The paper below is from projectcensored.org at Sonoma State University.

This from the "about" section of projectcensored.org:

"Founded by Carl Jensen in 1976, Project Censored is a media research
program working in cooperation with numerous independent media groups
in the US. Project Censored’s principle objective is training of SSU
students in media research and First Amendment issues and the advocacy
for, and protection of, free press rights in the United States. 
Project Censored has trained over 1,500 students in investigative
research in the past three decades.

Through a partnership of faculty, students, and the community,
Project Censored conducts research on important national news stories
that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US
corporate media."

Walter Cronkite said this about project censored: 

"Project censored is one of the organizations that we should listen to,
to be assured that our newspapers and our broadcast outlets are
practicing thorough and ethical journalism."
— Walter Cronkite

The Media Can Legally Lie

in Top 25 Censored Stories for 2005

CMW REPORT, Spring 2003


Title: “Court Ruled That Media Can Legally Lie”


Author: Liane Casten

ORGANIC CONSUMER ASSOCIATION, March 7, 2004


Title: “Florida Appeals Court Orders Akre-Wilson Must Pay Trial Costs
for $24.3 Billion Fox Television; Couple Warns Journalists of Danger to
Free Speech, Whistle Blower Protection”


Author: Al Krebs

Faculty Evaluator: Liz Burch, Ph.D.


Student Researcher: Sara Brunner

In February 2003, a Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with
an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or
falsifying the news in the United States.

Back in December of 1996, Jane Akre and her husband, Steve Wilson,
were hired by FOX as a part of the Fox “Investigators” team at WTVT in
Tampa Bay, Florida. In 1997 the team began work on a story about bovine
growth hormone (BGH), a controversial substance manufactured by
Monsanto Corporation. The couple produced a four-part series revealing
that there were many health risks related to BGH and that Florida
supermarket chains did little to avoid selling milk from cows treated
with the hormone, despite assuring customers otherwise.

According to Akre and Wilson, the station was initially very excited
about the series. But within a week, Fox executives and their attorneys
wanted the reporters to use statements from Monsanto representatives
that the reporters knew were false and to make other revisions to the
story that were in direct conflict with the facts. Fox editors then
tried to force Akre and Wilson to continue to produce the distorted
story. When they refused and threatened to report Fox’s actions to the
FCC, they were both fired.(Project Censored #12 1997)

Akre and Wilson sued the Fox station and on August 18, 2000, a
Florida jury unanimously decided that Akre was wrongfully fired by Fox
Television when she refused to broadcast (in the jury’s words) “a
false, distorted or slanted story” about the widespread use of BGH in
dairy cows. They further maintained that she deserved protection under
Florida’s whistle blower law. Akre was awarded a $425,000 settlement.
Inexplicably, however, the court decided that Steve Wilson, her partner
in the case, was ruled not wronged by the same actions taken by FOX.

FOX appealed the case, and on February 14, 2003 the Florida Second
District Court of Appeals unanimously overturned the settlement awarded
to Akre. The Court held that Akre’s threat to report the station’s
actions to the FCC did not deserve protection under Florida’s whistle
blower statute, because Florida’s whistle blower law states that an
employer must violate an adopted “law, rule, or regulation.” In a
stunningly narrow interpretation of FCC rules, the Florida Appeals
court claimed that the FCC policy against falsification of the news
does not rise to the level of a “law, rule, or regulation,” it was
simply a “policy.” Therefore, it is up to the station whether or not it
wants to report honestly.

During their appeal, FOX asserted that there are no written rules
against distorting news in the media. They argued that, under the First
Amendment, broadcasters have the right to lie or deliberately distort
news reports on public airwaves. Fox attorneys did not dispute Akre’s
claim that they pressured her to broadcast a false story, they simply
maintained that it was their right to do so. After the appeal verdict
WTVT general manager Bob Linger commented, “It’s vindication for WTVT,
and we’re very pleased… It’s the case we’ve been making for two years.
She never had a legal claim.”

UPDATE BY LIANE CASTEN: If we needed any more proof that we now live
in an upside down world, the saga of Jane Akre, along with her husband,
Steve Wilson, could not be more compelling.

Akre and Wilson won the first legal round. Akre was awarded $425,000
in a jury trial with well-crafted arguments for their wrongful
termination as whistleblowers. And in the process, they also won the
prestigious “Goldman Environmental” prize for their outstanding
efforts. However, FOX turned around and appealed the verdict. This
time, FOX won; the original verdict was overturned in the Appellate
Court of Florida’s Second District. The court implied there was no
restriction against distorting the truth. Technically, there was no
violation of the news distortion because the FCC’s policy of news
distortion does not have the weight of the law. Thus, said the court,
Akre-Wilson never qualified as whistleblowers.

What is more appalling are the five major media outlets that filed
briefs of Amici Curiae- or friend of FOX - to support FOX’s position:
Belo Corporation, Cox Television, Inc., Gannett Co., Inc., Media
General Operations, Inc., and Post-Newsweek Stations, Inc. These are
major media players! Their statement, “The station argued that it
simply wanted to ensure that a news story about a scientific
controversy regarding a commercial product was present with fairness
and balance, and to ensure that it had a sound defense to any potential
defamation claim.”

“Fairness and balance?” Monsanto hardly demonstrated “fairness and
balance” when it threatened a lawsuit and demanded the elimination of
important, verifiable information!

The Amici position was “If upheld by this court, the decision would
convert personnel actions arising from disagreements over editorial
policy into litigation battles in which state courts would interpret
and apply federal policies that raise significant and delicate
constitutional and statutory issues.” After all, Amici argued, 40
states now have Whistleblower laws, imagine what would happen if
employees in those 40 states followed the same course of action?

The position implies that First Amendment rights belong to the
employers - in this case the five power media groups. And when
convenient, the First Amendment becomes a broad shield to hide behind.
Let’s not forget, however; the airwaves belong to the people. Is there
no public interest left-while these media giants make their private
fortunes using the public airwaves? Can corporations have the power to
influence the media reporting, even at the expense of the truth?
Apparently so.

In addition, the five “friends” referred to FCC policies. The five
admit they are “vitally interested in the outcome of this appeal, which
will determine the extent to which state whistleblower laws may
incorporate federal policies that touch on sensitive questions of
editorial judgment.”

Anyone concerned with media must hear the alarm bells. The Bush FCC,
under Michael Powell’s leadership, has shown repeatedly that greater
media consolidation is encouraged, that liars like Rush Limbaugh and
Ann Coulter are perfectly acceptable, that to refer to the FCC
interpretation of “editorial judgment” is to potentially throw out any
pretense at editorial accuracy if the “accuracy” harms a large
corporation and its bottom line. This is our “Brave New Media”, the
corporate media that protects its friends and now lies, unchallenged if
need be.

The next assault: the Fox station then filed a series of motions in
a Tampa Circuit Court seeking more than $1.7 million in trial fees and
costs from both Akre and Wilson. The motions were filed on March 30 and
April 16 by Fox attorney, William McDaniels-who bills his client at
$525 to $550 an hour. The costs are to cover legal fees and trial costs
incurred by FOX in defending itself at the first trial. The issue may
be heard by the original trial judge, Ralph Steinberg-a logical step in
the whole process. However, Judge Steinberg must come out of retirement
if he is to hear this, so the hearing, set for June 1, may go to a new
judge, Judge Maye.

Akre and her husband feel the stress. “There is no justification for
the five stations not to support us,” she said. “Attaching legal fees
to whistleblowers is unprecedented, absurd. The ‘business’ of
broadcasting trumps it all. These news organizations must ensure they
are worthy of the public trust while they use OUR airwaves, free of
charge. Public trust is alarmingly absent here.”

Indeed. This is what our corporate media, led by such as Rupert Murdoch, have come to. How low we have fallen.

Jane Akre and be reached at:
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jakre@bellsouth.net.

www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/11-the-media-can-legally-lie/

I want to preface this with one idea that I think someone already mentioned:  Every time we turn on the TV or read a paper that has paid advertisements, we support the MSM. Media outlets make the majority of their money from advertisements. If Americans  consumers decide to stop patronizing  unbalanced media outlets and head to places with fairer coverage of events, that means the advertisers will eventually follow.

