Overflow room for school board meeting
Day 3 NCMR: Final
Sorry this took so long to post, had to get back in the swing of things at school and could find time until now to write.
Sunday morning, I attended the panel that I was most looking forward to, on the Wisconsin protests and Labor reporting in general.
Kari Lydersen spoke about the Republic Window and Door factory, where in late 2008, workers occupied the factory after the company announced bankruptcy and refused to give the workers severance. The workers were part of the United Electrical Workers and after about a week, the union, the company, and bank of America came to an agreement to pay the workers. Lydersen wrote a book on the experience of being there with the workers, called Revolt on Goose Island. She said that while many in the media blamed Bank of America for what happened, by cutting off loans to the company, Lydersen held the company as solely responsible to what happened. They never told their workers what was going on and would remove equipment out at night. She also spoke about organizing efforts of warehouse workers in Chicago.
Mike Elk, a labor reporter for In These Times spoke on a few issues, including the lack of a ‘labor beat’ in almost all newspapers and magazines today. In his view, the 3 impediments to unions are outsourcing, union busting, and incompetent, overpaid labor leaders. I know the final to be very true, from my fathers union, the Teamsters. They have numerous people getting paid over $100,000 a year, drawing multiple salaries and multiple pensions. Elk felt that if all these high paying positions have pay cuts, they labor movement would have over $100 million to use on important projects, like starting a better labor press. He also talked about a little known labor dispute at a Honeywell nuclear facility in southern Illinois. Workers were locked out after their union reported to the EPA about the company storing radioactive material behind the plant. Now there are scabs working in their place, with little or no experience and there have been a number of accidents. The government hasn’t done much and that’s not surprising, since the company’s CEO David Cote, is a major donator to Obama’s campaign and was appointed to the presidents debt commission.
Steve Early, a member of the Communications Workers of America, spoke about his labor journalism. He writes for Labor Notes, an online and print labor news source. When asked if he thought that there should be a ‘labor watch’ on NPR or public radio, he disagreed, saying we already have a labor press, it just needs to be better promoted. He has written a number of books about the labor movement, his most recent called The Civil War in US Labor. In the book, he talked about an old topic, corruption in the labor movement, but with a new twist, within so called progressive unions like SEIU. I spoke with Mr. Early after the talk about the Teamsters and labor in Rochester, NY where I attend school. He gave me a few people to get in touch with.
The conference wrapped up with a panel discussion, but by that point I was conferenced out. I spent the last hour on my computer looking up different sites or issues I had learned about. I spoke with staffers at the Democracy Now table and gave them a copy of video I made, hoping that they review it and give me some tips. Over all, I’m very happy I attended. I learned so much about many different issues and meet some interesting people. The conference will happen again within a few years and hopefully I can again attend but this time as an employed journalist instead of a student.
Day 2 NCMR
I started off the day at a talk on artists and advocates. The best speaker was the president of the Writers Guild East. He spoke about the move to make his union more politically active following the 2007 writers strike. The rest of the speakers talked just about getting musicians to sign on to different movements, which was boring to listen to, so I left.
My favorite panel of the day was on the role independent journalism in international crisis in places such as Egypt and Afghanistan.
Sahrif Abdel Kouddous of Democracy Now talked about returning to his native Egypt to cover the revolution. While he was covering the resistance to Mubarak, the Egyptian government shut down the internet, so for Sahrif to get around this, using his iphone, he would text his coworkers in New York, who would publish his texts on twitter. A number of mainstream news agencies used his tweets for coverage. He spoke about how this was the first time Egyptians from all parts of society came together to create change and how some journalists, like Anderson Cooper following his attack, stopped trying be ‘objective’ and call them movement what it was, a peoples movement for democracy. Sahrif also didn’t let us forget that the need for change hasn’t stopped in Egypt, starting his talk with telling the room that protesters were again in Tahrir Square calling for the military to allow a civilian transitional government. At least 2 people were killed when the army removed them from the square. http://www.democracynow.org/
Marcy Wheeler, blogger from FireDogLake spoke on a number of subjects, including wikileaks and the treatment of Bradley Manning. She called attention to the government and the State Departments official support for foreign activists while at the same time cracking down on activists in the US. She pointed out that under the Patriot Act, the section used to fight espionage can be used to gain information on anyone, with little or no reason needed to be given when asking a judge to approve it. http://firedoglake.com/
Derrick Crowe from Brave New Foundation spoke about the organization Rethink Afghanistan. This group helps local Afghans do reporting on incidents that don’t get media coverage in the US. He specifically highlighted the killings and attempted cover-ups of Afghan allies and civilians by American Special Forces in Gardez. When asked, most of the room had never heard of these incidents and helped to prove Crowe’s point that until people are seeing independent and uncensored news about Afghanistan and not was the Pentagon PR is producing, policy there will not change. http://www.bravenewfoundation.org/
http://rethinkafghanistan.com/iou/
The last speaker was Ahmed Shihab-Eldin from Al Jazeera English. He showed some video he had made explaining the start of the uprisings in the Arab world and the importance that social media played. Also, he spoke about a new talk show he’s hosting that will premier soon on Al Jazeera. I got to speak with him after and found that he left his job at the New York Times to move to Al Jazeera after seeing their work and realizing that’s the kind of work he wanted to do. http://english.aljazeera.net/demandaljazeera/
After lunch I went to a screening of Killing Us Softly 4: Advertisings Image of Women by Jean Kilbourne. It was a recording of a lecture and slide show she had given before an audience. It featured advertisements for the 60s and 70s (When she made the first in the series) up until the present and how they impact the views on women’s looks, their self-esteem, and men’s view on women. It looked at the use of photo shopping pictures of models, which I was aware of, but went even further showing that some photo retouchers will take different photos of body features from 3 or 4 models and combine them to ‘create’ a new woman. Here is the trailer.
