by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Stopping in San Diego
October 24 in the middle of a whirlwind tour — 14 cities in eight days,
including two events in the L.A. area before he got to San Diego — Juan
Gonzalez, co-host (with Amy Goodman) of the progressive radio/TV show Democracy
Now!, spoke at the Church of the Brethren
in City Heights to present his new book, News for All the People: The
Epic Story of Race and the American Media.
Co-authored by Joseph Torres, who also appeared at the event, the book argues
that there have actually been three sectors of the American media: the
mainstream corporate media, the white alternative/rebel media, and media owned
and controlled by people of color.
“I have been a
professional journalist for over 35 years, and for 10 years before that I’d
been a social activist in the anti-war, Puerto Rican liberation and labor
movements,” Gonzalez said. “For 35 years I worked in the corporate or
commercial media [he still does, as a columnist for the New York Daily News], which remains the primary way people are informed,
but they are not the only way.
Amy Goodman and I work with the rebel, alternative, community press that dates
back to the founding of our country and is a totally separate strain. I have
also had the opportunity to work in the third strain. In the 1980’s I edited Vocal
Communidad in Philadelphia, about the
Latino community. It still exists today, among six to seven Spanish-language
papers in Philadelphia. I was also involved in the 1980’s with the founding of
the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and defended the right of
African-Americans, Hispanics and Native people to own their own media.”
The story
Gonzalez and Torres tell in their book is alternately exhilarating and
depressing, celebrating the heroism of the pioneers of media ownership in the
communities of color — and describing how their publications and radio outlets
were suppressed, not only with economic power but often through physical
violence. According to Gonzalez, the first newspaper in the U.S. owned by
African-Americans, Freedom’s Journal, was
founded in 1827 — and the words of its first editorial could stand as a mission
statement for virtually all U.S. media outlets coming from the communities of
color: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. …
From the press and the pulpit we have suffered much by being incorrectly
represented.”
“There were 30
Black papers before the Civil War,” Gonzalez said. “In 1808 the first
Spanish-language newspaper in the U.S. was founded in New York. The first
Chinese-language paper was founded in 1854. The Native American press is to me
the most astounding because until the 1820’s no Native American tribe in the U.S. had a written language. In the
1820’s the Cherokees developed a written version of their language and launched
a literacy campaign, and in 1828 the Cherokees started the first Native paper.
There were others in Shawnee in the Indian Territory” (modern-day Oklahoma).
According to
Gonzalez, the media of color were attacked not only by the mainstream media
outlets of their time but also by the white-owned “alternative” or “rebel”
press, particularly papers owned or associated with organized labor and
so-called “workingmen’s” movements. It’s not surprising when you realize how
many unions and white workers’ movements historically blamed immigrants for
their low pay and poor working conditions. The first labor party in U.S.
history, the Workingmen’s Party in San Francisco in 1867, had at the top of its
list of demands the exclusion of all Chinese from the U.S. Not until 2000 did the
U.S. labor movement formally reverse itself, abandoning its historic
anti-immigrant position when the AFL-CIO executive council passed a resolution
calling, according to labor writer David Bacon, “for the repeal of employer
sanctions, for a new amnesty for the undocumented, and for a broad new program
to educate immigrant workers about their rights.”
Both the
mainstream and the white alternative press “not only spread racist
stereotypes,” Gonzalez said, “their editors and publishers often instigated,
organized and fomented racial violence. We have decades of examples.” The most
notorious one, Gonzalez said, was in 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina, where
despite the takeover of the state government by white supremacists, enough
African-Americans still voted that the City Council had a Black majority. Then
Josephus Daniels, editor/publisher of the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, called on white
supremacists from all over the state to invade Wilmington and forcibly drive
the Blacks from office.