So when the MSM outlets are under threat of losing a significant number viewers, it seems very likely that the advertisers will leave or put pressure on these outlets to make the changes their customers are looking for. In other words, one of SCAAMD's most powerful points of leverage will be its ability to successfully encourage media consumers to move to more objective media outlets.

The following is a comprehensive article  from 2001 that   provides some useful points and background on efforts to restore balance to the MSM.

Robert A. Hackett, professor of communication, co-directs NewsWatch Canada at Simon Fraser University near Vancouver. His recent publications include (with Richard Gruneau et al.) The Missing News: Filters and Blind Spots in Canada's Press, and (with Yuezhi Zhao) Sustaining Democracy? Journalism and the Politics of Objectivity. E-Mail: hackett@sfu.ca

www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media_Reform/Bldg_Media_Demo.html

Building a Movement for Media
Democratization
by Robert A. Hackett
Project Censored 2001
by Peter Phillips and Project Censored
Seven Stories Press, 2001, paper
 
Project Censored has identified critical flaws in America's corporate media system. Through its strong domestic market and the export of not just particular media products but its entire model of organizing the media, that system influences the flow of news, ideas, and entertainment around the world.

Any citizen, any social movement, concerned with promoting social equality, justice, and democracy within and between nations will sooner or later have to confront and challenge an increasingly globalized corporate media system. Why is that the case? Essentially, transnational corporations in the communication and information industries have become key bulwarks of global capitalism both ideologically and economically.

 Since the 1980s, the emerging global media system has vastly enhanced the communication infrastructure of international commerce, constituted a crucial site of investment (think of Nasdaq), and through its news, movies, television programs, and other media formats created a cultural environment which promotes the politics and values of consumerism and free market fundamentalism.

Undoubtedly, the global communication system has enhanced (unevenly) the affluence of a minority of the world's countries and people. It has also sometimes contributed to the political liberalization of old-style authoritarian regimes like those of Eastern Europe. On the other hand, the journalism offered in such a hyper-commercialized, corporate-dominated system in many ways contradicts fundamental democratic values and ideals, such as equal opportunity for informed participation by all citizens in discussing and deciding matters of public concern. In journalism, as Project Censored's work highlights, marketing imperatives are overriding the ethos of public service.

Affluent consumers and business are relatively well-served with a press that reflects their generally conservative political dispositions. The rest of us are offered a steady diet of trivia and scandal-"junk food news." Unprecedented transnational media concentration creates potentially centralized power over the public agenda. Increasingly, newsrooms promote or censor stories based not on their relevance to the public, but rather their ability to help or hurt the commercial and political interests of the media empires.

Some people argue that new media technology, particularly the Internet, is the solution to the "democratic deficit" of the corporate media system. But the Internet, while an extremely valuable organizing tool for grassroots activists, is not likely to fundamentally shift the balance of political power. Quite apart from the inequalities in access to computers and telecommunication networks, the Net itself is becoming commercialized and colonized by many of the same corporations which dominate the conventional media.

While they offer some openings for alternative and progressive views on particular issues, the dominant transnational media on the whole are significant obstacles to movements promoting progressive social change. Any fundamental challenge to the current distribution of wealth and power within global capitalism is also a challenge to the dominant media. How can ecologically sustainable economies be achieved without addressing a media/advertising complex that cultivates the desire for limitless consumption? Can a level playing field for diverse political parties be achieved in the U.S. without bitter opposition from the television networks, who have a vested interest in hyper-expensive political advertising? Can ethnic and gender equality be achieved while media representations and employment practices continue (despite some progress) to stereotype, marginalize, or underrepresent women and minorities? Can social programs and workers' rights be sustained in the long run when the agenda-setting media are closely tied to the corporate elite and its interests? Can progressive social movements succeed when they are demonized, trivialized, or ignored by the media on which they generally depend to reach broader publics? And most crucially, can democracy itself flourish without a political communication system which nurtures equality, community, and informed engagement with public issues?

The pivotal role of the media leads Robert McChesney to observe, "Regardless of what a progressive group's first issue of importance is, its second issue should be media and communication, because so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible, across the board."
Encouragingly, there are growing signs of organized grassroots activity within many countries to challenge the "corporatization" of public communication. Such activism for media democratization takes different forms in different national contexts, and I do not attempt a global overview here.

In the U.S. and Canada alone, there are hundreds of local and national projects and groups engaged in one or more of the following dimensions of media activism, each of which is typically associated with specific kinds of actors. These forms include building autonomous or "alternative" media independent of state and corporate control, which add diversity to the media system insofar as they give voice to the marginalized, convey counter-hegemonic information, and/or offer models of organization and communication more democratic than the dominant commercial media.

Other major avenues of activism include the media education movement, which is especially advanced in Europe, and media analysis and monitoring projects such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and Project Censored in the U.S., and NewsWatch in Canada. Also present are campaigns and publicity strategies to use and enhance openings for progressive voices within the existing media (media skills training, media relation strategies to gain access by achieving newsworthiness, etc.). We see also satirical "culture jamming," which aims to subvert the intended meanings of commercial and corporate media, and challenges to ideological hegemony and the logic of the marketplace from within mainstream media. Culture jamming is represented by the struggles of journalists and other media workers and public interest interventions in legal, regulatory, and political arenas to challenge the processes and substance of state policy towards media. Efforts to build national and international coalitions around "the cultural environment," "media and democracy," "press and broadcasting freedom," or "the right to communicate" are ongoing as well. In some countries-as diverse as New Zealand, India, Brazil, Sweden and Finland-such commitments are also represented directly in elected legislatures from emerging progressive political parties.

Behind their diversity, democratic media activism displays a fairly consistent and enduring commitment to change media messages, practices, institutions, and contexts (including state communication policies), in a direction which enhances democratic values and subjectivity, as well as equal participation in societal decision-making. A Polish public broadcasting planner suggests that a key principle of democratic public communication is the ability of each segment of society "to introduce ideas, symbols, information, and elements of culture into social circulation" so as to reach all other segments of society. This is at the heart of the progressive project of a more equitable distribution of economic, social, cultural, symbolic, and informational resources.

To be sure, there are important ambiguities within the concept of media democratization. Debates over censorship, pornography, and hate speech suggest the sometimes uneasy combination of commitments to social solidarity, egalitarian social transformation, and individual freedom from state or corporate power.

Nevertheless, media democracy manifestos exhibit an impressive degree of convergence around the goals of expanding the range of voices accessed through the media, building an egalitarian public sphere, promoting the values and practices of sustainable democracy, and offsetting or counteracting political and economic inequalities found elsewhere in the social system. Indeed, Jakubowicz suggests adopting the term "communicative democracy" rather than "democratic communication," in order to underscore that the idea of democracy itself is premised upon communication between equals.

It is probably premature to describe these various forms of media activism as a coherent social movement, but they are laying the groundwork for one. In the rest of this chapter, I reflect on both the obstacles that such a movement would face, and the social resources it could draw upon. The chapter concludes with some suggestions for strategic priorities.

OBSTASTACLES TO A MEDIA DEMOCRATIZATION MOVEMENT

Without doubt, a media democracy movement will face formidable obstacles. Of the relatively few published case studies from which to draw historical lessons, one of the best is McChesney's analysis of an early U.S. media reform movement: the coalition to support public broadcasting and oppose the commercialization of radio as it emerged as a mass medium in the 1930s.3 Within a few years, that coalition's goal of reserving significant spectrum space for public interest, noncommercial broadcasters had been decisively defeated; conversely, the dominance of the corporate networks was entrenched through legislation and regulatory practice. The reformers failed partly due to their own avoidable shortcomings-their political incompetence, their lack of coordination, and in some cases, their elitist sympathies which militated against organizing a popular base. Moreover, the onset of the Depression drastically shifted national priorities towards more obviously bread-and-butter issues.

Other obstacles confronting the reformers, however, were more fundamental and long-term-primarily, the ideological, political, and structural power of their main opponents, the broadcasting corporations. The American corporate media, McChesney argues, "have actively and successfully cultivated the ideology that the status quo is the only rational media structure for a democratic and freedom-loving society." More broadly, American political culture since the early twentieth century has virtually precluded public discussion of the fundamental weaknesses of capitalism, forcing media reformers to argue defensively that commercial broadcasting is a special case of market failure. This constraint has been reinforced by the near-absence of a viable Left, and by the dominant culture's sanitized images of capitalism.

