"People Have The Power" at Media Reform Conference

The umbrella of media reform is so big that many varieties of activists -- those who decry what they call the "carpet-bombing" of young people by marketers, those who run all-volunteer community access television and radio stations, those who agitate for more and fairer representation of people of color, disabled people and the aging -- all found room to camp under its shade. For three days more than 2,000 of them inhabited a lively campground at the conference sponsored by media scholar and critic Robert McChesney's FreePress.
It was a gathering that included the pierced-and-tattooed to the graying. It wasn't unusual to find circles of activists seated on the floors of the conference hotel, engaged in earnest strategizing. One thing members of this crowd had in common, besides a predilection toward left-liberal politics, was an insistence that mass media, broadly defined, treat them primarily as citizens and not consumers.
Media reform is to the next election cycle what campaign finance reform was to the last, predicted conference organizer McChesney; indeed, he's noted that many activists frustrated by the ability of big money to wind its way around most loopholes have shifted their energies toward restoring some sense of public participation in media.