53437126.

doc
Page 1 of 2

Published on Thursday, June 12, 2008 by Common Wonders

Be the Media
by Robert C. Koehler

Camera, lights, mike-in-the-face. Hey Bill Moyers, what are you doing at a left-wing,
partisan media conference?
That was how Fox News producer Porter Barry tried to ambush television’s most
venerable voice of sanity this past weekend, after Moyers spoke eloquently —
“Journalism can only exist in a vibrant, democratic culture” — at the fourth annual
National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis.
But Moyers would have none of it. By standing his ground, reframing the “gotcha”
idiocy of the encounter (a bully-boy, “say yes or we’ll crucify you” summons to
appear on Bill O’Reilly’s show) and turning it into a dialogue for which Barry was
unprepared, he managed to shove the ambush oh so figuratively back down Barry’s
throat. What goes around comes around, guys. As the producer retreated, he himself
was filmed and peppered with questions by a reporter for the American News Project.
Be the media! This was a real-time demo of the core imperative of the four-day
conference: that it’s up to us to turn things around. The flailing and desperate
corporate media have prostrated themselves ever more irredeemably before the
altar of organized money and, in their compromised allegiance, purvey not actual
“news” any longer but a simplistic military-industrial patriotism to a country sick of
war and hungry for truth. They’re not going to change; they’re just going to keep
staggering, so it seems, toward total irrelevance.
The serendipitous poke in the eye to Fox News notwithstanding, the message of the
conference was not part of the zero-sum paradigm of left vs. right and Whose
Ideology Is Better? What’s at stake — i.e., human survival — is far bigger than that.
And perhaps no presentation at the conference demonstrated this with more urgency
than the screening of “Body of War,” a documentary by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue
that, in its unblinking honesty, scrapes the platitudes away from “the most sanitized
war ever,” as Donahue put it.
Allard, yea. Allen, yea. Baucus, yea . . .
The film, which portrays the day-to-day struggle of Iraq war vet Thomas Young, who
became paralyzed from the chest down after he took a bullet above the collarbone in
Sadr City in 2004, begins filling in what I call the hole, or responsibility void, at the
center of the Iraq war and every war.
It begins with the slow intonation of the Oct. 11, 2002 vote that authorized the use of
military force against Iraq: Bayh, yea. Bennett, yea. Biden, yea. This vote, indeed,
serves as the backdrop, the canvas, on which the film unfolds. We cut away from the
names and suddenly here’s Thomas Young in his wheelchair, sitting at his computer,
53437126.doc
Page 2 of 2

typing a letter to a paraplegic Q&A Web site. He’s getting married. He wants to know
how to avoid having an accidental bowel movement when he’s in his tux.
Brownback, yea. Bunning, yea. Burns, yea.
“The vet’s choice,” says Young, who has become an anti-war activist, “is to tell the
truth and be called a traitor or internalize and self-destruct.”
The thought could have served as a catchphrase for the whole conference, sponsored
by the organization Free Press (freepress.net), which 3,500 people attended this
year. What I felt not only during but between the breakout sessions was an intense
concentration of . . . intelligent passion, you might say — creative determination not
to self-destruct and not to let this country self-destruct. This may be what a
movement feels like, or what the future feels like.
“Every day that Cheney and Bush do not bomb Iran . . . is because of that greater
force — all of us working together,” said Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.
While there was plenty of urgent anger at the failings of the corporate media, and
plenty of incisive analysis of the government-friendly propaganda they push and call
news, what I felt was not despair but an extraordinary sense of purpose. Upheaval is
in the air. Maybe it’s partly because of what has happened this year in the
Democratic primaries.
On Saturday, as the conference was in full flower, Hillary Clinton conceded to Barack
Obama. “What happened today is that someone paid a price at last for supporting
the Iraq war,” said author Naomi Klein.
Carper, yea. Cleland, yea. Clinton, yea. . . . Lott, yea. Lugar, yea. McCain, yea.
The accountability is just beginning. But, as Klein noted, weapons companies have
given more money to Democrats than Republicans this year. The old system, even
with a President Obama at the helm, is geared to perpetuate inequality and generate
conflict. A new media is forming, on the Internet and in our hearts, that will be
beholden not to the interests of oil and war but to a just, sustainable future.
Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune
Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can respond to this column at
bkoehler@tribune.com or visit his Web site at commonwonders.com