In the 1930s the structural power of corporate media was already evident in their dominance over politicians' access to voters and over the terms of public debate, including debate about media issues themselves. Today, the weapons of globalized media conglomerates include their sheer financial resources and their ability to use cross-promotional synergy, brand-name recognition, distribution muscle, high entry costs, and economies of scale. Oligopolistic markets give them the power to marginalize or take over smaller players. They also have the ability to pre-empt or co-opt politically troublesome opposition through token concessions.

Canada, Britain, and many other Western countries succeeded, where the U.S. failed, in establishing a viable, mass-audience public broadcasting service, one which could to some extent counterbalance the democratic shortcomings of a purely corporate, commercial system. Today public broadcasting around the world faces severe challenges. These include declining audiences related to channel multiplication, the decline of social democratic governments in western Europe, governmental pressure to become more commercial, the resulting identity crisis and dislocation, right-wing attacks on its perceived left-liberal bias, and broader critiques that see it as obsolete or irrelevant.

The broader context for public broadcasting's crisis is the worldwide hegemony of market liberalism, and the process of media globalization. The flipside of the concentrated power of global media capital is the social and political indeterminacy of the groups that would potentially benefit from media democratization. For the most part, they are diffused, marginalized, and/or difficult to mobilize. The apathy of media audiences is not surprising during "normal" times of social and economic stability in the advanced capitalist societies. There is no widespread popular clamor for participation in mass communication (on the production side), nor for more access to a greater range of views (on the consumption side). If anything, given marketing and cultural pressures towards social fragmentation, many consumers want fewer voices and less complexity in their daily media fare, not more. Many consumers also identify with the branded images, products, programs, and celebrities that constitute the corporate mediascape.
The culture of consumerism and the sheer burdens of daily life militate against all movements for social change, but especially one with goals as seemingly remote from daily concerns or immediate successes as media democracy. According to some theorists, accessible and diverse media programming may be a "merit good" like education, training, or health; left to themselves, consumers "tend to take less care to obtain it than is in their own long-term interests.''
The current absence of mass involvement in media democratization, however, should not be taken as unduly discouraging. Demands for participatory communication are historically more frequent in times of revolutionary upheaval when people's stories, actions, and protests are prominent in public communication. Michael Traber identifies three such waves of change. The eighteenth-century middle-class revolutions in France and America established the democratic rights of the individual vis-a-vis despotic government. The early "utopian" years of twentieth-century socialist revolts in Mexico and Russia posited a second generation of human rights in which the state has, in principle if not practice, a positive role in promoting citizens' well-being, including their access to the means of communication. The third wave of communication rights derives from the postwar Third World anticolonial struggles; these "solidarity" rights emphasize the duty of states and social organizations to place common human interests before national and individual interest.

During more stable periods, however, demands for expanded public communication rights are typically confined to advocacy groups, creative cultural producers, alternative journalists, mainstream media workers, scholars, and others with occupational or political incentives to seek media access. Indeed, some of the most articulate and energetic spokespeople for media democracy, at least in the U.S., have come from their ranks. But the interests of these groups are not identical, and in many cases they are marginalized, lacking the power resources strategically to intervene in a media system dominated by huge companies which integrate production and distribution.

Moreover, without brand-name products to sell, media democracy groups in a market economy are perpetually short of money. Typically, they depend on supporters' donations, short-term contracts, memberships, government or foundation grants, or sponsorship by institutions, such as the several trade unions which help underwrite the British Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF). While the CPBF itself has largely maintained its democratic autonomy, such funding is elsewhere often tied to specific projects or institutional agendas. Even foundation grants, a major funding source for progressive groups in the U.S., have important limitations. They increase the sense of rivalry between groups pursuing the same funders, and they are often time-consuming to pursue: unlike their right-wing counterparts, "liberal" foundations still tend to fund specific projects rather than long-term institution-building.

SOCIAL BASES FOR A MOVEMENT

While the obstacles are formidable, there are also deep and persistent social bases for media democratization. I do not want to suggest that social movements simply reflect existing tensions and interests; they have a creative role in raising new issues and forging new identities. But, extrapolating from the political economy approach to communications analysis, it is possible to suggest some of the structural conditions and social dynamics most favorable to media democracy activism.

The conflicting interests and inequalities generated within a capitalist social structure have spurred various forms of social, cultural, and political resistance, most classically the organized workers' movement and socialist parties. Communicative democracy can be seen as a product of the ways that subordinate social classes constitute themselves through their own media and culture. The struggles of workers and social democratic parties have been a major backbone in western Europe of both the Left press, and advocacy for reformist state media policies. The CPBF in Britain is an exemplar. It was founded in 1979 as an alliance between journalists, academics, and public sector workers facing hostile press coverage, and print media unions facing technological annihilation. CPBF attempted to increase workers' influence over media employment and coverage, and to influence, with some success, the communications policy stance of the Trade Union Congress and the Labour Party during its long stay in opposition. While Britain's current "New Labour" government clearly has no interest in challenging the media conglomerates, CPBF continues to be probably the most impressive progressive advocate of media reform in western Europe. It also inspired the formation, in 1996, of a fledgling Canadian counterpart to oppose growing press concentration. It was spearheaded by several media unions and the country's largest progressive advocacy coalition, the Council of Canadians. In the U.S., unions have to date shown little interest in coalitions for media reform, preferring to put most of their eggs in the basket of conventional public relations strategies. There are signs, however, that under pressure from media mega-mergers, layoffs, and management assaults on editorial integrity, once reticent American media workers are becoming less reluctant to join unions and form alliances.

Indeed, while the point has been contested, some political economists regard the cultural industries as more fertile sites for worker resistance, compared to other industrial sectors. Bernard Miege points to the tendency to define divisions, the inherent "creativity crisis," and the tension between different technical and social "logics" at work in cultural industries. One challenge and opportunity for a media democratization movement is to find the common ground between worker resistance from within, and the demands for media access and diversity from without.

Some forms of nationalism generate localized resistance to the logic of globalized capitalism. The centrality of language and culture in nationalist politics gives it immediate relevance to struggles over communication policies and structures. Anticapitalist Third World nationalism was a driving force behind the movement for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) in the 1970s and 1980s. A landmark for this movement was the UNESCO-commissioned report Many Voices, One World, authored by a commission headed by Sean MacBride.

While a sympathetic critic described the report as "ambiguous, contradictory, and deficient" in its efforts to straddle different positions, its commitment to the right to communicate and to a "balanced flow" of information between North and South-arguably the report's most important legacies-implied the structural reform of the dominant, western-based corporate media system.
 Not surprisingly, these ideas were anathema to the corporate media and their political allies. NWICO's demise as an intergovernmental movement was ensured by the relentless hostility of the Reagan and Thatcher governments, the collapse of the Soviet bloc which had supported aspects of NWICO, the global hegemony of market liberalism, and the retreat from socialist and anti-imperialist versions of nationalism by Third World political elites. Those elites have abandoned NWICO "in favor of negotiating national and regional relationships with the global media powers."

Nevertheless, the impetus behind NWICO has not altogether disappeared. Rather, given its appeal to the "communication imagination" of the Third World, it has arguably become a "people's movement" with "deep roots in a historic sociopolitical and cultural process" of decolonization, participatory development, and democratization. Since the 1980s, NGOs, social movements, local cultural producers, and some communication policy experts and institutes have been the main torchbearers for more equity and autonomy within global communication, and/or for more participatory communication institutions and stronger indigenous cultural expression within nations.

Such developmental communication needs in the South have become the major focus of the ecumenical World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), which explicitly promotes media democratization and the right to communicate. Based in London and financed largely by development agencies and Protestant churches in the North, the WACC sponsors training programs and over 100 communication projects in the South, many of which give voice to marginalized people's criticisms of existing social injustices.

Even in the North Atlantic geopolitical region, cultural nationalism in countries like France has helped put some brakes on global trade liberalization. Moreover, even such liberalization has a "silver lining," according to a leading Irish communications researcher: as the state deregulates and commercializes media, the ethic of public service (still strong in many liberal democracies other than the U.S.) can be used to lever state funding for democratic alternative and community media. The opportunity lies in the state's need for legitimacy, and in the widely perceived centrality of media to society's own image and sense of identity.

