“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. . . . When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” —Rev. Dr.
“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. . . . When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” —Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The influence of money in the media is more often expressed by defining the boundaries of a news outlet’s conception of what news is. It is the insidious, unspoken self-censorship that causes an editor to turn down a story not because it is bad or wrong but because it’s just not what we do here. Whether the root of this self-censorship is fear of losing advertisers, or fear of pissing off the boss, or fear of offending someone that you might run into at a party later this year, or just a deeply internalized and ill-understood sense of what is and is not respectable, the effect is the same. The New York Times, which answers to the most establishment of establishment families, and Breitbart, which answers to an unhinged right-wing hedge funder, draw their boxes of acceptability in different places, but they both have boxes.
The 2016 election exposed a significant crisis for U.S. democracy: the failure of our news media system. This was an election in which false news was consumed as if true; in which polls were significantly off-base; in which journalists missed the stories both of Trump supporters, who came out in unanticipated numbers, and former Obama …
How can we transform the news media system to rebuild public trust?
Pointing Toward Solutions
The breakdown of our news media system requires more than a simple repair job. We need to radically re-imagine what journalism and the news business will look like in the future.
There are a number of efforts already underway that can give direction, if we are willing to take the time to study them.
1. The reemergence of true community media. Public access channels and community radio, long ignored as irrelevant to journalism, are rapidly becoming physical centers of community journalism, especially in news deserts. Together with alternative news media, they can form the backbone of a new type of local reporting.
2. The growing power of podcasts and Black Twitter. Communities of color are finding alternative media in which to share stories and engage in news reporting. As American demographics change, engaging these communities is critical to developing a new news ecosystem.
3. The rise of an engagement model for journalism. Instead of a model in which media provide infotainment to passive audiences, new tools around engagement invite community members to identify news stories and to provide financial support for reporting. Used for decades in the traditional organizing community, the engagement model provides the promise for richer stories and also for sustainable funding.
4. Building stories through collaboration. The era of a federal news service with branches in every city is gone. To replace it, outlets and entrepreneurs are working on collaborative models that bring together journalists with a special expertise in local, demographic, or topical reporting to tell a larger story.
5. The death of the audience—and the rise of the news interlocutor. Instead of a model in which media provide infotainment to passive audiences, new tools around engagement invite community members to support editorial teams in identifying news stories. Such engagement builds trust—and helps news teams uncover bigger stories.
The efforts above are all happening within independent media at outlets that are especially resourceful because they are under-resourced. Through this election, the outlets that focused most heavily on issues rather than on the “horse race” were often unabashedly progressive news outlets.
As just one example, since August, the #StandingRock protest against the North Dakota pipeline has provided compelling story lines, a high level of visual interest, and most importantly, a condensed snapshot of a significant number of critical issues facing the United States: climate change; energy needs; environmental protection; local vs. federal vs. native rights; the role of corporate money in politics; police brutality; press freedom, and more. Yet, Standing Rock received very little mass media coverage before the election.
In contrast, Standing Rock was a top story for 30 progressive news outlets between August 22, when the protest got going, and October 1. You can see coverage from all of these angles and more here. Ironically, the only coverage it got on the networks came when Democracy Now! journalist Amy Goodman was arrested during a Standing Rock protest.
After an event like Election 2016, it is very easy for pundits and power brokers, foundation officers and academics, to ignore smaller independent and community news outlets and instead to look for a magic bullet. It is at times like this that we get calls to build a new network (remember Air America) or invest in one type of journalism (Big Data anyone) or one technology (virtual reality, on the horizon).
Those interventions make everyone feel good, but they won’t fix the deeply systemic problems facing journalism. What journalism requires at this moment is:
1) Immediate support for those outlets, individuals and entrepreneurs that are successfully engaging demographic, geographic and topic-centered communities around news reporting.
2) A direct response to the role Facebook plays in news distribution, both through anti-trust efforts aimed at opening up Facebook’s walled garden and proactive efforts to create alternative distribution tools.
3) An open, transparent, and in-depth conversation among the many different stakeholders in the news ecosystem, including especially those who rarely are invited to the table with the aim of building new connections and new tools that will encourage community-based reporting.
Jo Ellen Green Kaiser is the executive director of The Media Consortium. The Media Consortium is one of several organizations that represents independent news outlets. We invite all who are interested to come to our conference March 1-4, 2017 in Washington, DC, to begin this deeper conversation on transforming our media ecosystem.
Facing Race 2016: 'We Have to Earn Respect of Future Generations'
Just two days after the election Race Forward convened over 2,000 justice organizers, scholars, journalists, funders, and artists in Atlanta for their Facing Race conference. As speakers and attendees processed the current political and media landscape, renewed calls for radical imagination emerged as a central theme to meet the urgency of the moment.
Featured Quotes
"We have to earn the respect of future generations. We have to work for it … We may not have all the solutions or the perfect strategy [yet, but] what we need is people who are willing to be transformed, to stand next to somebody and build with unlikely players."