“Day and night
we worked, for I rarely went home until two or three o’clock in the morning,
getting the news and writing the editorials and conferring with the Democratic
[Party] leaders,” Daniels later wrote in his autobiography. Their first target
in Wilmington was the city’s only Black-owned paper, the Record, and its publisher, Alex Manley. On November 10,
1898, Daniels wrote, “the white supremacy people determined to expel Manley
from the city, and to set fire to his building and burn it as a lasting evidence
that no vestige of the Negro who had defamed white women of the State should be
left. His building was gutted and burned but Manley escaped.” Then, Gonzalez
said, the mob of nearly 2,000 white racists drove the elected Black City
Councilmembers out of town and staged a series of gun battles in which at least
60 Wilmington Blacks were killed and white supremacists took control of the
city.
After an
in-depth description both of the Wilmington massacre and the prestigious career
Josephus Daniels had later — he was appointed Secretary of the Navy under
Woodrow Wilson and when his assistant secretary, Franklin D. Roosevelt, became
President he picked Daniels as his ambassador to Mexico — Gonzalez cited other
examples of “racial pogroms” against
people of color begun or encouraged by white media. Among these were “the Tucson Citizen and other Arizona papers with the Camp Grant
massacre” (a slaughter of over 200 Apaches, and the kidnapping of Indian
children, in the Arizona Territory on April 30, 1871), “the Rocky
Mountain News and other newspapers in
Colorado fomenting and supporting the Sand Creek massacre” (November 29, 1864,
in which a 700-man white militia attacked, killed and mutilated between 70 and
163 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians), “the pogroms against Chinese-American communities and others in
the West … the Omaha Bee helping
to organize and instigate the lynching of Will Brown in a race riot in 1919. So
the press was not merely spreading bias; it was an actor, organizer and
instigator of racial hatred in the United States.”
Gonzalez cited
more recent examples, too, including the framing of Mexican-American radio
performer and spokesperson Pedro J. Gonzalez on a rape charge to get his
program off the air in the 1930’s and the campaign waged by radio and TV
stations in Mississippi to get whites to come out and block James Meredith from
entering the University of Mississippi as its first African-American student in
1962. “This is part of the sordid history of American journalism that the media
have yet to own up to and fully apologize for,” Gonzalez said. “We are all
suffering the damage from this long history that you do not generally read
about in the press, because the press were involved.”
The
Myth of the “Free Market” in Media
The other main
part of Gonzalez’ message was an attack on the myth that the American media
system is the result of fair competition in a “free market.” According to
Gonzalez, the real history of media in America is a series of technological
changes, followed by debate at the highest levels of government about how those
changes should be implemented. These, he explained, were a series of battles
between commercial and corporate interests on one side and local communities,
small businesses, educational institutions, labor organizations, people of
color and independent individuals on the other. In every case but one, Gonzalez
said, the battle ended with the U.S. government giving the corporations
virtually everything they wanted, and the corporations using their control of
government and the regulatory process to silence potentially competing voices.
The one
exception, he explained, occurred at the very beginning of the American
republic: in 1792, when the first U.S. Congress debated whether, and under what
ground rules, to set up a United States Post Office. “America was a settler
nation, and the settlements were scattered across the country, so George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and others, decided that the
government had to establish a postal system so the settlers could communicate
with each other,” Gonzalez said. “Only 10 percent of what the postal system
carried was mail; the other 90 percent was newspapers. The founders felt the
government had a role to contribute to the free flow of information, so they set
up second-class postal rates by which newspapers could be mailed below cost so
they could be delivered easily and without censorship. For the first 60 to 70
years of the U.S., the Post Office was the largest government employer, and its
main purpose was to deliver newspapers to the people.”
The second
communications revolution took place in the 1840’s after Samuel Morse developed
the first practical telegraph system. “Congress apportioned money to build the
first telegraph line,” Gonzalez explained — $30,000 for a wire between
Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, 40 miles away — “and because it allowed
information to be transmitted instantaneously, Morse wanted to sell his patents
to the government. The business community wanted a private market, and Congress
eventually sided with the business community. The U.S. was the only country where the government didn’t run the
telegraph, so telegraph service became more expensive [than elsewhere] and
centralized. Eventually it was dominated by the Associated Press (AP), United
Press International (UPI) and the other wire services.” The result, Gonzalez
argued, was a loss of diversity in American media, as publishers bought their
stories from wire services and offered their readers a blander, more
homogenized, pro-business perspective on the news.