The defense of minority languages is a related wellspring of demands for media access and diversity. Economic and media globalization contributes to cultural homogenization, as a handful of dominant languages are expanding at the cost of others. Within the next century, 90 percent of the world's languages may die out. Control over language, crucial to cultural and personal identity, is a primary means of exerting power over other aspects of people's lives. Millions of people are denied the right to use their own language (and may even be legally penalized for doing so) in state-supported education or public communication. Forced linguistic assimilation is not peculiar to authoritarian Third World regimes. Residential schools still haunt the living memories of aboriginal people in Canada, where dominant media still arguably contribute to their marginalization and misrepresentation. A 1998 referendum in California, intended to deny Spanish-speaking children bilingual education, was one of five international cases selected by supporters of the People's Communication Charter (PCC) for the first public hearing on languages and human rights at the Hague in 1999.

Access and expression through public communication is the oxygen for such developmental and cultural needs. This point can be expanded: Media democratization is essential if human values in private and public life- values like friendship, citizenship, and the nurturing of children-are to be successfully defended against the corrosive logic of commercialization. Rejection of the idea that all aspects of human life can be bought and sold in the marketplace is developing. We now see resistance to the erosion of public broadcasting, the commodification of public information, the targeting by advertisers of children at home and in schools, and the intrusion of violent television programming in family life. Perceptions of commercial television's negative impact on the socialization of children have led parents and educators to media activism. Librarians have joined alliances to defend public access to information.

Religious commitments, too often ignored by the contemporary Left as a potential agent for progressive social change, have also inspired media activism. In one analysis, if religion is to survive in a modern world polarized between the strictly private sphere and the mass media, then it has no choice but to project itself through public communication and to challenge the dominance of commercial and political speech. Does such religious intervention constitute media democratization? That depends. Patriarchal, monolithic and exclusionary forms of religious fundamentalism have fuelled efforts to censor and demonize gay people, for example. But the ecumenical, inclusive and dialogical vision of the WACC and other progressive religious organizations, committed to values of human dignity, love, and solidarity, has inspired critique and action against the materialistic, consumerist, and narcissistic individualist biases of commercial media.

The communicative needs and practices of "new" social movements emerging since the 1960s have been another crucial springboard for challenges to the corporate media. The anti-Vietnam war protests and "counterculture" of the 1960s generated an upsurge of oppositional media forms, notably "underground" or alternative urban newspapers. To be sure, most of these papers commercialized or disappeared as the youth counterculture re-integrated into the middle-class mainstream. According to one of its veteran editors, however, the alternative press enjoyed a revival during the Reagan-Bush era of the 1980s, in response to the mainstream media's political timidity and the emergence of a culturally progressive baby-boomer market.

Other movements have had more staying power than the youth counterculture. Most notably, movements for civil rights-first for blacks, then Latinos, aboriginal peoples, and other ethnic minorities-have generally sought not the revolutionary transformation of the social or media system, but rather fairer and greater representation within it. (The most militant such groups either politically marginalized themselves or, like the Black Panthers, were crushed by state repression.) Nevertheless, the reformist civil rights movement has generated significant demands for change in the dominant media-against exclusion or stereotyping of minorities in media content, and for more diversity in media employment and ownership.
Since the 1970s, movements for gender equality have engaged in similar kinds of media activism. According to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (GLAAD), "Great strides have been made toward more accurate and inclusive representation" of gays in the dominant U.S. news and entertainment media. Arguably, the value to advertisers of the affluent gay male market has given the latter media leverage not enjoyed by many other minorities, like African Americans.

Likewise, feminism has unleashed energy for media transformation. At the national level, some elements of the feminist movement have long specialized in monitoring and advocacy work around media representation of women. Canada's MediaWatch and the Women's Desk at FAIR in New York are two examples. At the international level, no longer inhibited by the 1980s backlash against NWICO, women's rights conferences have increasingly placed the question of media power on their agenda. Women have expressed specific concerns about their commodification in advertising, their victimization in media violence, and their degradation in pornography. Definitions of communication rights, feminists argue, must take into account women's perspective before they can be considered genuinely "universal." At the same time, many feminists argue that their struggle is not simply for their own power but rather for a more just, sustainable, peoplecentered (rather than capital-dominated) world order. Because of the social construction of gender, women may be better placed than men to understand the need for, and to implement, more empowering and inclusive patterns of communication.

To be sure, there is no single feminist approach to media analysis or action; one must speak of feminisms. Michele Mattelart distinguishes between liberal feminists seeking equal participation in existing media structures dominated by patriarchal codes of professionalism and "objectivity," and a more radical questioning of the role of media structures and codes in constructing gender difference and colonizing women's definitions of themselves.
Other critical social movements have also emerged in anglo-North America during the 1970s and 1980s-notably movements for environmental sustainability, for peace and nuclear disarmament, and against American military intervention in Central America and elsewhere. One example of media-oriented activism engendered by these movements was a 1986 campaign by peace groups and their allies against the ABC network production Amerika, a film depicting a UN-backed Soviet occupation of the U.S. One legacy of this campaign was the creation of America's leading progressive media watchdog group, FAIR.

By and large, however, while the peace and environmental movements sought to use the media to promote their primary political objectives, they have generated relatively few efforts to democratize the media themselves, by comparison with movements for gender and ethnic equality. Why would this be the case? One reason may be the relative self-satisfaction on the part of the environmental movement with its ability to convey its concerns through the existing media during the 1980s and early 1990s. Most notably, Greenpeace seemed to have spectacular success in building itself as the globe's leading environmental advocacy group precisely through staging media events. Greenpeace leaders apparently regarded the media, particularly television, as a politically neutral tool, available for exploitation by those who understood its technological logic. A second reason for the relative absence of media challenges by environmental and peace movements was their focus on challenging state policies, and thus finding openings in the existing media to mobilize public opinion. By contrast, movements for gender and ethnic equality are comparatively more concerned about their cultural status and recognition. For these latter groups, the media loom more immediately as part of the landscape they wish to change.

As a hothouse for social movement media activism, the special case of the province of Quebec, a predominantly French-speaking enclave in North America, should be noted. It has a unique context of "cultural resistance to the centrifugal forces of the great North American melting pot." Rapid political and social modernization during the 1960s, growing working-class militancy, and a crystallizing polarization between the political options of preserving or leaving the Canadian federation in the 1970s all created "some unique examples of social and political uses of media," covering all kinds of activism. Taken together, these elements have created "a distinctive media culture and a situation in which media are considered as part of the normal terrain of social struggle"-undoubtedly to a greater extent than elsewhere in North America, where national and class conflicts have not overlapped, and public media have not been used to forge and defend collective identities to the same degree.

The most recent emerging "new" social movement today is international rather than regional or national in scope. The growing opposition to corporate-driven trade liberalization-and conversely, the defense of democratic human rights-is bringing in a new generation of media-savvy activists. The communication needs of this movement are generating new forms of alternative international communication, most notably through the Internet and related new technology. As a partially successful effort to both influence and bypass the corporate news media, the Independent Media Center at the "battle of Seattle" World Trade Organization protests is being replicated elsewhere. At the same time, the continued indifference or hostility of major corporate media to the progressive anti-WTO movement could help increase activists' awareness of the need for structural media reform, and the need to add the right to communicate to the emerging global human rights agenda.

There are indications of other new openings to gain hearings for communicative democracy. As the flipside of media commercialism and infotainment, public cynicism towards journalism, as measured in polls, has grown sharply in recent years, especially in the U.S. Trade unionists, environmentalists, and left-of-center parties and movements in Canada and the U.S. are becoming more aware that the rightward shift in the press, the elimination of social affairs and labor beats, media concentration, and the displacement of independent, public-interest journalism by commercially-driven infotainment, all mean that conventional media relations practices will have decreasing success in gaining media access for progressives. They will be forced to consider alternative strategies and coalitions to gain a public voice.

