More from the National Conference on Media Reform

(Part 2 of our own DD reporter’s media journey – 11:30 AM EST – promoted by Nightprowlkitty)

I’m gonna start this one with the juicy stuff. I just got called “crazy” by Bill O’Reilly. So I think I have now arrived, haven’t I?

Yes, Faux News is at the event filming for O’Reilly. In a break-out session I attended where one of the panelists was Robert Greenwald, he took a few minutes at the opening of the session to point them out and we all had a bit of fun at their expense.  

Now on to more serious stuff from The National Conference on Media Reform. The opening keynote speaker was Lawrence Lessig. He had an interesting message for this crowd. It was basically that no reform of anything happens without election reform. But his presentation was much more rousing than that. He talked about a flaw at the core of the “people’s house” being dependency…the dependency of elected officials on crony capitalism. One of the more interesting lines in his speech was when he talked about big business learning early on in this country that the “return from regulation is better than the return from competition.”

Lessig’s speech is a little hard to capture in terms of its impact because he presented one of the most amazing powerpoints with it that I have ever seen. In talking with some young folks at lunch, they agreed with this. So I was able to rest in the idea that my impression was not just due to my lack of tech sophistication.

If you’d like a taste of what Lessig had to say, you can see a video of a similar powerpoint at a new website he has been a part of creating to further this kind of reform called Change Congress. The video is here.

One of the breakout sessions I attended on Friday was titled How Independent Media Creates Change. The panelists all talked about experiences they’ve had with creating real change in the world outside of mainstream media. A couple of the presenters are well known to most of us in the blog world…Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films and Jane Hamsher from FireDogLake.

But the ones I found most interesting were Jefferson Morley from the Center for Independent Media and Daisy Hernandez from ColorLines.

Their stories were interesting, but what really impressed me is the overall work they are doing. The Center for Independent Media has alternative media in six states: Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico and Washington. Jefferson Morley spent most of his career working for the Washington Post, but found that he couldn’t reform media from inside media, so he left to start this venture. If you live in one of the states where they operate, I’d highly recommend checking them out.

And I highly recommend that everyone check out ColorLines. Here’s how they describe themselves at their website:

Currently in its 9th year of publication, ColorLines is the leading national, multi-racial magazine devoted to the creativity and complexity of communities of color. ColorLines features the best writing on the issues that affect these communities.

My takeaway from the first day of this conference is that there is a richness to the alternative media on the internet now that is even more powerful than I had realized before. The world is literally at our fingertips.