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."
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