CONCLUSION: HOW TO BUILD A MEDIA DEMOCRATIZATION MOVEMENT

I have argued that, notwithstanding formidable obstacles, there is an urgent need, a reasonably coherent paradigm, important social bases, and multiple forms of activism prefiguring a radical project of media democratization. The question remains: Can these factors really cohere into an effective new social movement? This question in turn raises others. Could media democratization be achieved simply as a byproduct of the political and communicative practices of existing movements? Or is a distinct new movement indeed necessary? If so, around what strategies, core program, and collective identities should such a movement mobilize? Should it be a movement of the Left, or a broader coalition? Should the Left put communicative democracy atop its own agenda, in hopes of finding new supporters for progressive social change, or would such a move further marginalize the Left? To what extent is media reform connected with and dependent upon broader social and political change?

Space does not permit adequate exploration of these questions here. Moreover, neither I nor most of the veteran media scholars and activists I interviewed could offer more than provisional and speculative answers. I conclude this essay with some of them.

Does media democratization require a movement? Robert White argues that new social movements are not only the main source of, but also a model for, democratic communication. Indeed, he virtually equates the two, for two reasons. First, movements need to practice horizontal, participatory communication internally, in order to attract loyal members, challenge hegemonic definitions of reality, enhance the movement's cultural status, and project its symbols into the public arena. Second, full-scale communicative democracy involves not only structural media reform, but also normative change, spreading participatory communication practices throughout society. For White, movements are the birthplace of such cultural transformation.
Such a view perhaps romanticizes oppositional social movements. More importantly, it conflates democratization through the media (the use of media by groups seeking progressive change in other social spheres), and democratization of the media. These two processes are not identical. They do overlap, however. In engaging in public communication for their primary objectives, progressive movements add to media diversity; conversely, structural media reform would create more public space for critical movements.

The latter, however, is unlikely to be achieved without a popular movement devoted specifically to this objective. Only sustained popular pressure is likely to persuade governments to challenge the power and earn the wrath of media conglomerates. Examples of socially progressive governments retreating from media reform in the face of virulent hostility from media capital abound, from Venezuela in 1974 and Mexico in 1977-1980 to Britain's New Labour government in the 1990s. In one case (Peru in the 1970s), a progressive nationalist military government expropriated major media outlets and turned them over to peasant and labor organizations, only to find that the latter were neither prepared nor very interested in managing the media.

The communicative practices of various existing social movements are not on their own likely to put media reform on the political agenda. Industry structure and state policy institutions have created technologically-mediated public communication as a distinct sphere of economic and political activity. Coordinated popular action and the naming of a collective project- media democratization-is necessary to counter corporate power in this sphere. Such a project will likely be spearheaded by the groups with the most direct stake in media issues (independent journalists, communication researchers, etc.). It will need to draw from the energies and frustrations of other social movements prepared to devote at least a small portion of their resources to it. Clearly, the Left as a whole has a stake in the success of such a movement. It will have greater cultural and political resonance if it can attract groups (such as parents, librarians, churches) which are critical of the corporate media but which do not currently identify with the Left.

Is such a coalition possible, without sacrificing the progressive aspects of media reform? We do not yet know, but the 1996 founding convention of the Cultural Environment Movement in St. Louis offered encouraging evidence that it is. Founded by senior U.S. communications scholar George Gerbner and endorsed by 150 organizations, the CEM brought researchers, educators, policy-makers, cultural workers and producers together with religious, environmental, public health and children's rights groups. The CEM endorsed both the PCC and a "Viewer's Declaration of Independence" which called for change to a brutalizing and homogenized cultural environment dominated by media conglomerates with "nothing to tell but something to sell." Before it can fulfill its promise of becoming a genuine mass movement, the CEM or any similar grouping would need to attract organized labor, and to satisfy such organizational needs as long-term stable funding and staffing and representative collective decision-making. Still, the breadth of its vision and coalition indicates a potential, though embryonic, movement.

What should the strategic priorities of such a movement be? A 1998 survey of U.S. media activists found differences of opinion-for example, between building autonomous media and influencing or reforming the dominant media; between "insider" strategies of working with media professionals and policy elites, and the "outsider" strategy of mobilizing marginalized groups for an assault on the citadel; and between the inwardfocused strategy of mending fences within the movement, and campaigns to spread the message outwards.

Too often, activists disdain strategies for change which differ from their own. To be sure, one must often choose between the different forms of media activism; it is not simply a matter of allocating scarce resources, but also of choosing between constituencies which cannot simultaneously be attracted with the same language and tactics. For instance, San Francisco's Media Alliance, an impressive membership-based coalition which originated in the 1970s as an effort to reform and reinvigorate local journalism from within, may have alienated potential media supporters in the 1990s when it organized a protest against a local news outlet.

At the same time, media democratization is too big a project to be accomplished through any single strategy, and there are potential synergies between different approaches. For example, "those who focus directly on existing power structures and those who work to foster alternatives beyond them expand each other's social wiggle-room. The presence of oppositional movements can force dominant power structures to bow to opposing viewpoints, while activists who engage with mainstream media can push for practices and policies that offer more opportunities and resources for oppositional cultures to grow and thrive.''

Interviews with various activists suggest some of the guiding principles for any successful strategy. It must involve carefully building coalitions, which are broad enough to be politically effective but not so broad as to contain internal, potentially paralyzing divisions. Greater coordination or collaboration are essential, but it is neither possible nor necessary to fit all progressive media activism into the same tent. A movement needs a common and compelling focus, such as the right to communicate, but one which allows different groups to participate in different ways without sacrificing their autonomy. The Equal Rights Amendment, which energized the women's movement in the 1970s, has been suggested as a precedent in this respect.

Ideally, communicative democracy campaigns need to connect with deeply felt concerns of broad constituencies, find supporters within political and economic elites (or at least exploit divisions within them), and make possible links between local, national, and international action, as well as between "grassroots" and "tree-tops" (elite, policy-making) levels. Such campaigns need to use existing resources to reduce the costs of mobilization, give individuals psychological and material incentives to participate, and build networks which can respond quickly on different issues. Where possible, a campaign should not be simply reactive, but should create agenda-setting or springboard effects-for example, by participating in the institutional design and implementation of new technology, such as digital television. A media democracy movement needs to draw on the strengths rather than the potential divisiveness of its diversity. It should identify short-term, winnable objectives, building on the momentum of initial successes, and develop a "strategic capacity" that builds from individual initiatives to global organizations.

Several candidates for such coalitions and campaigns present themselves. These include adding the right to communicate to the emerging international human rights agenda, building coalitions to defend media workers' rights and/ or challenge media concentration, and reinvigorating public broadcasting. (The recently formed Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting in the U.S. joins the older Friends of Canadian Broadcasting in the ranks of leading media reform groups in their respective countries.) The first step, though, is for progressive movements to place media democratization higher on their own agendas, as a precondition of their own political advance.

Dan Rather Slams Corporate News at National Conference for Media Reform

 

Free Press, June 7, 2008

By Dan Rather

Former
CBS News anchor Dan Rather delivered a blistering critique of corporate
news on Saturday night at the National Conference for Media Reform
hosted by Free Press.

The following are Dan Rather's prepared remarks:

I am grateful to be here and I am, most of all, gratified by the
energy I have seen tonight and at this conference. It will take this
kind of energy — and more — to sustain what is good in our news
media... to improve what is deficient... and to push back against the
forces and the trends that imperil journalism and that — by immediate
extension — imperil democracy itself.

The Framers of our Constitution enshrined freedom of the press in
the very first Amendment, up at the top of the Bill of Rights, not
because they were great fans of journalists — like many politicians,
then and now, they were not — but rather because they knew, as Thomas
Jefferson put it, that, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free...
it expects what never was and never will be."

And it is because of this Constitutionally-protected role that I
still prefer to use the word "press" over the word "media." If nothing
else, it serves as a subtle reminder that — along with newspapers —
radio, television, and, now, the Internet, carry the same
Constitutional rights, mandates, and responsibilities that the founders
guaranteed for those who plied their trade solely in print.

So when you hear me talk about the press, please know that I am
talking about all the ways that news can be transmitted. And when you
hear me criticize and critique the press, please know that I do not
exempt myself from these criticisms.

