|
program get involved about contact links |
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." The Media For America campaign was developed following the first National Conference on Media Reform held November 2003 in Madison, Wisconsin when 2000 media activists, broadcasters, academics, policy makers, journalists, and elected officials gathered to celebrate the unprecedented public opposition to the controversial FCC rulings in June 2003 enacted to allow even greater concentration of media ownership. Not since 1934 had so many citizen groups voiced such discontent with commercial media interests. The keynote address by Bill Moyers is still worth reading and distributing, especially in light of his recent assessment of what's at stake. Discussion from the 2007 Media Reform Conference in Memphis is worth streaming. John Boyer and Henry Kroll have been involved for more than 25 years in public broadcasting, media education, media policy reform and community outreach. Strategically based in Washington, DC and San Francisco, the national centers respectively for media policy development and media reform activism, they teamed up at the Madison conference to explore effective ways to involve more ordinary citizens in the media ownership debate. Launched in January, 2004, MFA began working closely with two key groups with enormous potential to bolster the media reform effort. John Boyer is currently Executive Director of Ilmworks, a non-profit media production company working in collaboration with the Alaweed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University to produce a new TV series and streaming media about American Muslims and Islam. He taught in the Television and Media Arts Program on the Newark campus of Rutgers University from 1994 to 2002. In 2000, he founded the youth civic media project, Network Newark New Jersey (N3TV) to encourage college students interested in multimedia production to document under-reported civic programs in need of exposure and funding. Previously he worked as a public affairs television researcher and producer specializing in international affairs, media controversies and media literacy on programs broadcast nationally on PBS. A two-part program he initiated in 1982 for the PBS series, Inside Story with Hodding Carter as Chief Correspondent, critically analyzing U.S. media coverage of the Soviet Union, won several awards including a national Emmy. Mr. Boyer was Senior Producer on the acclaimed 1992 documentary, On Television: Teach The Children, with Edwin Newman examining the policy debate regarding regulation of children's television, and Producer on a 1996 national PBS documentary, Media Literacy: The New Basic?, with John Merrow. Henry Kroll has been involved for more than 30 years in public service broadcasting, both as a television producer and public policy advocate. He was a member of the acclaimed KQED Newsroom program in San Francisco which pioneered comprehensive, public service coverage of local news in response to a general newspaper strike in. He became the first elected citizen representative member of the KQED Board of Trustees, serving for more than 10 years. After 20 years as a Field Organizer for the California Unitarian Universalist Church, he joined with Rev. Paul Sawyer and Robert Alpern of the UUJEC, Peter Franck of the National Lawyers Guild, and George Gerbner, Professor Emiritus at the Annenberg School of Communication and founder of the Cultural Environmental Movement (CEM) to develop the Media Democracy Legal Project (MDLP) in 1998 to mount a legal challenge to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which Senator Bob Dole called "the single largest giveaway of a public resource in the Nation's history." (For more information on the MDLP, go to www.medialegalproject.org ). He has worked closely for more than 20 years with Ben Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly (just re-released as The New Media Monopoly by Beacon Press) and Dr. Peter Phillips, Director of Project Censored at Sonoma State University. Before administering the MDLP, he directed the CEM, a pioneering group of media reform activists lead by America's preeminent scholar of communications, George Gerbner. |