February 24 - March 2, 2000
![[Don't Quote Me]](/standard/image/headers/dont_quote_me_header.gif)
Dial 'M' for media
Danny Schechter fights the power with a new Web venture. Plus, John McCain spams the Net, and talk radio shows signs of life.
by Dan Kennedy
The Internet is a bit like the philosopher's forest. If a tree falls down and no one is there to hear it, does it really make a sound? Likewise, does it matter if a Web site is important, provocative, or interesting if no one ever stumbles across it?
The big portal Web sites direct users to a vast array of content. But with the Net becoming more and more commercialized, the chances of being hooked up to alternative, independent sites that aren't playing the e-commerce game are diminishing every day. Washingtonpost.com takes you to partners Newsweek.com and MSNBC.com, which in turn is linked to yet another partner, Slate. Similarly, the New York Times site directs you to a daily webcast it co-produces with ABC News and to TheStreet.com, a financial-news site in which it has invested.
Enter the not-for-profit Media Channel, which made its official debut a few weeks ago, following several months of testing, at http://www.mediachannel.org. Started by veteran media activists and longtime associates Danny Schechter and Rory O'Connor, the Media Channel is intended to serve as an independent, left-leaning media watchdog. But what's most intriguing is the possibility of its emerging as a portal to alternative content providers, thus amplifying voices that often go unheard.
The heart of the Media Channel is its partnerships with more than 300 organizations. Some of its partners, such as the Nation, the American Prospect, and the Columbia Journalism Review, are fairly well known. Others -- including the Media Consortium, an investigative-reporting site; Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, which torments the mainstream media; and Rocky Mountain Media Watch, which keeps tabs on local TV news -- rarely break into the mainstream. The Media Channel draws on content from each of these groups and includes links to them, thus potentially increasing their visibility far beyond what they would be able to accomplish on their own.
"We're trying to create the same kind of alliances that commercial sites try to create," says executive editor Schechter, who, along with O'Connor, runs Globalvision, a New York-based independent television-production company best known for its human-rights series Rights & Wrongs. The aim of this approach, according to a piece Schechter wrote for the site's debut, is to "become the Internet supersite for reliable and critical information about the media worldwide."
Schechter -- who's remembered in Boston for his days as the "News Dissector" at WBCN in the 1970s, when the radio station was an independent alternative voice (now, owned by CBS, it's another commercial clone) -- has assembled some big names to help out. The site includes a four-minute-plus video from retired CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who looks into the camera and says, "Like you, I'm deeply concerned about the merger mania that has swept our industry, diluting standards, dumbing down the news, and making the bottom line sometimes seem like the only line." And that's the way it is. Among the advisers to the Media Channel is retired Boston Globe editor Thomas Winship, now chairman of the International Center for Journalists. And New York Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld chips in with a tribute to the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer. (Lelyveld won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1985 book about apartheid, Move Your Shadow.)
The Media Channel is sprawling -- so much so, in fact, that it could really use a better organizational scheme. Its topics reflect its worldwide orientation, a product of its partnership not just with Globalvision but also with OneWorld Online, which is based in England. Its daily news briefing for February 16, for instance, included the BBC's efforts to air the Lockerbie plane-bombing trial and a piece on a German Web site that outs former Stasi agents. Other features include a section on teaching "media literacy" to kids; a huge archive of material related to media mergers, especially the recent America Online-Time Warner combination; and a whistle-blowing essay by Bruce Whitehead, a former producer for England's ITN network. Whitehead charges that ITN lacked the guts to broadcast an interview he conducted with the Nigerian dissident Ken Saro-Wiwa several years ago -- but then ran brief excerpts of it after Saro-Wiwa was hanged by the Nigerian government. (Whitehead's piece would have been stronger if there had been some sort of rebuttal or comment from ITN. Perhaps that will come.)
Unfortunately -- or maybe fortunately -- the Media Channel debuts at a time of tremendous danger for Internet-based independent media. AOL had been a leader in the fight for so-called open access, which would require cable companies to open their high-speed Internet lines to all comers, just as telephone companies are mandated to do (see "Net Loss," News and Features, January 7). But AOL now holds the keys to Time Warner's cable lines, and has announced that it will pull out of the open-access battle. (Two disclosures: I own a small quantity of AOL stock; and I'm so disgusted with AOL chairman Steve Case's cynical self-interest that I'm looking to unload my shares, even at a likely loss.)
Without government intervention, there is a distinct possibility that cable companies will ruin the wide-open nature of the Internet by banning programming they don't wish to carry, such as streaming video, which would compete with cable's own offerings. Indeed, some cable operators already cut off Net videos after they hit the 10-minute mark. The alleged excuse is limited cable capacity, but how credible is that when you can watch perfectly acceptable video over a simple phone line with a 56K modem? The one rule about the Internet to date has been that there are no rules -- that anyone can get on and be heard. Now that is in grave danger.