In our efforts to take back the American press for the American
people, we are blessed this weekend with the gift of good timing. For
anyone who may have been inclined to ask if there really is a problem
with the news media, or wonder if the task of media reform is, indeed,
an urgent one... recent days have brought an inescapable answer, from a
most unlikely source.

A source who decided to tell everyone, quote, "what happened."

I know I can't be the first person this weekend to reference the
recent book by former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, but,
having interviewed him this past week, I think there are some very
important points to be made from the things he says in his book, and
the questions his statements raise.

I'm sure all of you took special notice of what he had to say about
the role of the press corps, in the run-up to the war in Iraq. In the
government's selling of the war, he said they were — or, I should say,
we were "complicit enablers" and "overly deferential."

These are interesting statements, especially considering their
source. As one tries to wrap one's mind around them, the phrase
"cognitive dissonance" comes to mind.

The first reaction, a visceral one, is: Whatever his motives for
saying these things, he's right — and we didn't need Scott McClellan to
tell us so.

But the second reaction is: Wait a minute... I do remember at least
some reporters, and some news organizations, asking tough questions —
asking them of the president, of those in his administration, of White
House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and — oh yes — of Scott McClellan
himself, once he took over for Mr. Fleischer a few months after the
invasion.

So how do we reconcile these competing reactions? Well, we need to pull back for what we in television call the wide shot.

If we look at the wide shot, we can see, in one corner of our
screen, the White House briefing room filled with the White House press
corps... and, filling the rest of the screen, the finite but
disproportionately powerful universe that has become known as
"mainstream media" — the newspapers and news programs, real and
alleged, that employ these White House correspondents — the news
organizations that are, in turn, owned by a shockingly few, much larger
corporations, for which news is but a miniscule part of their overall
business interests.

In the wake of 9/11 and in the run-up to Iraq, these news
organizations made a decision — consciously or unconsciously, but
unquestionably in a climate of fear — to accept the overall narrative
frame given them by the White House, a narrative that went like this:
Saddam Hussein, brutal dictator, harbored weapons of mass destruction
and, because of his supposed links to al Qaeda, this could not be
tolerated in a post-9/11 world.

In the news and on the news, one could, to be sure, find persons and
views that did not agree with all or parts of this official narrative.
Hans Blix, the former U.N. chief weapons inspector, comes to mind as an
example. But the burden of proof, implicitly or explicitly, was put on
these dissenting views and persons... the burden of proof was not put
on an administration that was demonstrably moving towards a large-scale
military action that would represent a break with American precedent
and stated policy of how, when, and under what circumstances this
nation goes to war.

So with this in mind, we look back to the corner of our screen where
the White House Press Corps is asking their questions. I have been a
White House correspondent myself, and I have worked with some of the
best in the business. You have an incentive, when you are in that
briefing room, to ask the good, tough questions: If nothing else, that
is how you get in the paper, or on the air. There is more to it than
that, and things have changed since I was a White House correspondent —
something I want to talk about in a minute. But the correspondents —
the really good ones — these correspondents ask their tough questions.

And these questions are met with what is now called, euphemistically
and much too kindly, what is now called "message discipline."

Well, we used to have a better and more accurate term for "message discipline." We called it "stonewalling."

Now, cut back to your evening news, or your daily newspaper... where
that White House Correspondent dutifully repeats the question he asked
of the president or his press secretary, and dutifully relates the
answer he was given — the same non-answer we've already heard dozens of
times, which amounts to a pitch for the administration's point of view,
whether or NOT the answer had anything to do with the actual question
that was asked.

And then: "Thank you Jack. In other news today... ."

And we're off on a whole new story.

In our news media, in our press, those who wield power were, in the
lead-up to Iraq, given the opportunity to present their views as a
coherent whole, to connect the dots, as they saw the dots and the
connections... no matter how much these views may have flown in the
face of precedent, established practice — or, indeed, the facts (as we
are reminded, yet again, by the just-released Senate report on the
administration's use of pre-war intelligence). The powerful are given
this opportunity still, in ways big and small, despite what you may
hear about the "post-Katrina" press.

But when a tough question is asked and not answered, when reputable
people come before the public and say, "wait a minute, something's not
right here," the press has treated them like voices crying in the
wilderness. These views, though they might be given air time, become
lone dots — dots that journalists don't dare connect, even if the
connections are obvious, even if people on the Internet and in the
independent press are making these very same connections. The
mainstream press doesn't connect these dots because someone might then
accuse them of editorializing, or of being the, quote, "liberal media."

But connecting these dots — making disparate facts make sense — is a big part of the real work of journalism.

So how does this happen? Why does this happen?

Let me say, by way of answering, that quality news of integrity starts with an owner who has guts.

In a news organization with an owner who has guts, there is an
incentive to ask the tough questions, and there is an incentive to pull
together the facts — to connect the dots — in a way that makes coherent
sense to the news audience.

I mentioned a moment ago that things have changed since I was a
White House correspondent. Yes, presidential administrations have
become more adept at holding "access" over the heads of reporters — ask
too tough a question, or too many of them, so the implicit threat goes,
and you're not going to get any more interviews with high-ranking
members of the administration, let alone the president. But I was
covering Presidents Johnson and Nixon — men not exactly known as
pushovers. No, what has changed, even more than the nature of the
presidency, is the character of news ownership. I only found out years
after the fact, for example, about the pressure that the Nixon White
House put on my then-bosses, during Watergate — pressure to cut down my
pieces, to call me off the story, and so on... because, back then, my
bosses took the heat, so I didn't have to. They did this so the story
could get told, and so the public could be informed.

But it is rare, now, to find a major news organization owned by an
individual, someone who can say, in effect, "The buck stops here." The
more likely motto now is: "The news stops... with making bucks."

America's biggest, most important news organizations have, over the
past 25 years, fallen prey to merger after merger, acquisition after
acquisition... to the point where they are, now, tiny parts of
immeasurably larger corporate entities — entities whose primary
business often has nothing to do with news. Entities that may, at any
given time, have literally hundreds of regulatory issues before
multiple arms of the government concerning a vast array of business
interests.

These are entities that, as publicly-held and traded corporations,
have as their overall, reigning mandate: Provide a return on
shareholder value. Increase profits. And not over time, not over the
long haul, but quarterly.

One might ask just where the news fits into this model. And if you
really need an answer, you can turn on your television, where you will
see the following:

Political analysis reduced to in-studio shouting matches between partisans armed with little more than the day's talking points.

Precious time and resources wasted on so-called human-interest stories, celebrity fluff, sensationalist trials, and gossip.

A proliferation of "news you can use" that amounts to thinly-disguised press releases for the latest consumer products.

And, though this doesn't get said enough, local news, which is where
most Americans get their news, that seems not to change no matter what
town or what city you're in... so slavish is its adherence to the
"happy talk" formula and the dictum that, "If it bleeds, it leads."

I could continue for hours, cataloging journalistic sins of which I
know you are all too aware. But, as the time grows late, let me say
that almost all of these failings come down to this: In the current
model of corporate news ownership, the incentive to produce good and
valuable news is simply not there.

Good news, quality news of integrity, requires resources and it
requires talent. These things are expensive, these things eat away at
the bottom line.

Years ago, in the eighties and the nineties, when the implications
of these cost-trimming measures were becoming impossible to ignore, and
the quality of the news was clearly threatened, I spoke out against
this cutting of news operations to the bone and beyond. Even then,
though, I couldn't have imagined that the cost-cutting imperatives
would go as far as they have today — deep into the marrow of what was
once considered a public trust.

But since the financial resources always seem to be available for
entertainment, promotion, and — last but not least — for lobbying...
perhaps there is an even more important reason why the incentive to
produce quality news is absent, and that is: quality news of integrity,
by its very nature, is sure to rock the boat now and then. Good,
responsible news worthy of its Constitutional protections will, in that
famous phrase, afflict the powerful and comfort the afflicted.

And that, when one feels the need to deliver shareholder value above
all, means that good news... may not always mean good business — or so
goes the fear, a fear that filters down into just about every big
newsroom in this country.

Now, I have spent my entire life in for-profit news, and I happen to
think that it does not have to be this way. I have worked for news
owners who, while they may have regarded their news divisions as an
occasional irritant, chose to turn that irritant into a pearl of public
trust. But today, sadly, it seems that the conglomerates that have
control over some of the biggest pieces of this public trust would just
as soon spit that irritant out.

