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http://www.commondreams.org/views07/0118-20.htm Published on Wednesday, January 17, 2006 Life on the Plantation by Bill Moyers Delivered to the Media Reform Conference, Memphis, TN January 12, 2007 It has long been said (ostensibly by Benjamin Franklin, but we cant be sure) that democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote. My fellow lambs: Its good to be in Memphis and find you well-armed with passion for democracy, readiness for action, and courage for the next round in the fight for a free and independent press. I salute the conviction that brought you here. I cherish the spirit that fills this hall and the camaraderie we share today. All too often the greatest obstacle to reform is the reform movement itself. Factions rise, fences are built, jealousies mount and the cause all believe in is lost in the shattered fragments of what was once a clear and compelling vision. Reformers, in fact, too often remind me of Baptists. I speak as a Baptist. I know Baptists. One of my favorite stories is of the fellow who was about to jump off a bridge when another fellow runs up to him, crying: Stop. Stop. Stop. Dont do it. The man on the bridge looks down and asks, Why not? Well, theres much to live for. Like what? Well, your faith. Are you religious? Yes. Me, too. Christian or Buddhist? Christian. Me, too. Are you Catholic or Protestant? Protestant. Me, too. Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist? Baptist. Me, too. Are you original Baptist Church of God or Reformed Baptist Church of God? Reformed Baptist Church of God. Me, too. Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God Reformation of 1820, or Reformed Baptist Church of God Reformation of 1912? 1912. Whereupon the second fellow turned red in the face, shouted, Die, you heretic scum, and pushed him off the bridge. That sounds like reformers, doesnt it? By avoiding contentious factionalism, you have created a strong movement. I will confess to you that I was skeptical when Bob McChesney and John Nichols first raised the issue of media consolidation a few years ago. I was sympathetic but skeptical. The challenge of actually doing something about this issue beyond simply bemoaning its impact on democracy was daunting. How could we hope to come up with an effective response to an inexorable force? It seemed inexorable because over the previous two decades a series of mega-media mergers had swept the country, each deal even bigger than the last. The lobby representing the broadcast, cable, and newspaper industry is extremely powerful, with an iron grip on lawmakers and regulators alike. Both parties bowed to their will when the Republican Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That monstrous assault on democracy, with malignant consequences for journalism, was nothing but a welfare giveaway to the largest, richest and most powerful media conglomerates in the world Goliaths whose handful of owners controlled, commodified and monetized everyone, and everything, in sight. Call it the plantation mentality in its modern incarnation. Here in Memphis they know all about that mentality. Even in 1968 the Civil Rights movement was still battling the plantation mentality based on race, gender, and power that permeated Southern culture long before and even after the groundbreaking legislation of the mid-1960s. When Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Memphis to join the strike of garbage workers in 1968, the cry from every strikers heart I am a man voiced the long suppressed outrage of a people whose rights were still being trampled by an ownership class that had arranged the world for its own benefit. The plantation mentality was a phenomenon deeply insulated in the American experience early on, and it permeated and corrupted our course as a nation. The journalist of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, had envisioned this new republic as a community of occupations, prospering by the aid which each receives from the other, and from the whole. But that vision was repeatedly betrayed, so that less than a century after Thomas Paines death, Theodore Roosevelt, bolting a Republican party whose bosses had stolen the nomination from him, declared: It is not to be wondered at that our opponents have been very bitter, for the lineup in this crisis is one that cuts deep to the foundations of government. Our democracy is now put to a vital test, for the conflict is between human rights on the one side and on the other special privilege asserted as a property right. The parting of the ways has come. Today, a hundred years after Teddy Roosevelts death, those words ring just as true. America is socially divided and politically benighted. Inequality and poverty grow steadily along with risk and debt. Many working families cannot make ends meet with two people working, let alone if one stays home to care for children or aging parents. Young people without privilege and wealth struggle to get a footing. Seniors enjoy less and less security for a lifetimes work. We are racially segregated in every meaningful sense except the letter of the law. And survivors of segregation and immigration toil for pennies on the dollar compared to those they serve. None of this is accidental. Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow not someone known for extreme political statements characterizes what is happening as nothing less than elite plunder: The redistribution of wealth in favor of the wealthy and of power in favor of the powerful. Indeed, nearly all of the wealth America created over the past 25 years has been captured by the top 20% of households, and most of the gains went to the wealthiest. The top 1% of households captured more than 50% of all gains in financial wealth. These households hold more than twice the share their predecessors held on the eve of the American Revolution. Of the early American democratic creeds, the anti-Federalist warning that government naturally works to fortify the conspiracies of the rich proved especially prophetic. So it is this that we confront today. Americas choice between two fundamentally different economic visions. As Norton Garfinkle writes in his new book The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth, the historic vision of the American Dream is that continuing economic growth and political stability can be achieved by supporting income growth and the economic security of middle-class families without restricting the ability of successful businessmen to gain wealth. The counter belief is that providing maximum financial rewards to the most successful is the way to maintain high economic growth. The choice cannot be avoided: What kind of economy do we seek, and what kind of nation do we wish to be? Do we want to be a country in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Or do we want to be a country committed to an economy that provides for the common good, offers upward mobility, supports a middle-class standard of living, and provides generous opportunity for all? In Garfinkles words, When the richest nation in the world has to borrow hundreds of billions of dollars to pay its bill, when its middle-class citizens sit on a mountain of debt to maintain their living standards, when the nations economy has difficulty producing secure jobs or enough jobs of any kind, something is amiss. You bet something is amiss. And it goes to the core of why we are here in Memphis for this conference. We are talking about a force media that cuts deep to the foundation of democracy. When Teddy Roosevelt dissected the real masters of the reactionary forces in his time, he concluded that they directly or indirectly control the majority of the great daily newspapers that are against us. Those newspapers the dominant media of the day choked (his word) the channels of information ordinary people needed to understand what was being done to them. And today? Two basic pillars of American society shared economic prosperity and a public sector capable of serving the common good are crumbling. The third basic pillar of American democracy an independent press is under sustained attack, and the channels of information are choked. A few huge corporations now dominate the media landscape in America. Almost all the networks carried by most cable systems are owned by one of the major media conglomerates. Two thirds of todays newspaper markets are monopolies. As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace. And those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR, are under growing financial and political pressure to reduce critical news content and shift their focus in a mainstream direction, which means being more attentive to the establishment than to the bleak realities of powerlessness that shape the lives of ordinary people. What does todays media system mean for the notion of the informed public cherished by democratic theory? Quite literally, it means that virtually everything the average person sees or hears outside of her own personal communications is determined by the interests of private, unaccountable executives and investors whose primary goal is increasing profits and raising the companys share price. More insidiously, this small group of elites determines what ordinary people do not see or hear. In-depth news coverage of anything, let alone of the problems people face day-to-day, is as scarce as sex, violence, and voyeurism are pervasive. Successful business model or not, by democratic standards, this is censorship of knowledge by monopolization of the means of information. In its current form which Barry Diller happily describes as oligopoly media growth has one clear consequence: there is more information and easier access to it, but its more narrow in content and perspective, so that what we see from the couch is overwhelmingly a view from the top. The pioneering communications scholar Murray Edelman wrote that Opinions about public policy do not spring immaculately or automatically into peoples minds; they are always placed there by the interpretations of those who can most consistently get their claims and manufactured cues publicized widely. For years the media marketplace for opinions about public policy has been dominated by a highly-disciplined, thoroughly-networked ideological noise machine, to use David Brocks term. Permeated with slogans concocted by big corporations, their lobbyists and their think-tank subsidiaries, public discourse has effectively changed how American values are perceived. Day after day, the ideals of fairness and liberty and mutual responsibility have been stripped of their essential dignity and meaning in peoples lives. Day after day, the egalitarian creed of our Declaration of Independence is trampled underfoot by hired experts and sloganeers who speak of the death tax, the ownership society, the culture of life, the liberal assault on God and family, compassionate conservation, weak on terrorism, the end of history, the clash of civilizations, no child left behind. They have even managed to turn the