---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 4 Dec 1995 04:00:54 -0500
From: Vigdor Schreibman - FINS <fins@access.digex.net>
To: Multiple recipients of list <tvfa-talk@essential.org>
Subject: The Liberty Tree & CEM
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FINS: Communicating the Emerging Philosophy of The Information Age
FEDERAL INFORMATION NEWS SYNDICATE
Vol III, Issue No. 23 (114 lines) December 4, 1995
READ THIS ISSUE OF FINS TO CONSIDER:
* A new electronic journal is launched
* Heroic cyberspace "story tellers" in sight
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CLOSING THE "VALUES-GAP":
The Liberty Tree & CEM
By Vigdor Schreibman
A new electronic journal has been launched: The Liberty Tree. Its
guiding spirit is Jerry Landy, former CBS News Correspondent and tough
media critic, who intends to place primary focus of the Tree on news and
critical commentary on the popular mass media.
Landy observes, "(I)n the United States, unlike most enlightened
democracies, radio and television and print do not hold themselves
effectively to account for their performance. They do not really talk back
critically to themselves.... We are a nation in denial, a nation of brooding
silences. TV-oriented media is silence institutionalized. They are no
longer the solution but part of the problem." Indeed, Newton Minow recently
told Landy's ISSUES IN TELEVISION class, "telemedia have become a global
force second only to nuclear power -- but we're not treating it as such."
What gives The Liberty Tree its very special direction at this time, in
addition to Landy's formidable talents as a journalist and teacher, is the
emerging Cultural Environmental Movement that Landy promised to support.
CEM is the brainchild of George Gerbner, Dean Emeritus of the Annenberg
School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. Its founding
convention has been scheduled to be held on March 15-17, 1996, in St. Louis,
hosted by Webster University, and co-sponsored by Webster and other
organizations representing a broad range of social and cultural concerns.
In a message to supporters sent out earlier this year, Gerbner explains the
cause of CEM, as no one can:
> "Scotch patriot Andrew Fletcher once said that whoever tells the stories
> of a nation need not care who makes its laws. That was at a time when
> stories were still hand-crafted, home-made, community-inspired. Today,
> they are the products of a complex mass-production and marketing process.
>
> "Who tells most of the stories today? No longer home and community.
> No longer parents, schools, or church. In many parts of the world not
> even the native country. Our children are born into homes in which the
> dominant story tellers are not those who have something to tell but a
> small group of global conglomerates that have something to sell."
>
> It is impossible to exaggerate the consequences of that historic
> shift for human socialization and governance. Channels multiply but
> communication technologies converge and media merge. With every merger,
> staffs shrink and creative opportunities diminish. Cross-media
> conglomeration reduces competition and denies entry to newcomers. Fewer
> sources fill more outlets more of the time with ever more standardized
> fare. Alternative perspectives vanish from the mainstream. Media
> coalesce into a seamless, pervasive, and increasingly homogenized
> cultural environment that has drifted out of democratic reach. Even
> fund-starved public broadcasting is fighting for its life and needs
> urgent support.
>
> Other distortions of the democratic process include the promotion
> of practices that drug, hurt, poison, and kill thousands every day;
> portrayals that dehumanize and stigmatize; cults of media violence that
> desensitize, terrorize, and brutalize; the growing siege mentality of
> our cities; the drift toward ecological suicide; the silent crumbling of
> our infrastructure; the widening resource gaps in the richest country
> that already has the most glaring inequalities in the industrial world;
> the costly neglect of vital institutions such as public education and
> the arts; and image politics corrupting the electoral process.
>
> The Cultural Environment Movement was born to meet the crucial
> challenge of our time: to build new mechanisms of independent citizen
> initiative and participation in cultural decision-making. We shall no
> longer beg for favors in an area where we have constitutional rights,
> human rights, and civil rights. We must mobilize as citizens as
> effectively as commercials mobilize us to act as consumers.
It is the Constitutional theory established in an era of the solitary
pamphleteer, that the communications media should operate as a
"marketplace of ideas." This could bring to bear on civilization, so the
theory says, the valued ideas of the whole citizenry in the process of
cultural development and formulation of public policy. We live, however,
in a "rigged and lopsided competition of ideas," Yale political economist
Charles E. Lindblom observed in his classic volume "Politics and Markets"
(1977). From this situation there has come to exist an opportunistic
"marketplace of media ideas" one may see, serving merely to maximize the
profits of the media owners and their favored clients, at the expense of
society-at-large
That is only the beginning of the story, however. A new media is unfolding
in cyberspace; one that can challenge the whole structure of contemporary
civilization derived from the opportunistic "marketplace of media ideas." In
cyberspace the ideas of the citizeny have a stunning new chance to regain
compelling command. That is where The Liberty Tree is going to pave its
heroic path. The URL is http://www.prairienet.org/libertytree/.
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