So what does this mean for us tonight, and what is to be done?

It means that we need to be on the alert for where, when, and how
our news media bows to undue government influence. And you need to let
news organizations know, in no uncertain terms, that you won't stand
for it... that you, as news consumers, are capable of exerting pressure
of your own.

It means that we need to continue to let our government know that,
when it comes to media consolidation, enough is enough. Too few voices
are dominating, homogenizing, and marginalizing the news. We need to
demand that the American people get something in exchange for the use
of airwaves that belong, after all, to the people.

It means that we need to ensure that the Internet, where free speech
reigns and where journalism does not have to pass through a corporate
filter... remains free.

We need to say, loud and clear, that we don't want big corporations
enjoying preferred access to — or government acting as the gatekeeper
for — this unique platform for independent journalism.

And it means that we need to hold the government to its mandate to
protect the freedom of the press, including independent and
non-commercial news media.

The stakes could not possibly be higher. Scott McClellan's book
serves as a reminder, and the current election season, not to mention
the gathering clouds of conflict with Iran, will both serve as tests of
whether lessons have truly been learned from past experience. Ensuring
that a free press remains free will require vigilance, and it will
require work.

Please, take tonight's energy and inspiration home with you. Take it
back to your desks and your workplaces, to your colleagues and your
fellow citizens. magnify it, multiply it, and spread it. Make it viral.
Make it something that cannot be ignored — not by the powers in
Washington, not by the owners and executives of media companies. Write
these people. Call them. Send them the message that you know your
rights, you know that you are entitled to news media as diverse and
varied as the American people... and that you deserve a press that
provides the raw material of democracy, the good information that
Americans need to be full participants in our government of, by, and
for the people.

There is energy here, that can be equal to that task, but this
energy must be maintained... if the press — if democracy — is to be
preserved.

Thank you very much, and good night.

 

I hate to be a killjoy before the dream of a no-immunity party even begins. However, we might succeed in having immunity dropped from the FISA legislation only to find we have overlooked even worse aspects of this legislation. The more I read about this issue, the more it appears the immunity problem may be doing double duty.  It serves as both a significant issue that does warrant attention, and as a distraction from other even more objectionable aspects of the FISA Amendment legislation that will expand government power to spy on U.S. citizens.

For those who haven't already read this, below is a really nice excerpt from a diary post at the Daily Kos. It was written by a former criminal defense attorney called "NCrissieB." Among other things,  NCrissieB specialized in litigating Fourth Amendment rights cases having to do with search and seizure, so his expertise is quite on point. NCrissieB's main argument is that the Patriot Act already did away with our Fourth Amendment rights.

Perhaps he is even right  when he says that the immunity issue " is not the hill to die on," with respect to Obama. However, there is no time like the present for voters to send a message to all members of Congress that we not only expect them to nix immunity and refrain from creating any more unconstitutional laws, but we also expect them to amend any questionable laws that already exist.

The more laws on the books that degrade the same constitutional rights, the less powerful the argument that they are unconstitutional will be in the future. This is especially true with some of the Supreme Court members we've got today.  So better to pay attention to this now.

It is understandable that to we failed to fully safeguard our democracy in the aftermath of 9-11 when the Patriot Act went through. We can still demonstrate to our lawmakers in Congress that now we are paying much closer attention to the laws they propose-- and especially any loopy parts that erode our Constitutional rights.

You can read NCrissieB's whole post here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/6/26/62819/0991/926/542170   
--------------------------------------------------------------

NCRISSIEB's TAKE ON CURRENT STATE OF Y|OUR FOURTH AMENDMENT RIGHTS:

Thu Jun 26, 2008 at 04:46:30 AM PDT

Your telephone number pops up several times on the call list of someone the FBI believe is involved with Al Qaeda.  The FBI go to the FISC, and ask for a warrant to wiretap your telephone.  The wiretap reveals nothing about terrorism - turns out they were wrong number calls - but the FBI do hear you talking about who will bring the weed to your backyard barbeque.

Based on that, the FBI get a warrant to raid your home on the day of the barbeque, and in they swoop, charging you with possession with intent to distribute.  That's a felony.

"What gives you the right to storm into my back yard?" you ask.  The FBI agent presents you with the warrant, and its affidavit, and you see that they've been wiretapping you.  "What gives you the right to spy on my phone calls?" you demand.

"We have a FISA warrant," the agent answers.  And off you go to trial.

At trial, your attorney moves to exclude the search warrant that let them into your backyard, on grounds that you're not a terrorist, there is no conceivable evidence to suggest otherwise, thus no FISA warrant should have been issued, thus the wiretap is illegal, and all information gained from it is "fruit of the poisoned tree."  But there's a problem:

Not even your trial judge can see the FISA affidavit.  It is classified, "sources and methods" information.  The prosecutor can show the judge that a FISA warrant was indeed issued, but that's as far as it goes.

Because you can't see the factual allegations underlying the FISA warrant - not even the trial judge can see that - you cannot challenge the validity of that warrant.  It's not reviewable.  Not at trial.  Not on appeal.  Not ever.

Which means they could have said anything they wanted.  They could have had only the flimsiest pretext of probable cause.  They could even have lied outright.  You'll never know, so you can't challenge it.

Oh, and the FISC has refused fewer than five of the tens of thousands of warrant requests submitted, in the past 19 years.  The FISC is, quite literally, a rubber-stamp court.

This is the "protection" offered by FISA.  This is the "constitutional safeguard" so many of you are so up in arms to preserve.  It is no safeguard at all.

Your constitutional rights exist only so long as you or your lawyer can challenge their violation in court.  If FISA is the last bastion of the Fourth Amendment, the Fourth Amendment is already a dead letter.

In terms of constitutional safeguards, the current FISA bill is a non-issue.  Yes, it allows telecoms to raise "color of law" immunity as an affirmative, threshhold defense.  And yes, that means the telecoms very likely will never be held to account for violations of FISA.  But the secrecy of FISA warrants themselves voids the Fourth Amendment, if information gained from those warrants can be used in a criminal trial.

I'm convinced that Barack Obama recognizes this.  I'm sure he recognizes that this bill is a classic political bait-and-switch, wrapping telecom immunity in the mantle of "safeguarding our constitutional rights," when in fact those rights are already voided by use of secret, non-reviewable FISA warrants to gather information for criminal cases.  I'm sure Barack Obama realizes that this petty knoll is not "the hill to die on."

"The hill to die on" is the USAPA's breaking down the wall of separation between intelligence-gathering and criminal investigation.  And that is not even at issue yet.  We'll need a Democratic president, and at least 60 Democratic senators, to fight that battle.

So please, folks, let's keep this bill in context.  If you're counting on FISA to safeguard your Fourth Amendment rights ... they're already gone.

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(Excuse the lines. The block quotes haven't been working for me.)

I have a few more user-friendly documents about  FISA that I hope to post soon.

Have a great 4th! Don't drink and drive.

Here is a new and creative way for citizens against retroactive immunity to make their voices heard.  Commenter Diverik just brought this to my attention:

Anybody who wants to support Sen. Dodd and Feingold in their opposition to retroactive immunity can become an online citizen co-sponser by going here:

http://advomatic.bm23.com/public/?q=landingpage&fn=Mail_LandingPage_Link&id=1c1sal9lif76e2hlphhjcjllpc0d9&page=subadd&type=p&ssid=9531

I hear so much confusion about FISA and I have plenty of my own. I  found some clear and concise information about the implications of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that  passed in the House on June 20.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that the House just passed will hit the Senate in a few days for its final approval process on June 8.

Let's hope the Senate does not pass this before everybody has a chance to understand the potential consequences of this act.

I want to share two, clear documents that I found at  American, nonprofit organizations.

I hope these are useful  for others who also do not have time to become regular experts on FISA, but want to understand the essential points of a law that will govern  how and when the American government may spy its citizens.

