Move Over, Tim Russert

Are you: a) A political news junkie? b) Constantly surfing political blogs? c) An activist seeking a national audience? Now there’s a political news network just for you—but not on your TV. Go online and load up Politics TV. Officially launching March 7, this progressive online TV network will provide daily news delivered with a satirical edge; DSPAN, a progressive version of CSPAN that allows nonprofits and think tanks to submit videotapes of their events, and the Candidate Channel, which will feature video commentaries by candidates running for local, state and federal office.

Politics TV is not just about the news viewers can watch, but about news viewers can produce. On the soon-to-be-launched Satire Channel, PTV viewers can submit flash cartoons, sketch comedy, and other humorous content. Over the next few months, Politics TV will also roll out the Pundit Channel, which is billed as “the American Idol of political talk shows.” Politics TV producers will travel the country looking for the best “pundits” in cities across the country.

Politics TV’s Executive Producer David Mannett puts it this way: “Politics TV is the continuation of the democratization of media. Blogs have leveled the playing field for print media and journalism. Internet TV is going to take on conventional broadcast and news TV.”

20 years of FAIR-ness

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) celebrates its 20-year anniversary in 2006, and the media monitoring group is taking a look back at its accomplishments in the January/February issue of Extra!, the group’s bimonthly magazine. Throughout the years, FAIR has mounted creative protests, worked with anti-racist and gay activists to fight bigoted commentators like Bob Grant and Michael Savage, and has time-and again marshaled organizers to demand more accurate coverage of marches, military actions, and the putative “liberal” bias of the media itself.

“FAIR provided the foundation for the explosion in media reform activism of the past decade,” writes media scholar Bob McChesney. “What Voltaire said about God is true about FAIR: If it did not exist, we would have to invent it.”

Small-screen activism

In a trifecta of organizing, production and distribution, the Sierra Club, Brave New Films and Link TV are teaming up on a seven-part television series to highlight how “pollution, corporate greed and short-sighted government policies affect all of us.” Each show will highlight the impact of major environmental issues in local communities, along with corresponding activism. Topics range from the continuing economic and environmental damage wreaked on the Prince William Sound region by the 1988 Exxon oil spill to the devastating toll of air pollution-related health problems on working families in Los Angeles.

The show, which debuted January 12, will air every second Thursday of the month until July at 8:30 p.m. EST and PST on Link TV (DIRECTV channel 375 and Dish Network channel 9410). The Sierra Club and Brave New Films—which recently produced the direct-to-DVD documentary, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price—are offering alternative modes of distribution. Viewers can download the shows to their computers and video iPods and the DVDs are available at no cost for house parties.

For more information on the series and to download the first episode, “9/11 Forgotten Heroes,” visit www.sierraclub.org/tv/.

Really rapid response

Nonprofits and news junkies now have access to a powerful research and spin-monitoring tool. MediaChannel, a “media issues supersite,” is partnering with MediaVision, a video search engine, to offer real-time monitoring of cable and network broadcasts to activists at a discounted rate. MediaVision delivers digital video clips to users based on a simple search query or an automated feed keyed to a topic specified by the user.

While “clipping services” have been combing media for customers such as PR firms and political campaigns for decades, MediaVision specializes in “getting it to individuals really fast,” says Gregg Reed, the company’s chief operating officer. Because the search is based on closed-captioning of the broadcasts, which are available 5-10 seconds after airing, it’s possible to receive an alert and respond to an on-air assertion while a show is still in progress. Customers can store clips and share them in the context of research, but can’t repost them or distribute them to the public. Check out a demo at www.mediachannel.org.

Each month in In These Times, Tracy Van Slyke and I write a short column on developments in media and activism. I’m posting these all here as a supplement to this site.

From the January 2006 issue:

Whither the News?

Have we reached the end of journalism as we know it?

In early December, as news broke that the Bush administration was placing pro-war stories in the Iraqi press, the Tribune Company announced a round of deep staff cuts at several major newspapers. In response, MoveOn Media Action launched a localized petition drive, criticizing the company for abandoning “its responsibility to deliver strong watchdog journalism to the public” and then hand delivered 45,000 signatures to the company’s CEO.

But staff cuts are just a small part of the picture, writes Michael Massing in a two-part series in the New York Review of Books. Massing, a contributing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, takes readers on a tour of the monomaniacal world of right-wing punditry, a strident force that has “contributed to a siege mentality among journalists.” Cowed by corporate owners, readers screaming “bias” and their own class interests, journalists have betrayed themselves, he writes. “Of all the internal problems confronting the press, the reluctance to venture into politically sensitive matters, to report disturbing truths that might unsettle and provoke, remains by far the most troubling.”

Media 2.0

As traditional journalism falters, a shake-up in media distribution methods and changes in consumption patterns is forcing media makers to look to new models. According to “The Making of the New Powers That Be,” a report from the progressive think tank New Politics Institute (NPI), these shifts will radically transform political communication. “Anyone with any connection to politics needs to pay close attention to the changes taking place in the media world today,” writes NPI fellow Peter Leyden. “If you change the way you reach audiences and consumers, then it changes the way you reach citizens and voters too.”

NPI claims that this transformation is based on several large-scale societal shifts, including the rise of new distribution channels such as high-bandwidth Internet, the emergence of cheaper technologies that allow people to create their own media, and the displacement of the Boomers by the rising “Millennial Generation.” Widespread access to high-speed video and audio in particular will force media outlets, advertisers and corporations to rethink traditional text-based content as audiences come to expect “interactive, on demand, tailored media.” The report is available at the NPI Web site.

Build the Echo is a site administered by Executive Editor Jessica Clark and Publisher Tracy Van Slyke of In These Times magazine, developed to continue the work we began with our maps of the Conservative Media Machine and the Emerging Progressive Media Network, published in the spring of 2005. The map and accompanying article generated a groundswell of response from media organizations and outlets, and continues to serve as reference point for the quickly evolving progressive media sphere.

Since late last year, we have been keeping tabs on the intersection of media and activism in “Spin Cycle,” a brief monthly column in In These Times and are participating in a variety of media activism and research efforts while working on the next stage of the maps, slated for publication in the June 2006 issue.

Here’s what we’ve been reading lately