The third dashed
opportunity for a freer, more diverse media system in the U.S. came in the
early 20th century with the invention of radio. According to
Gonzalez, early radio was the Internet of its day; equipment was readily available
and reasonably priced, start-up costs were low, “thousands of amateur radio
operators got on the air, and there was a huge diversity of voices between 1910
and 1920.” Then the federal government stepped in on the side of would-be radio
monopolists like David Sarnoff of NBC and William Paley of CBS. In 1927
Congress created the Federal Radio Commission (FRC) and put then-Secretary of
Commerce Herbert Hoover in charge of it. In 1934, the Commission’s jurisdiction
was expanded and its name changed to the Federal Communications Commission
(FCC), and “in the process of regulating the airwaves, they handed the best
channels to business interests like NBC and CBS,” Gonzalez explained.
“Suddenly,
racial minorities, educational broadcasters, labor and others went off the
air,” Gonzalez said. “There were all kinds of stations pushed off the air when
the government handed it over to giant networks and newspapers.” The invention
of television and its emergence as a mass-market phenomenon in the late 1940’s
did not threaten corporate control of
the airwaves, Gonzalez explained, because “the same corporations that dominated
radio incubated TV.”
The next
development that did threaten the
corporate media power, according to Gonzalez, was the emergence of cable TV in
the 1960’s. “The same promises that were made in the early days of radio, and
which are now being made about the Internet, were made for cable,” Gonzalez
explained. “At the beginning there were hundreds of cable stations because in
order to use the public rights of way for their cables, companies had to get
the permission of local governments, and city councils had leverage to require
public access, educational channels, programming for underserved communities,
and affirmative action in hiring and vendors. Hundreds of commercial cable
companies developed in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s.”
Then, as they
had in the case of the telegraph and radio, the federal government stepped in
and took the side of giant corporations over the interests of individuals and
local communities, Gonzalez explained. “The government relaxed ownership rules
and allowed cable companies to consolidate,” he said, “so now Time Warner and
Comcast between them control 50 percent of all cable.”
According to
Gonzalez — and his co-author, Joseph Torres, who’s active with the independent
media lobby Free Press — government policy towards the Internet is following
the same pro-corporate pattern as it did with the telegraph, radio and cable
TV. One of the key demands of Free Press and other opponents of the corporate
media is to retain so-called “net neutrality,” which requires Internet service
providers (ISP’s) to treat all data equally. But the giant corporations which
dominate the ISP market as well as the rest of the U.S. media — AT&T, Time
Warner (owner of America Online), Verizon, Comcast — are fighting for a
so-called “tiered Internet,” which would give them the right to push corporate
Web sites over everyone else’s by charging less to access them and slowing down
access to independent sites. The loss of “net neutrality” would also give ISP’s
unlimited power to censor the Internet, totally or partially blocking access to
sites they consider politically objectionable — which could make future
attempts to organize Occupy Wall Street-style campaigns difficult or
impossible.
According to
Gonzalez, the consistent U.S. pattern of allowing giant corporations to control
and ultimately monopolize each new media technology has given the U.S. people
more media outlets than available in any other country — but also made them the
least informed citizenry in the advanced world. “The American people are
literally drowning in information,” he said. “We have 14,000 newspapers, 17,000
magazines, 12,000 radio stations and 1,200 TV channels, including dozens of all-news
cable channels. We have tens of thousands of Internet sites. We have all this
news and information — yet the American people remain misinformed and
disinformed.
“When two-thirds
of Americans believed, in the run-up to the Iraq war, that Saddam Hussein was
involved in 9/11, that means the media were doing a bad job,” Gonzalez
continued. “When Americans are the only people in the developed world not aware of the threat of human-caused climate change,
that’s an example of the structural problems with the U.S. media. When it took
the young people of Occupy Wall Street and the other occupations to turn
people’s attention to the source of our economic problems, that’s the fault of
our media.”
