The Only Way to Beat Big Media
According to Robert W. McChesney, a media scholar and president of FreePress.Net, 2005 has been a remarkable year for the media reform movement.
"Together, we’ve proven to the politicians and industry moguls that people won’t stand idle while powerful interests make policies in our name but without our consent," he says.
He credits bloggers and activism for saving federal funding and thwarting partisan attacks on public broadcasting, for exposing fake news and "payola pundits," for helping to protect the right of local communities across the country to bring universal, affordable Internet access to their citizens.
FreePress.Net is now recruiting more Free Press e-activists.
"Despite the gains we made in the past year, greedy corporate media continue to lead our nation down a perilous path," he says. "The narrow range of political debate, the lack of government and corporate accountability, and the obsession with celebrity and sensationalism have left the public dangerously misinformed about the most crucial issues of the day."
He points out that more and more journalists are being shown the door as their corporate employers opt to “synergize” operations by replacing reporting with “infotainment.”
"We need to push back in 2006 with an army of 500,000 activists - ready to sound the alarm when the FCC tries again to rewrite the rules to let Big Media control more local outlets in every city."
He also says, "We must confront the Bush administration’s relentless campaign to silence independent and skeptical journalism."
He says Congress needs to passe a new Telecom Act that’s better than the old one, "which gave us the Clear Channel colossus while handing Big Media billions of dollars in public assets for free."
And this time, he says, "the future of the Internet is at stake."
He says everyone knows someone who wonders why they can’t find people like them or the issues they care about on TV, people who are mad about their cable bill being too high or having no high-speed Internet access.
"Probably, like so many people I’ve met throughout America, they see the problems of the media but feel helpless to change them," he says.
He is asking everyone on the Internet who believes this to recruit two new e-activists.
"We started Free Press to give more people a voice in the momentous policy decisions shaping the future of all communications," he said. "We need more people to join the debate and build a media system that truly looks like America."