escalation of a failed war into a surge as if it were a current of electricity charging through a wire instead of blood spurting from a soldiers ruptured veins. We have all the Orwellian filigree of a public sphere in which language conceals reality and the pursuit of personal gain and partisan power is wrapped in rhetoric that turns truth to lies and lies to truth. So it is, that limited government has little to do with the constitution or local autonomy any more; now it means corporate domination and the shifting of risk from government and business to struggling families and workers. Family values now means imposing a sectarian definition on everyone else. Religious freedom now means majoritarianism and public benefits for organized religion without any public burdens. And patriotism now means blind support for failed leaders. Its what happens when an interlocking media system filters, through commercial values or ideology, the information and moral viewpoints that people consume in their daily lives. By no stretch of the imagination can we say the dominant institutions of todays media are guardians of democracy. Despite the profusion of new information platforms on cable, on the Internet, on radio, blogs, podcasts, YouTube and MySpace, among others, the resources for solid original journalistic work, both investigative and interpretive, are contracting rather than expanding. Im old fashioned in this, a hangover from my days as a cub reporter and later a publisher. I agree with Michael Schudson, one of our leading scholars of communication, who writes in the current Columbia Journalism Review that while all media matter, some matter more than others, and for the sake of democracy, print still counts most, especially print that devotes resources to gathering news. Network TV matters, cable TV matters, but when it comes to original investigation and reporting, newspapers are overwhelmingly the most important media. But newspapers are purposely dumbing down, driven down says Schudson by Wall Street, whose collective devotion to an informed citizenry is nil, seems determined to eviscerate newspapers. Meanwhile, despite some initial promise following the shock of 9/11, television has returned to its tabloid ways, chasing celebrity and murders preferably both at the same time while wallowing in triviality, banality and a self-referential view. Worrying about the loss of real news is not a romantic cliché of journalism. It has been verified by history: from the days of royal absolutism to the present, the control of information and knowledge had been the first line of defense for failed regimes facing democratic unrest. The suppression of parliamentary dissent during Charles Is eleven years tyranny in England (1629-1640) rested largely on government censorship operating through strict licensing laws for the publication of books. The Federalists infamous Sedition Act of 1798 likewise sought to quell Republican insurgency by making it a crime to publish false, scandalous, and malicious writing about the government or its officials. In those days, our governing bodies tried to squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt instruments of the law padlocks for the presses and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers. Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions, the courts and the constitution have struck those weapons out of their hands. But now theyve found new methods, in the name of national security and even broader claims of executive privilege. The number of documents stamped Top Secret, Secret or Confidential has accelerated dramatically since 2001, including many formerly accessible documents which are now reclassified as secret. Vice-President Cheneys office refuses to disclose what, in fact, it is classifying: even their secrecy is being kept a secret. Beyond what is officially labeled Secret or Privileged information, there hovers on the plantation a culture of selective official news implementation, working through favored media insiders, to advance political agendas by leak and innuendo and spin, by outright propaganda mechanisms such as the misnamed Public Information offices that churn out blizzards of factually selective releases on a daily basis, and even by directly paying pundits and journalists to write on subjects of mutual interest. They neednt have wasted the money. As we saw in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the plantation mentality that governs Washington turned the press corps into sitting ducks for the war party for government and neo-conservative propaganda and manipulation. There were notable exceptions Knight Ridders bureau, for example but on the whole all high-ranking officials had to do was say it, and the press repeated it, until it became gospel. The height of myopia came with the admission by a prominent beltway anchor that his responsibility is to provide officials a forum to be heard. Not surprisingly, the watchdog group FAIR found that during the three weeks leading up to the invasion, only three percent of U.S. sources on the evening news of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX, and PBS expressed skeptical opinions of the impending war. Not surprisingly, two years after 9/11, almost seventy percent of the public still thought it likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the terrorist attacks of that day. An Indiana school teacher told the Washington Post, From what weve heard from the media, it seems like what they feel is that Saddam and the whole Al Qaeda