'A Pillar Of Democracy Is Under Attack,' Bill Moyers & Media Reform, Review
'Bill Moyers: A Pillar of Democracy Is Under Attack,' The Nation, Jan. 17, 2007. Ed. *Repost. Moyers' speech to the national conference on media reform in 2007 is a critical summary of developments in U.S. media in the last 35 years.
- "We've got to get alternative content out there to people, or this country is going to die of too many lies." ~ BM, 2007
- "The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won. The rich are getting richer, the inequality gap is the widest it's been since 1929; the middle class is besieged and the working poor are barely keeping their heads above water." He added that as "the corporate and governing elites are helping themselves to the spoils of victory." ~ BM, 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Moyers
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-> Moyers' keynote address from January 12, 2007, the opening day of the Memphis conference: (By The Nation).
The crowd of media critics, media makers and media reformers rose to their feet to shout their enthusiastic endorsement of Moyers’ call for the creation of new and alternative media outlets that speak truth to power.
“We’ve got to get alternative content out there to people, or this country is going to die of too many lies,” said Moyers, as he hailed Amy Goodman and Democracy Now and announced that he will be returning to PBS in April with a new public affairs program. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ONCE SAID, “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.” “Liberty,” he said, “is a well-armed lamb, contesting the vote.” My fellow lambs — it’s good to be in Memphis and find you well-armed with passion for democracy, readiness for action, and courage for the next round in the fight for a free and independent press in America. I salute the conviction that brought you here. I cherish the spirit that fills this hall, and the camaraderie that we share here.
And I will confess to you that I was skeptical when Bob McChesney and John Nichols first raised with me the issue of media consolidation a few years ago. I was sympathetic but skeptical. The challenge of actually doing something about this issue beyond simply bemoaning its impact on democracy was daunting. How could we hope to come up with an effective response to any measurable force? It seemed inexorable, because all over the previous decades, a series of mega-media mergers have swept the country, each deal bigger than the last. The lobby representing the broadcast, cable, and newspapers industries was extremely powerful, with an iron grip on lawmakers and regulators alike. Both parties bowed to their will when the Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That monstrous assault on democracy, with malignant consequences for journalism, was nothing but a welfare giveaway to the largest, richest, and most powerful media conglomerations in the world. Goliaths, whose handful of owners controlled, commodified, and monetized everyone and everything in sight. Call it “the plantation mentality.”
America is socially divided and politically benighted. Inequality and poverty grow steadily along with risk and debt. Too many working families cannot make ends meet with two people working, let alone if one stays home to care for children or aging parents. Young people without privilege and wealth struggle to get a footing. Seniors enjoy less security for a lifetime’s work. We are racially segregated today in every meaningful sense, except for the letter of the law. And the survivors of segregation and immigration toil for pennies on the dollar, compared to those they serve..In fact, nearly all the wealth America created over the past 25 years has been captured by the top 20 percent of households, and most of the gains went to the wealthiest. The top 1 percent of households captured more than 50 percent of all the gains in financial wealth, and these households now hold more than twice the share their predecessors held on the eve of the American Revolution..
“When the richest nation in the world has to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to pay its bill,” Garfinkel says in his book, “when its middle class citizens sit on a mountain of debt to maintain their living standards, when the nation’s economy has difficulty producing secure jobs, or enough jobs of any kind, something is amiss.” You bet something is amiss, and it goes to the core of why we are here in Memphis. For this conference is about a force, the media, that cuts deep to the foundation of democracy.
When Teddy Roosevelt dissected what he called “the real masters of the reactionary forces” in his time, he concluded that, indirectly or directly, “they control the majority of the great newspapers that are against us.” Those newspapers, the dominant media of the day, choked “the channels of the information ordinary people needed to understand what was being done to them.” And today, two basic pillars of American society, shared economic prosperity and a public sector capable of serving the common good, are crumbling. The third pillar of American democracy, an independent press, is under sustained attack, and the channels of information are choked. A few huge corporations now dominate the media landscape in America. Almost all the networks carried by most cable systems are owned by one of the major media common conglomerates. Two-thirds of today’s newspapers are monopolies.
As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace; and those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR, are undergoing financial and political pressure to reduce critical news content and to shift their focus in a mainstream direction, which means being more attentive to establishment views than to the bleak realities of powerlessness that shape the lives of ordinary people...
Read More, https://www.thenation.com/article/bill-moyers-pillar-democracy-under-attack/
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Excerpts, "The Brainwashing of My Dad,' 2015 documentary by Jen Senko. Journalists and free speech advocates Robert McChesney, Jeff Cohen and others in the film explain the break down of the US media landscape.
> Watch online, rent or buy the film, "The Brainwashing of My Dad."
(Wiki). 'The Brainwashing of My Dad" As Jen Senko tries to understand the transformation of her father from a nonpolitical Democrat to an angry Republican fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely: a plan by Roger Ailes under President Richard Nixon for a media takeover by the Republicans, the 1971 Powell Memo urging business leaders to influence institutions of public opinion (especially the media, universities, and courts), the 1987 dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine under President Ronald Reagan, and the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act under President Bill Clinton.
The documentary aims to show how the media and the nation changed, which leads to questions about who owns the airwaves, what rights listeners and watchers have, and what responsibility the government has to keep the airwaves fair, accurate, and accountable.
Senko's father, Frank, was stated by her as originally being a "nonpolitical Kennedy Democrat" who began changing into a far-right Republican in the 1980s. On her father's lengthy commute to his place of employment, he listened to conservative talk radio, which Senko believes started the change in her father's personality. In particular, he listened to Rush Limbaugh and watched Fox News. Towards the end of his life, Frank's views mostly changed back to being somewhere in the middle due to his wife exposing him to liberal media. He died in January 2016 at the age of 93...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brainwashing_of_My_Dad
