Common Cause Blog

Journalism is Not a Crime!

This morning, journalists, citizens and supporters called upon the City of St. Paul Minnesota to drop the charges against the journalists arrested at the RNC convention. Our friends at Free Press helped organize the delivery of over 50,000 petition signatures collected online in 2 days to St. Paul City Hall calling on Mayor Chris Coleman and local law enforcement officials to drop all charges against journalists arrested while covering protests outside the Republican National Convention.

The arrest of obvious journalists is a crime against our democracy. It was clear from the videotape and other evidence that the people arrested were members of the press and were not involved in rioting. Their arrest was either an attempt to intimidate the press into not covering protests or it was incompetency on the part of the police force. I am not sure which is worse.

Not only should all charges be dropped, the police chief and the mayor owe these journalists an apology.

Affronts to freedom of the press

Some of the stories coming out of Minnesota this week are enough to make my stomach turn, especially after the appalling arrest of an ABC News producer in Denver last week as they attempted to videotape Senators and lobbyists emerging from a reception.

The biggest one this week is Democracy Now's Amy Goodman getting arrested--along with two of her colleagues--for obstruction and riot charges and then released. Goodman and her team had been reporting on the 'preventive' raids of activists and independent journalists by police before the RNC started. The video is an ugly scene.

Are telecom companies funding this convention?

In Denver, it's easy to get the feeling that the telecom companies are funding this convention. And it's pretty close to true. AT&T, Qwest, Verizon, and Comcast are heavily invested in the Denver DNC, and are similarly paying for a good chunk of the RNC next week. If you want to see a big special interest buying its way further into the halls of power, you've got it here. And anyone who cares about the future of the media, the internet, and the election system in this country should be getting mad.

On the ground in Denver, it's the little things that catch your attention - like almost every delegate has a lanyard around their neck that says "Qwest Qwest Qwest" (see the pics). When half the people you see have a Qwest band around their neck, you notice. And it gets in your head.

And then it's the parties. Of course, folks like me can't get in - but delegates, elected officials, lobbyists and their staffs usually can. AT&T is hosting a reception virtually every day, sometimes several. (Check out Sunlight's Party Time blog for some great coverage of the convention parties.) Yesterday I went to see who was at the AT&T-sponsored luncheon for "western delegates" only to get turned away at the door and informed that the event had been moved to a different fancy restaurant on the other side of town. Tuesday night I wandered past a private event sponsored by Verizon for Iowa delegates; they had reserved a café on the main drag through town and locked out the public, as you can see from the photo.

Those are the obvious images, but what's less visible to the naked eye is more significant.

Is this the "Internet Election"?

This morning at the Big Tent, Air America and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow hosted a discussion with Dr. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. The subject of the talk is how the internet is impacting the 2008 elections.

Maddow started out with pointing out that for the last several elections, broad claims have been made that the internet was making a major difference - but has it? Eric Schmidt responded that it is becoming more and more the case. His example of how the internet has recently made a big difference was how in the 2006 Senate races the GOP candidate in Virginia used the word "macaca" to describe a person of color, and it got around on Youtube, which may have been the pivotal point in that election. The viral nature of that video made a big difference in the shift of power in the US Senate.

Is that just increasing? It seems to be the case. More and more citizen journalism is emerging, and here at the Big Tent that is certainly evident.

Convention Symposium Demonstrates Need for Citizen Journalism

Cross-posted from The Hill...

The highlight of Tuesday-indeed, the most widely-attended presentation at the Big Tent so far-was longtime newsman Dan Rather giving a powerful, and at times emotional, talk that Jon covered in more depth earlier.

His key message at our symposium on media and democracy is that we NEED citizen journalism, we NEED owners with the guts to take any heat from talk radio, and we NEED to stop media consolidation. I caught a few minutes on video that don't do it justice, but hopefully they give a sense of his passion, including a moment of choking up about a minute and a half in.

But the day was about much more than Dan Rather. Indeed, that was the whole point -- that a healthy democracy depends on a diverse and free media that prods, questions, and educates the public rather than a small handful of networks controlling what people see and hear and what constitutes "news."

Is Civil Discourse a Civil Right?

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.

Dan Rather on the problems with media today

Veteran journalist Dan Rather is currently on stage at the Big Tent in Denver speaking on the dangers of media consolidation.

(remember, live streaming coverage can be found at http://www.commoncause.org/bigtent.)

He is pointing out something we discussed in our media reform plan for a new administration that the founders of this nation explicitly protected the press in the Bill of Rights because it is the role of the press to inform the public about what the government is doing right or wrong.

Rather says that his experience is that consolidation and corporatization of the media has led to a media that focuses more on safe stories and regurgitating the administration's message as to what they want the people to hear. And of course, that is what the media is NOT supposed to do.

He says the reason the mainstream press isn't more critical is that they are afraid of being accused of editorializing simply by researching and reporting facts that don't fit with what the administration wants people to hear.

His key message is that we NEED citizen journalism, we NEED owners with the guts to take any heat from talk radio, and we NEED to stop media consolidation.