thing are connected. Much to the advantage of the Bush administration, a large majority of the public shared this erroneous view during the buildup to the war a propaganda feat that Saddam himself would have envied. It is absolutely stunning frightening how the major media organizations were willing, even solicitous hand puppets of a state propaganda campaign, cheered on by the partisan ideological press to go to war. There are many other ways the plantation mentality keeps Americans from reality. Take the staggering growth of money-in-politics. Compared to the magnitude of the problem, what the average person knows about how money determines policy is negligible. In fact, in the abstract, the polls tell us, most people generally assume that money controls our political system. But people will rarely act on something they understand only in the abstract. It took a constant stream of images water hoses, dogs and churches ablaze for the public at large to finally understand what was happening to Black people in the South. It took repeated scenes of destruction in Vietnam before the majority of Americans saw how we were destroying the country to save it. And it took repeated crime-scene images to maintain public support for many policing and sentencing policies. Likewise, people have to see how money-in-politics actually works, and concretely grasp the consequences for their pocket books and their lives, before they will act. Media organizations supply a lot of news and commentary, but almost nothing that would reveal who really wags the system, and how. When I watch one of those faux debates on a Washington public affairs show, with one politician saying this is a bad bill, and the other politician saying this is a good bill, I yearn to see the smiling, nodding beltway anchor suddenly interrupt and insist: Good bill or bad bill, this is a bought bill. Whose financial interest are you serving here? Then there are the social costs of free trade. For over a decade, free trade has hovered over the political system like a biblical commandment, striking down anythingtrade unions, the environment, indigenous rights, even the constitutional standing of our own laws passed by our elected representatives that gets in the way of unbridled greed. The broader negative consequence of this agenda increasingly well-documented by scholars gets virtually no attention in the dominant media. Instead of reality, we get optimistic multicultural scenarios of coordinated global growth, and instead of substantive debate, we get a stark, formulaic choice between free trade to help the world and gloomy sounding protectionism that will set everyone back. The degree to which this has become a purely ideological debate, devoid of any factual basis that can help people weigh net gains and losses, is reflected in Thomas Friedmans astonishing claim, stated not long ago in a television interview, that he endorsed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) without even reading it that is, simply because it stood for free trade. We have reached the stage when the pooh-bahs of punditry only have to declare the world is flat for everyone to agree it is, without even going to the edge to look for themselves. I think whats happened is not indifference or laziness or incompetence but the fact that most journalists on the plantation have so internalized conventional wisdom that they simply accept that the system is working as it should. Im working on a documentary about the role of the press in the run-up to the war, and over and again reporters have told me it just never occurred to them that high officials would manipulate intelligence in order to go to war. Hello? Similarly, the question of whether our political and economic system is truly just or not is off the table for investigation and discussion by most journalists. Alternative ideas, alternative critiques, alternative visions rarely get a hearing, and uncomfortable realities are obscured, such as growing inequality, the re-segregation of our public schools, the devastating onward march of environmental deregulation all examples of what happens when independent sources of knowledge and analysis are so few and far between on the plantation. So if we need to know what is happening, and big media wont tell us; if we need to know why it matters, and big media wont tell us; if we need to know what to do about it, and big media wont tell us its clear what we have to do: we have to tell the story ourselves. And this is what the plantation owners fear most of all. Over all those decades here in the South when they used human beings as chattel and quoted scripture to justify it (property rights over human rights was Gods way), they secretly lived in fear that one day instead of saying, Yes, Massa, those gaunt, weary sweat-soaked field hands bending low over the cotton under the burning sun would suddenly stand up straight, look around at their stooped and sweltering kin, and announce: This cant be the product of intelligent design. The bossmans been lying to me. Something is wrong with this system. This is the moment freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and its time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself. When the garbage workers struck here in 1968, and the walls of these buildings echoed with the cry I am a man, they were writing their own story. Martin Luther King, Jr. came here to help them tell it, only to die on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. 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