"Trust Steve Case as far as you can throw him," says MSNBC.com chief Washington correspondent Brock Meeks, founder/publisher/editor of the pioneering electronic newsletter CyberWire Dispatch. Meeks fears that media corporations will be able to leverage their stranglehold on Internet cable to keep out anything that might hurt their bottom line.
Schechter is well aware of the threat. "The Internet is a battleground," he says. The Media Channel could prove to be an important weapon in the fight to keep the Net open to everyone.
By raising $4.3 million online and signing up some 104,000 volunteers via his Web site, presidential candidate John McCain has already made Internet history. But McCain also deserves another distinction he may wish to avoid: he is now apparently the first presidential hopeful to send out spam -- that is, unsolicited mass e-mails -- in his never-ending effort to catch up with Republican rival George W. Bush's $65 million.
Last week, the McCain campaign sent out an e-mail to everyone who had signed up on the Web to be part of the "McCain Interactive Team." The e-mail invokes the 14-year-old boy who was allegedly "push-polled" with negative information about McCain, and who is fast becoming McCain's official mascot. (Not wishing to accuse the Bush campaign without evidence, McCain, in the e-mail, blames the alleged dirty phone call on unspecified "special interests.") The e-mail also asks for a "special contribution" of $100, $50, or $25, and it contains a link to McCain's Web site so that a credit-card donation can be made on the spot.
Nothing wrong with any of that. But then comes a "P.S." asking those who receive the message, "Please help us today by forwarding this e-mail to 10 of your friends . . . " Thus does McCain join the ranks of fast-buck hucksters and porn-peddlers who flood your e-mail account with worthless garbage every hour of the day.
"That's unbelievable," says Trey Rust, director of business development for Politics Online. "It could have been some off-the-wall supporter, or anyone doing that."
Could have been, but wasn't. Heather Mirjahangir, a spokeswoman for the McCain campaign, confirms the authenticity of the e-mail, saying, "I think it's great."
Here's someone who doesn't think it's great: Scott Hazen Mueller, founder and chairman of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (CAUCE). "I honestly admire McCain," Mueller wrote in an e-mail responding to my inquiry, "but I think his campaign may find itself in a bit of hot water over this, as people become overly lax in their definition of 'friend.' I'm sure they don't mean to spam, but I'm equally sure someone will take this message up and plaster it all over e-mail and Usenet [an open Internet bulletin-board system], thinking they're doing good while they're really harming the campaign." (Mueller qualifies his pro-McCain remarks by adding, "Note that this is not a CAUCE endorsement!")
Mirjahangir, though, defends the "P.S.," saying, "It's no different from when John McCain stands in front of a group and says, 'Please tell your friends about me.' " She adds that the staff of McCain2000.com claims to have received "zero complaints."
Well, Mueller makes one. And I make two.
The lament that talk radio isn't what it used to be is an old one. Indeed, it was nearly three years ago that I wrote a rant about the medium's shift from politics and public affairs to entertainment, dubious advice, and discussion of which female news anchor you'd most like to see naked (see "The Death of Talk Radio," News, May 9, 1997).But things have actually gotten quite a bit better lately, at least in Boston. In recent months, all-talk station WRKO (AM 680) has been joined by two new talkers, WTTK (96.9 FM) and WMEX (AM 1060). 'RKO is the most politics-averse of the three, though the new morning team of Peter Blute and Andy Moes is at least an improvement over Jeff Katz and Darlene McCarthy (not that it was McCarthy's fault; her new evening show, with Lori Kramer, is listenable), and afternoon host Howie Carr's strengths lend themselves to analyzing the Big Dig woes.
Thus far, 'TTK and 'MEX have eschewed the urge to dumb down. 'TTK, after a morning of Imus and the Boston Herald's "Inside Track," features a solid block of locally based, news-oriented talk from noon right into the evening, with Margery Eagan and Jim Braude, Jay Severin, Mike Barnicle, and Janeane Graf. The quality varies (Barnicle, with the help of former senator Alan Simpson, spent an hour recently repeating an old, discredited story that, in 1991, then-senator Al Gore agreed to vote in favor of the Gulf War only after he was promised 20 minutes of TV time), but at least no one's spreading rumors that Tom Menino is dead. 'MEX is having a rough launch due to the legendary Jerry Williams's disappearance after just three days on the air. But former 'RKO mainstay Gene Burns, who had been doing two hours from San Francisco every afternoon, has taken up the slack by expanding to four. Burns is simply one of the finest hosts who ever passed through Boston, and it's great to hear him here once again.
With David Brudnoy still commanding the evening airwaves on WBZ (AM 1030) and Christopher Lydon hosting The Connection every morning on WBUR (90.9 FM), talk radio in Boston is better than it's been at any time since the late 1980s and early '90s, when it hit its peak in terms of ratings, substance, and influence.
Dan Kennedy's work can be accessed from his Web site: http://www.shore.net/~dkennedy
Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com
Articles from July 24, 1997 & before can be accessed here
