http://www.dailykos.com/...
While many people are under the impression that the customers of the media are the end users (viewers, readers, and listeners) that impression is incorrect. The customers of the media are the corporate advertisers. The end users are the product being sold. Did you get that? We are the product.
That's a major problem with pushing a progressive message in the corporate media. Seeing as how people are the product being sold, the needs of the people are of little importance, while the needs of the customers, heretofore, corporations and other big money institutions, are well taken care of.
What if we became a customer of the media? What if we paid to play?
k9meta:
It is strange writing this. I have been one of the most ardent opponents of the entire corporate system here on dKos for a couple years now, and here I am suggesting that we pay them to push our message. Something else that I did not think was a possibility before reading OPOL's Pacifism.
I believe we can push a Progressive message in the Corporate Media. That felt good to say.
OPOL's Pacifism is an amazing piece, and it needs to be widely distrubuted. It needs to be part of the historical record of these awful times so that nobody can hide what has happened.
Some of the pieces that scroll across our computer screens and sink into the Koshole, drowning in the ever expanding internet, accessible only through the benevolence of google and complex search strings, are the modern day:
The Jungle
War and the Intellectuals
Civil Disobedience
How the Other Half Lives
What will become of these modern day historical treatises?
Not only are they in danger of disappearing from historical memory, they are also not being read widely.
What if ALL Americans could read OPOL's Pacifism?
What if OPOL's Pacifism were the major chatter around the watercooler after the Right Wing Hate Machine tries to pollute it?
We would win. Progressives would win. We could change popular belief with messages like that.
Missed Opportunities and Lack of Perpetuity
I wrote a piece that might have done that Thank You For Helping My Family (sorry about the missing pics, it loses something, for sure.), after that there was a rush to add a human face to Social Security that, I believe, stopped the whole idea dead in it's tracks.
Putting a human face on social security was picked up by the Democrats and Progressive organizations, pushed online, and then the whole Privatization scheme was scrapped. A victory? So I thought until tonight.
Nobody outside of the netroots and those linked to the netroots saw that piece or the reverberations of thousands, tens of thousands, of stories pouring out into the American consciousness.
We threatened to take it outside the choir, the Republicans blinked, the Democrats put the card back in their pocket, and we missed the opportunity to educate Americans as to what Progressive policy means to this country. The problem was dropped like a bad habit, and we did not win.
The lesson that will be learned, and the rhetoric that will be used to start the assassination attempt again will be:
We tried to address this problem in '05, but did not have the guts to make the tough decisions to head off the economic calamatity that the very idea of SS is.
Sound familiar? Trotted out SS every decade or so and cutting a bit of meat off the bone and giving it away to private interests. It's coming again. I'd bet my house on it.
Jeff Gannon... Same thing.
Downing Street Memo's...Same thing.
Power of Progressive Clearinghouses
But what if these pieces were a full or half page in the NYT? LAT, and WaPo? What if it ran in hundreds of smaller papers. Then the country would know about it. It would be water cooler talk. It would be remembered and become part of our American consciousness.
OPOL's Pacifism should be a piece like that.
How do we do that?
We need to set up a couple of online clearing houses, like move on, only participatory. How much money do people give to MoveOn only to get a shitty forum and nearly zero impact on message?
I could imagine a place where you could post your stuff that is really good, maybe a nominal charge for initial posting to seperate the wheat from the chaff, and to keep the number of submissions manageable.
Then we use the power of the blogosphere to fund those pieces, allowing people to donate to the cause.
We would need to give the author control over where it is published. Maybe with a publishing plan outline, and people could communicate with the author to get it played in their area.
The Progressive Clearinghouses would set up accounts with the Corporate Media, so as to bargain collectively to push their contributor's work.
Each clearinghouse could develop their own guidelines and we would let active citizens choose what they want published.
There are so many details to hammer out, but I hope this effectively conveys the idea.
Moving from Media Product to Media Customer; to move from being the exploited viewer to the influence weilding customer could energize and empower people and give them a reason to be active citizens.