NEW YORK - "The last time I saw this kind of crowd," said Bill Moyers, addressing a vocal audience at the Media and Democracy Congress II, "I was at the White House and you were protesting at Lafayette Park."
Many MDC II participants showed the vehemence of the anti-war demonstrators that Moyers encountered as a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson in the '60s. A panel that Moyers moderated on Friday, called "The State of the Media," was dominated by a sometimes mobbish crowd that hooted and hissed at Walter Isaacson, Time magazine's managing editor.
On several occasions, audience members shouted down Isaacson as he attempted to answer charges that he had sold his magazine out to corporate interests. The general unwillingness of these MDC participants to allow dialog between Isaacson and the panel's more progressive journalists (including The Nation's Mark Crispin Miller, Christopher Hitchens, and Katha Pollitt) was a sign of the strong distrust and scorn many attendees hold for the mass media.
There were, however, flashes of hope during the three-day conference. At "The State of the Media" panel, 28-year-old author and ABC commentator Farai Chideya told of her plans to act as a subversive from within the system. In various workshops and panels on public-interest journalism, activists shared success stories in getting the progressive word out.
Much of the hope revolved around the Internet. One panel, "Building Community Online," featured solid nuts-and-bolts advice from Alfredo Lopez, an author, teacher, and a partner at the progressive communications firm PeopleLink.
"The corporate trend is towards individualization, towards making Internet users into warriors. That's because purchase is generally an individual experience," he told two dozen audience members. "To build a community online is to be a contrarian, to be a revolutionary."
At the same panel, Sam Tucker from WebActive told of a Belgrade radio station that, after being shut down by authorities, went online and served as a major front-line source of information.
But the hopeful, communal tone was often overwhelmed by nasty exchanges. "If you want everyone to cheer at this conference, just say some cliché," said reigning media theory guru Neil Postman, speaking at a panel on media literacy. He then called claims made by media consultant and co-panelist Lillian Jimenez "bullshit."
While many found Postman's remark to be rude, inappropriate, and, as one audience member pointed out, "highly uncollegial," others echoed his assertion that a kind of radical correctness had taken over the conference.
"A lot of these conferences become a game of chicken to see who can get to the moral high ground and then keep it," said Word editor Marisa Bowe, who participated in the panel "Online Journalism: Hope for the Future, or High Tech Hype?" "Often, people react ideologically rather than person to person," Bowe said.