http://www.fitsugar.com/Killing-Us-Softly-4-Movie-Trailer-9190792
Comedy and Satire was the topic of another panel I attended. Erin Gibson from current TV came to talk about her Modern Lady short video series, along with Elon James White who spoke about his web series, This Week in Blackness. The major theme of the talk was that humor can get people interested and informed in politics, but it can’t end there, that people must start to educate themselves and become involved. http://current.com/shows/infomania/modern-lady/
http://thisweekinblackness.com/
The day rapped up with speeches by a number of people. FCC chairman Michael Copps kept on bringing home the difficulties surrounding the fight for net neutrality and the attempts of the communications industry to try and regulate the Internet. Amy Goodman spoke about the importance of independent media and the power it has to shape political debate. U.S. Rep Mike Doyle told us about the fight for low power fm radio stations. It began over 10 years ago, when activists asked the FCC to open up unused sections of the fm band to allow people to create small, local radio stations. It was only recently approved by congress, after years of opposition from the national broadcasters association.
National Conference on Media Reform
This weekend, I’ve been attending the National Conference on Media Reform in Boston. I came not only as a photojournalist, but also as an activist and political person. Like many conferences, there are a number of talks going on at any one time during the day.
The first talk I attended was on using video in collaborative journalism. Mara Abrams spoke about her work helping train local people in under privileged areas to make news videos. Working with the Tiziano Project, her group taught Kurdish activists video skills and put their work on an interactive website. http://www.tizianoproject.org/
Thomas Grasty spoke about Stroome. Stroome is a website that allows you to edit video online. I haven’t checked it out yet, but Grasty said it there are 2 versions, beginner and advanced, with the former likened to imovie. Up loading 30 secs to 2 mins of video at a time was recommended, so its no Final Cut Pro, but it’s an innovative new way to edit where you can get real time input from others on the web. http://www.stroome.com/
Later I went to a talk about the media’s impact on Immigrant rights. Representatives from a few different groups talked. The main theme throughout was the feeling that the media has done at best, a poor job reporting on undocumented workers and at worse, race baiting and demonizing them.
Renata Teodoro from the Student Immigrant Movement spoke about being an undocumented student and the problems that caused with her wanting to attend college. http://www.simforus.com/
Carlos Garcia of the Puente Movement spoke about the situation for undocumented in Arizona and the ways activists are organizing and resisting measures like SB 1070. They have been taking direct action to protest immigration raids and confronting local sheriff Joe Arpaio who keeps undocumented in tent camps on chain gangs. http://www.puenteaz.org/
I wish they spoke more about what the media can do to help the undocumented. I’m kicking myself that I didn’t ask.
The rest of the day I saw some members of the FCC talk about net neutrality and media monopolies. I sat in on a talk by the Communications Workers of America on public media (PBS and NPR) and the efforts to cut their funding. I wasn’t aware that so many rural and tribal communities depend on public media to get their news since many communications companies see it as too costly to open markets in these areas.
At the opening Pienary, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi came and talked about the importance of a free press. Sadly, Senator Bernie Sanders wasn’t able to make an appearance. Being the only openly socialist in Congress, he would have an interesting view on media and the economy. Tomorrow I hope to be able to swing by the Al Jazzera booth and chat them up.
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
Stop motion video Mo and I made, inspired by Robert Longo
