Yesterday at the Big Tent events in Denver, we held a workshop titled "Is Civil Discourse a Civil Right?". Right to left in the photo are:

• Alex Nogales, President and CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition,
  
• Cathryn Hazouri, Executive Director of the ACLU of Colorado,
  
• Mark Lloyd, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Affiliate Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University,
  
• and yours truly acting as the moderator.

We had a lively discussion about how access to the media, including media ownership, public access and net neutrality impact the communities fighting for their civil rights. Alex Nogales pointed out how Latinos in America have their civil rights violated day after day by the impact of hate speech on radio and TV. Cathryn Hazouri pointed out that from the perspective of the ACLU, she opposes censorship of the media to deal with hate speech, but does support the idea of a modernized version of the Fairness Doctrine so that issues are presented in a truly fair and balanced way. Among other issues that Mark Lloyd talked about, he brought up how the Digital TV Transition might impact low income and minority communities more than others, and take away their access to the information they need to participate in our democracy, unless they get the word now about how to be prepared for the transition.

This is just a short snapshot of the event, we went over our allotted hour. It was videotaped, so we hope to get that video out online in the future and possibly distributed on public access.  

In general though, while these discussions might not be happening over at the DNC Convention, they ARE happening here in Denver at the Big Tent.