[IMC-US] personal reprtback for indy folks abouttheNationalCOnference on Med

[Tribal Scribal]

you've made some excellent points, kat. would you care to post this on your 
local newswire in some form or is it more in-house?  i ask 'cuz there's talk 
of creating a u.s. feature on the issue.

d.o.


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"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as 
necessary in the political world as storms in the physical world."

- Thomas Jefferson
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more rebellion here:
http://concertobi.blogspot.com/

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>From: Kat Aaron <yourfriendkat at gmail.com>
>Reply-To: Kat Aaron <yourfriendkat at gmail.com>,"Working Group for IMC-US." 
><imc-us at lists.ucimc.org>
>To: "Working Group for IMC-US." <imc-us at lists.ucimc.org>
>Subject: Re: [IMC-US] personal reprtback for indy folks 
>abouttheNationalCOnference on Media Reform.
>Date: Tue, 17 May 2005 22:45:24 -0400
>
>For me, the NCMR really threw into relief the gulf between the
>perspective of IMC and the media justice groups versus a media
>"reform" agenda.  Below are some of the reasons I was deeply troubled
>by the vision of media change articulated by free press and most of
>the people I heard speak on panels.
>
>Over and over at the conference, we heard reference to the founding
>fathers and their vision of a free press, that we need to go back to
>the free press vision of America's beginnings.  As Malkia Cyril
>pointed out at the opening plenary, who was that press free for – this
>country was founded on a capitalist and slave owning vision.  For most
>people, the press has never been free or open.  I don't want to go
>back to anything, I want to go forward into a media that's new in
>structure, ownership, and content.
>
>Both panelists and people from free press talked constantly about
>"our" issues, about "our" media – who is the we in that statement?  If
>free press has positioned themselves as the top of the media-change
>pyramid, at whose behest and on whose behalf are these media reforms
>being undertaken?  They don't seem to listen to or check in with the
>people who have been most excluded from the media. What will the media
>reform and the new media structure they seek to create look like – if
>the participants and stakeholders look like this conference I am
>worried.  The people at that conference aren't the people who most
>need to be involved in the media changes.
>
>My friend Amy Sonnie at the Youth Media Council also pointed out that
>the free press model is essentially one that buys in to the cult of
>personality (McChesney, Josh Silver) and of one big national
>organization.  They seem to subscribe to the idea that national
>organizations are the keystone of the solution to our problems, or
>even worse, that the organizations themselves are the solution.  They
>see a pyramid and we see horizontal organizing.  There's also a
>cultural dimension to this; national organizations like free press
>seldom recognize the validity and power of different structures and
>cultural models.  Not everyone is comfortable or happy working in that
>top-down structure that is their way of working.  I know I'm sure as
>hell not.
>
>Someone asked me if I thought the split was generational – young
>people in the indymedia and media justice movements, and older people
>in the reform movement.  I answered that no, if there had been people
>from the Black Panthers or the Young Lords at the conference, they
>would likely have been down with what the media justice and IMC people
>were trying to say, with our various goals and perspectives – it was
>who the older people were in large part, white men used to working a
>certain way, used to having power and having trouble ceding it.
>
>As Arun from NYC pointed out in the IMC caucus, we have an
>anti-statist and anti-capitalist perspective.  Reform doesn't really
>fit into that – it's tweaking the system that I think most of us want
>to dismantle.  Since we're not dismantling capitalism tomorrow, and we
>need reform in the meantime, reform goals should be strategic and
>directed by the communities that most need change, communities
>historically most marginalized.
>
>The ultimate issue seems to be that for us (whoever us is) the end
>goal is social justice.  Media justice is a part of that, and media
>reform is an intermediary step towards the media justice we want to
>see.  At the conference, most of the discussion was centered around
>media reform as ends and means, reform as the goal in and of itself.
>That's not anything I want to be a part of.
>
>The next question for me is whether we can just walk away from the
>whole free press/reform scene.  I personally think not, at least right
>now, for this reason:  if they go much further forward with a media
>reform agenda that isn't in dialogue with the media justice movements,
>with imc, etc, then an uninformed media reform agenda will be
>implemented that I think will make it harder for us to implement a
>community-led and -based media reform vision.  At some point soon,
>their work will start to be detrimental to ours, if we haven't passed
>that point already.  The media reform movement is at serious risk of
>losing the people who are needed to make the change.  There will come
>a moment where they have identified a media reform that they think is
>needed, and they will ask people to support it, and the people won't
>be there.  You can't build someone a vehicle for change and then ask
>them to drive it.
>
>What to do, then?  I don't know.  I think the first step is reaching
>out to some of the media justice groups (maybe again, I don't know
>what's been done on that front to date, and if someone does, I'd love
>to hear about it, off list if that's old news for other people).  Then
>maybe reaching out in concert with the media justice groups to free
>press and articulating how fucked up things were at the NCMR – I know
>that happened after the last NCMR, but maybe it's worth one more try?
>Maybe not though.  In some ways, the bigger question is whether reform
>is something that's worth putting energy into.  I think Prometheus's
>work says yes, and there are really important issues around community
>wireless, shit like that.  But for me, working on reform with the free
>press people is only going to work if they change a lot about how they
>work, and I don't know how realistic that is.
>
>Anyway, that's my two cents, or my two bucks, sorry this email was so
>long.  The whole thing really got me thinking though.  Looking forward
>to hearing people's thoughts.
>
>- Kat
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>IMC-US mailing list
>IMC-US at lists.ucimc.org
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