— Mary Hooks, Southerners on New Ground
"This election cycle revealed the depth of the backlash against the progress of all our social justice movements…. Backlash only exists when we are making progress"
— Rinku Sen, Race Forward
“We have been learning about how to build social movements that have a lasting impact on not only policies, but the hearts and minds of people, because you cannot separate system change from changing the hearts and minds of the people.”
— Judith LeBlanc, Native Organizers Alliance
Natives and non-Native water protectors have found room in this movement for their passions, from traditional wisdom to direct action against fossil fuels.
As the camp began growing in August, there has been an influx of herbalists. Many of the water protectors have an interest in reconnecting with this traditional knowledge...
“for a lot of people in the camps, that information was stolen from them through the boarding school system.”
The experience of being at Standing Rock with Native people from around the country has created an opportunity for Black Elk and other herbalists to assume the role of educator.
Here are CEO names, emails, and phone numbers—because banks have choices when it comes to what projects they give loans to.
“As a customer of your financial institution, I reject the notion of my money helping to support your investment in the Dakota Access pipeline, an inherently dangerous and unjust oil pipeline that threatens air and water quality in many states, and violates sacred lands of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. I urge you to give up your financial stake in the Dakota Access pipeline immediately.”
Here are names of CEOs and other bank executives involved in these decisions—along with their phone numbers and email addresses. The first 17 banks (*) are directly funding the Dakota Access pipeline:
Mailing Address:
ING Bank N.V.
P.O. Box 1800
1000 BV Amsterdam
The Netherlands
U.S. Office:
ING Financial Holdings LLC
1325 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10019
646-424-6000
DNB First Bank*
CEO and President William J. Hieb
610-269-1040
Main Branch:
4 Brandywine Avenue
Downingtown, PA 19335
484-691-3621
ABN Amro Capital
Chairman of the Board Gerrit Zalm
Corporate Office:
ABN AMRO Bank N.V.
Gustav Mahlerlaan 10
1082 PP Amsterdam
The Netherlands
31-10-241-17-23
U.S. Office:
100 Park Avenue, 17th floor
New York, NY 10017
917-284-6800
Bank of Nova Scotia (Scotiabank)
CEO and President Brian J. Porter
Corporate Office:
Scotia Plaza
44 King Street W
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M5H 1H1
416-866-6161
[email protected]
U.S. Office:
250 Vesey Street,
23rd and 24th floors
New York, NY 10281
212-225-5000
Scotia Howard Weil (“Energy Investment Boutique”):
Energy Centre
1100 Poydras Street Suite 3500
New Orleans, LA 70163
504-582-2500 and 800-322-3005
[email protected]
The illusion of victory is a dangerous thing. We could undo what we have built at Standing Rock, this unprecedented act of Native American collective resistance.
Paris agreements take effect November 4, and the climate change math shows we need a managed decline of fossil fuels in the U.S. That means no Dakota Access pipeline.
I am not sure how badly North Dakota wants this pipeline. If there is to be a battle over the Dakota Access, I would not bet against a people with nothing else left but a land and a river.
Most importantly, they would see the serious purpose for the people here at Camp Sacred Stone, one that’s not going away without a successful resolution.
Military-style troops confronted Dakota Access water defenders recently, underscoring the common narrative U.S. tribes share with the world’s Indigenous Peoples.
#StandingRock backstory from The Hightower Lowdown
“Corporate routers likely assumed that the reservation’s 8,500 mostly impoverished Lakota Sioux had no clout, so there was no need to get their permission, especially since the pipeline wouldn’t actually be on tribal land. Bad assumption.”
...
In April, the Standing Rock Sioux made their stand. Some 35 tribal leaders established Sacred Stone Camp, just off the reservation and near where ETP’s engineers intend to tunnel under the river. Would anyone even notice a small protest way out in the hinterland? Not at first. But after the tribe’s social media network spread word of the Cannon Ball rebellion, a phenomenal, spontaneous migration of Native people–not coordinated by anyone– began arriving at the camp to stand in solidarity against ETP.
They came in cars, campers, and caravans–some even paddled down the Missouri in traditional canoes. There were Penobscot from Maine, Anishinabek from Michigan, Ponca Nation people from Oklahoma, Menominee from Wisconsin, the Hoopa Valley Tribe from California, Paiutes from Oregon, and many others. By August, representatives of 280 Native American tribes had joined, making this the largest, most diverse, cross-tribal action in US history. Plus delegations came from Canada, Mexico, Peru, and New Zealand.
Want to understand the pipeline protests? Start with the Founding Fathers.
In the standoff at Standing Rock, the pipeline opponents do not see themselves as political activists, or even as protesters. They see themselves as “protectors of the water,” i.e., of their treaty rights.
Though the mainstream media has presented the superficial details and sensationalized the brief violent encounters between the Native Americans and the pipeline advocates, the conflict at Standing Rock has its origins in centuries of bloody historical conflicts that have never been resolved.
