By Stephanie Elizondo Griest

With media conglomerates buying up the last of America's independent newspapers and radio airwaves, corporate control of news and entertainment has become a serious threat to the democratic principles of free speech and diversity of opinion. On October 18-20, 2002, more than 350 media democracy advocates gathered in Albuquerque, New Mexico to form a much-needed new organization, the Action Coalition for Media Education (or ACME), dedicated to fighting media consolidation and its consequences.

A cardinal rule of the ACME Summit was its organizers' refusal to accept any corporate media sponsorship. Corporate financing has been the cause of considerable debate on the media literacy conference-circuit for the past decade, with some educators refusing to attend events sponsored in part by Channel One (a 12-minute news broadcast with two minutes of commercials beamed into classrooms nationwide) or other corporate enterprises. The Alliance for a Media Literate America (AMLA), the major coalition of media literacy educators and advocates, does accept corporate support, which was one of the primary reasons for the founding of ACME as a distinctly anti-big business alternative.

"Any time organizations take large amounts of money from a corporation or a sponsor, whether it be anti-smoking programs taking money from Phillip Morris or media literacy organizations taking money from AOL/Time-Warner or Cable in the Classroom, we think it has an effect on one's message," said Bob McCannon, director of the New Mexico Media Literacy Project and one of the ACME Summit's organizers. "The influence and disingenuity of the global giants is most apparent when one looks at the content of the rapidly growing world of SEMs (sponsored educational materials). Exxon and Nike are in thousands of schools with fancy curricula, talking about their wonderful environmental records."

Among ACME's foremost concerns is that six global conglomerates (AOL Time Warner, News Corp., Sony, Viacom, Vivendi Universal, and Disney) now own the vast majority of America's newspapers, magazines, record labels, publishing houses, movie production companies, and television shows, and that just four telcos (BellSouth, Qwest, SBC, and Verizon) own the phone lines into nearly every home and business in this nation.1 Such consolidated control of information, art, and ideas results in the homogenization of news and information, the silencing of dissenting or non-mainstream voices, and the suppression of important information that the owners of media corporations find embarrassing or inconvenient.

But some of the presentations at the ACME Summit, like other discourse among advocates of media literacy and media democracy, were confusing and inconsistent. On the one hand, ACME organizers and participants frequently voiced their support for free expression and opposition to "corporate censorship." On the other hand, there seemed to be strong support for government regulation of media content, without much acknowledgment that media corporations come in all shapes and sizes, that not all art and entertainment produced by corporations is insidious or evil, and that any type of government control impinges on the rights of the public (yes, including youth) to access ideas and information.

Because government regulation of media content is so problematic (as opposed to non-content based regulation, which generally doesn't create free-expression problems), media literacy education is particularly important as an alternative to censorship. This is why the Free Expression Policy Project published Media Literacy: An Alternative to Censorship several months ago, and why FEPP presented a workshop at the ACME Summit.

At the well-attended workshop, FEPP Director Marjorie Heins discussed the importance of building an alliance between anti-censorship and media literacy advocates. "As many leaders in the media literacy movement recognize, assertions of harmful effects from mass media are overly generalized and overly simplistic," Heins said. She touched on some of the common myths (many of which could be found in a flyer distributed at the Summit by Peter DeBenedittis, a prominent ACME member.2) -- for example, that scientific research has proven "media violence" to cause aggressive behavior.

FEPP Communications Director Stephanie Elizondo Griest, who also coordinates the Youth Free Expression Network, then highlighted four of the major free-expression issues affecting young people today: Internet filtering software, "abstinence-only" sex education, the censorship of student media, and the suppression of gay/straight alliances on high school campuses. "Each of these measures are enacted to preserve the so-called 'innocence of youth,' but in reality, they deprive youth of the critical information they need in such areas as AIDS, STDs, pregnancy prevention, and alternative lifestyles," she said.

Other workshops during the Summit included "On the Border: Culturally Specific Media Literacy," in which Antonio Lopez of Lost World Communications in Santa Fe, New Mexico shared some strategies in teaching media literacy curriculum to indigenous and Latino youth. Among his suggestions were using media that actually speak to the culture the youth are coming from. Playing pop star Shakira's recent Pepsi commercial in slow motion, for instance, can be an effective way to teach Latinos about the subliminal techniques used in advertising.

Sheldon Rampton of PR Watch in Madison, Wisconsin, meanwhile, exposed the "dark side" of America's $10 billion/year public relations industry. Some of the more insidious practices his group has documented are the creation of "front groups" (i.e. PR pros and political consultants masquerading as independent "public interest" groups) that spy on activists and harass journalists who are critical of their products or policies.

"When dealing with an 'expert,' you really should begin with the assumption: 'This guy is a flak - but for whom?'" Rampton said. "These companies go out and try to co-opt those who haven't yet sold out their souls."

Among the major speeches at the Summit, author Robert McChesney gave a broad overview of the big business-dominated U.S. media system and the importance of independent, alternative voices. University of Massachusetts professor and media literacy pioneer Sut Jhally brilliantly if hyperbolically analyzed the U.S. media in Marxist terms, likening audiences (especially child audiences) to products that media companies deliver to their real clients: advertisers. At the end of the conference, attendees elected a 10-person board representing the fields of media literacy education, media production, and media reform to lead ACME in the years ahead.

November 2002

For more on the threat to democracy and free expression posed by media consolidation, see Robert McChesney and John Nichols, "The Making of a Movement," http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020107&s=mcchesney (accessed 11/6/02);

The Center for Digital Democracy Web site,
http://www.democraticmedia.org (accessed 11/5/02); and

The Action Coalition for Media Education, http://www.acmecoalition.org (accessed 11/6/02).

NOTES

1. Frank Rose, "Big Media or Bust," Wired, Issue 10.03, March 2002,
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.03/mergers.html (accessed 11/6/02).

2. Peter DeBenedittis, "Violence as Entertainment," reprinted from Paradigm magazine, Vol. 7, No. 3 (summer 2002). Among other errors, this article asserts that the 1972 Surgeon General's Report on media violence definitely concluded that harm had been proven; in fact, the report's conclusions were cautious and equivocal. See Brief Amicus Curiae of 33 Media Scholars in Interactive Digital Software Ass'n v. St. Louis County (text accompanying notes 15 and 16 in HTML version; p. 16 in PDF version); Willard Rowland, Jr., The Politics of TV Violence (1983), pp. 171-96; Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children (2001), pp. 235-36.