn how to reach "outside the pews", IPA says

Independent publications need to pursue ways to penetrate the larger marketplace in order for their messages to be amplified,  according to Linda Jue, of the Independent Press Association (IPA).

A lot of publishers of IPA-member magazines and publications don’t understand why they should support a media-reform movement because they already feel they are actively pursuing media reform, Jue said today during a panel at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis.

“Part of the media-reform movement has to be about creating a new, viable, credible independent media that will reach out beyond the pews [of the converted],” said Ju.

There are now only four major periodical distributors in the United States, said Jue, and they typically won’t carry independent publications.  She said college students always ask her where such publications can be found. “They are our natural constituency,” she said. “But one of those four distributors controls distribution on college campuses.”

“We don’t have an amplification system,” said Jue, a former journalist with the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Public Broadcasting Service. “The things you and I in this room take for granted . . . most people in the United States who rely on mainstream media, newspapers, magazines and broadcast, don’t know.”

For example, she said, in conversations with reporters over the years about the coverage of affirmative action, she said she was told by the reporters they could not cover the substance of the issue “because they were driven by the horse race aspect of it.” She added: “Every time they tried to get into the substance of it . . . their editors told them tye really couldn’t, because the New York Times wasn’t covering it that way.”

Ju, director of new voices in independent publishing at IPA, said she and others turned to independent media “because that is where we can do the kind of journalism that we got into the business to do. But we an’t do it without resources.”