Thirteen of us from San Antonio, meeting up with Bill Moyers, Jesse Jackson, Phil Donahue, Jennifer Pozner, Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! along with thousands of people from around the country are here in Memphis, Tennesse to challenge the power of Big Media to tell our story.It's called the National Conference for Media Reform and let me tell you, it's not a typical journalism conference.
There are no corporations here, is that wild or what? No fancy lunches, no corporate freebies. There are only people like us, people from the inner-city, people who write about immigrants, the prison industry, the housing projects, the Katrina evacuees, disabled people, farmworkers, feminists, all media reform advocates.
I heard Danny Glover this morning, Bill Moyers, Jesse Jackson and Phil Donohue. They spoke about democracy and how the corporate-owned media is killing it by censoring opposing voices, denying a truly diverse media, and by monopolizing the true story of America.
"Call it a plantation mentality," said Bill Moyers, calling Big Media the post-modern outcome of our slave-owning past in the most impassioned speech I've ever heard and ever will from a journalist, I'm sure.
"There is a censorship of knowledge," he said. "What we see from the couch is a view from the top...they [Big Media] have turned a failed escalation into a surge as if it was an electrical current instead of the blood from a ruptured vein."
He got a standing ovation, and I didn't see one television station covering his remarks.
**The catfish is good, the trolleys are bright lollipops, the Mississippi River is close by, and the people on the bus sing the blues if you want.
Comments
It's El Pedro and I so terribly need you help. I am still in Dallas and I am invovled in something huge and exiciting.
Please e-mail me soon.
El Pedro