(cross posted on mydd)
i've beein giving some thought to this issue for a while. after reading atrios's excellent series on World Journalism Institute, watching outfoxed, and reading Ted Turner's excellent piece in the Washington Monthly, and witnessing the groundswell of support for overturning the FCC ruling that allowed further media conglomeration last summer, I'm beginning to think media reform should be the netroots' signature domestic policy initiative for next year.
why media reform?
it's fundamental to a good democracy. it has solid support among liberals. and phrased correctly (in a populist, anti-east-coast-elite-populist kind of way) breaking up media monopolies could play well with social conservatives also. and i believe (with no facts at all to back me up!) that many moderates just looove their local news, which is one of the things most adversely affected by the latest round of conglomeration.
i think there is a lot of support or potential support out there for "structural" media reform, the most important piece of which is just making the media companies a lot smaller. read Ted Turner's piece in the Washington Monthly this month for many more details on that.
there is another, related piece to media reform, which i call "substantive" media reform. this means getting the news outlets to paint progressive issues in a more positive light.
the netroots is already pretty well geared up for substantive media reform. having traveled in dean circles for a while now, it seems that media watchdogging has a very strong presence in our ranks. many people, it seems, like nothing more than rattling off a letter to the editor.
some of our groups became quite sophisticated about it too - figuring out which stories to target, which newspapers to write to, and how to write the best letters. we have a lot of good domain knowledge rattling around in people's heads.
of course, an army of letter-writers is great, but not enough. when atrios uncovered World Journalism Institute earlier this year, he exposed one of the far right's most potent, least well-known weapons: a pipeline-packing scheme for journalists. briefly, WJI helps train journalists to write objective-sounding news pieces which are actually heavily biased to conservative religious forces.
now i don't think we should be emulating this kind of sinister approach. but i do think there is a lot we can do to pack the pipeline of leftist journalists.
i don't know much about journalism, but i know that many people get their foot in the door in college newspapers, working their way up to small town papers or alternative weeklies, and up to larger newspapers from there. a friend of mine is in TV news, and had to work his way up a similar chain. the structure is very similar to the political pipeline - dog-catcher to city council, city council to state rep, to state senate... etc. it may not be quite so rigid in journalism, but there is no doubt that there is a pipeline effect in journalism.
dean has been working hard on political pipelining this year, and mad props for that. i think we would do well to set up a similar journalistic pipelining effort. this could take a lot of different approaches, but i think the best place to start is by funding progressive college newspapers. the conservatives are way, way ahead of us in this regard, and i don't doubt it's one of the reasons bush enjoys such high support among college kids (something like 35% in the last poll i saw... sounds tiny, but it should be way, way smaller). more funding for these papers means more progressive college newspapers on campus, more exposure for progressive journalists on campus, and ultimately it means that there more progressive college journalists in the "real world". that not only translates into more progressive small town, big town, and national journalists, it also generates a glut of progressives who write really well, and really persuasively. that means better copy on progressive politician's web sites, it means more effective fundraising literature for progressive 527s... and on and on. i believe this kind of scheme has serious long-term multiplier potential.
moreover, i think journalistic pipelining is a necessary corrollary to political pipelining. how is a progressive upstart politician going to get a foothold if the press is constantly hostile to her ideas?
obviously blogs play a huge part of this equation... i haven't figured out how exactly. perhaps blogs are a good way to "short-cut" the pipeline.
anyway, this is just a vague collection of thoughts for now. but i wanted to toss it out and let some other folks have at it.