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First, here is a letter signed by many trusty nonprofit American organizations, including the League of Women Voters. The following letter can be found at the nonprofit Center for National Security Studies cnss.org/

<blockquote>June 9, 2008

Re: Opposition to the FISA Legislation Proposed by Senator Bond

Dear Member of Congress:

As organizations that are deeply committed to both civil liberties and effective intelligence-gathering, we strongly urge you to oppose legislation recently outlined by Senator Bond to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This bill unreasonably and unnecessarily authorizes broad surveillance of Americans’ international communications without meaningful Fourth Amendment protections: no individualized warrant issued by a court, no determination of probable cause of wrongdoing, and no specification of the location or means of the surveillance.

Touted as a compromise to end an impasse between House and Senate versions of FISA legislation, the bill proposed by Senator Bond is far from a compromise. Its chief provisions are not significantly different from those contained in the bill passed by the Senate in February of this year (S. 2248). Like that measure, the “compromise” would threaten Americans' privacy by severely curtailing judicial review and failing to include other reasonable civil liberties protections that appear in the House-passed version of the legislation (H.R. 3773). Neither Sen. Bond nor the administration has made a persuasive case that these sweeping new powers are needed or that existing authorities are inadequate to ensure the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence-gathering activities.

In addition, this legislation would use the secret FISA court to rubber stamp a grant of immunity to telecommunications companies that assisted with unlawful warrantless surveillance.

The Bond proposal does incorporate a few improvements, including an audit of illegal warrantless surveillance and a provision reaffirming that FISA is the exclusive means by which foreign intelligence surveillance can lawfully be conducted in the United States. But these modest concessions do not offset the vast new unchecked surveillance powers the bill confers on the government.

Among the most important reasons to oppose this bill are the following:

The bill would authorize massive warrantless surveillance. The bill allows the government to intentionally acquire millions of Americans’ international communications with no individualized warrant or determination of probable cause, so long as one party to a phone call or e-mail is believed to be located abroad and the purpose is to gather foreign intelligence.

The bill would require no individualized warrant even when an American’s communications clearly are of interest to the government. The bill requires an individualized warrant only if and when the government decides to “target” a particular American by using the person’s phone number or e-mail address to select his or her communications for acquisition. While the legislation provides for judicial review of targeting and other guidelines, the court procedures are inadequate to meet Fourth Amendment requirements.

The bill would curtail effective judicial review of surveillance. While the bill contains provisions for FISA court review of targeting and other guidelines, those provisions do not provide a meaningful role for the court in ensuring that the government does not seize and data-mine the private communications of law-abiding Americans. Moreover, the bill contains an exception for “exigent circumstances” that could be misused to circumvent even the limited court review provided by the bill with respect to new surveillance programs.

The bill would grant retroactive immunity for wrongdoing. The bill would give blanket immunity to companies that aided the government in conducting warrantless electronic surveillance of Americans. Like S. 2248, the bill would direct the court to dismiss privacy lawsuits against telecommunications providers if they received written assurances that the President had authorized the surveillance—assurances which in fact they received.
One change which makes the “compromise” worse than the Senate bill is a provision which would require the transfer of all of the lawsuits brought against the telecommunications providers from federal district court to the secret FISA court—a body whose only job for the past thirty years has been to approve FISA surveillance applications, not to try cases. This is not a compromise on immunity; it is the same old immunity dressed up to look like a judicial proceeding.

The bill would not provide a reasonable sunset. The bill would authorize the government to conduct this massive surveillance for six years, just like the original Senate bill.
The proposed bill would grant unnecessary and unconstitutional powers to the Executive Branch. We urge you oppose it, and to vote against any legislation that contains the defects described above.

Thank you for considering our views.

American Civil Liberties Union
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee
American Library Association
Association of Research Libraries
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Center for American Progress Action Fund
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for National Security Studies
Congressman Bob Barr, Liberty Strategies
Defending Dissent Foundation
Doug Bandow, Vice President for Policy, Citizen Outreach Project
DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Fairfax County Privacy Council
Friends Committee on National Legislation
League of Women Voters of the United States
Liberty Coalition
MAS Freedom
National Lawyers Guild – National Office
OMB Watch
Open Society Policy Center
OpenTheGovernment.org
People For the American Way
Privacy Lives
Republican Liberty Caucus
The Multiracial Activist
United Methodist Church, General Board of Church and Society
U.S. Bill of Rights Foundation</blockquote>

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Okay, second I will post just part of an intelligible summary of recent FISA activity from the Bill of Rights Defense League. There are many links in this document, so if they don't come through as intended, I'll try it again or you can just go to the source.

You can find the rest here::

 http://www.bordc.org/threats/legislation/ 
 (just scroll down to the bolded title "Legislation Addressing Warrantless Wiretapping")

Legislation Addressing Warrantless Wiretapping

RECENT HISTORY AND WHAT IS HAPPENING ON THIS TODAY

FISA Amendments Act
Bill Number: S 2248 S 2248
Status: Introduced on October 26, 2007. Hearings held in Judiciary Committee on October 31. Reported out of committee on November 16. Passed by the Senate on February 12, 2008. 68-29
Sponsor: Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV)
Co-sponsors

Senate version of a bill which promises to "streamline" and "modernize" the Foreign Intelligance Surveillance Act (FISA). The Senate Intelligence Committee passed the bill out of committee. Its report is available by clicking here. This version of the bill immunizes telecommunication companies that cooperated with the president's illegal warrantless wiretapping program from September 2001 to January 2007.

• Comparison of FISA Amendments Act and RESTORE Act by the Center for Democracy and Technology.
• Text of the FISA Amendments Act, as passed by the Judiciary Committee on November 16.

On December 17, the Senate voted 76-10 to invoke cloture, so that debate on the bill would be limited to 30 hours. The only 2008 presidential candidate in the Senate who voted was Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT), and he voted with 9 other senators against moving quickly to a vote. Then, Dodd threatened a filibuster in an attempt to strip the provision that immunizes telecommunications companies. After ten hours of debate, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid decided to remove the bill from consideration until January 2008 when the Senate returned from its recess.

Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI), Jim Webb (D-VA), Jon Tester (D-MT), and Christopher Dodd (D-CT) crafted amendments to the original bill, which would have placed restrictions on government surveillance. The Senate voted on those amendments on February 12, 2008.

• Dodd's amendment, SA 3907, would have stripped telecom immunity from the bill. It failed 31-67.
• Feingold and Dodd's amendment, SA 3912, would have required the government to target individuals, rather than vacuuming up all electronic communications. It failed 37-60.
• Feingold, Webb and Tester's amendment, SA 3979, would have restricted government surveillance when U.S. persons are included in the communication. It failed 35-62.
• Even Senator Dianne Feinstein's amendment, SA 3910, which would have reiterated that FISA is the exclusive tool for government intelligence surveillance, failed 57-41.

The Protect America Act (PAA) expired on February 16, 2008. On March 14, 2008, the House passed a new version of H.R. 3773 that incorporates elements from the RESTORE Act and the FISA Amendments Act. According to the Center for National Security Studies, the new bill "contains strong reporting requirements that will ensure that Congress obtains access to the information needed for public and congressional consideration of what permanent amendments should be made to the FISA." The House and Senate still have not reconciled their different versions of the FISA Amendments Act.

WHAT IS HAPPENING TODAY:

However, in May 2008, Senator Kit Bond (R-MO) issued a proposal that he believes is a compromise on warrantless surveillance. Under Bond's proposal, telecom companies accused of breaking the law by providing the government with personal subscriber information without receiving a warrant would be let off the hook. Cases against them would be sent to a secret FISA court that would not review whether the companies actually broke the law, but would instead ask whether the companies followed what the Bush administration told them was the law. If the President gave them a note saying his request for information was legal, the companies would not be held responsible for violating their customers' privacy rights.

The FISA Amendments Act of 2008, Senator Bond's "compromise" was passed 293-129 by the House on June 20, 2008. The Senate vote is still pending.

What You Can Do:

Call Your Congressional Representative TODAY with this message:

• Do not give in to Senator Bond's proposed "compromise."
• Do not grant immunity to telecommunications companies.
• Do not vote for a bill that allows wiretapping without a warrant. Our Fourth Amendment specifically states a warrant is needed for government searches.

Senator Feingold released this statement on the Senate floor on February 12. Senator Dodd's statement, "The Rule of Law Abandoned, Dark Day in the Senate."

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I have found other useful information I will try to post at a later time.