News Corp. Protest Was Good First Outing for Boston Media Reform Network, Better Coverage Needed

If I was writing a standard Open Media Boston news article on last Thursday’s Rally to Make Fox History, the introduction would read something like this “Over 40 advocates from the Boston Media Reform Network held a rally in front of the Massachusetts State House to demand that Congress hold hearings on the scandal that has engulfed the media conglomerate News Corp. in the United Kingdom and now threatens to spread to the United States. The corporation stands accused of criminal acts including hacking the cell phones of large number of individuals and institutions high and low, and bribing police officials - that have already resulted in a number of high profile arrests and resignations of key News Corp. executives. Local media reform activists say that they are closely watching similar investigations that have been launched in the US by the Department of Justice and the FBI, and are starting a campaign to push for Congress to follow the road already taken by the UK’s Parliament and preside over sweeping investigations of News Corp.’s role in any criminal activities that are revealed. During the rally and the picket that followed across the street at Fox 25’s Beacon Hill studios, BMRN activists indicated some of the potential remedies that Congress could take if their investigation found News Corp. guilty of crimes in the US. Like enjoining the Federal Communications Commission to pull all of News Corp.’s broadcast licenses in the US on the grounds that it lacks the ‘good character” required of license holders in FCC regulations. Including the one held by Fox 25 - News Corp.’s Boston affiliate. And moving to break up News Corp. and oversee the sale of its assets to other companies, and/or public entities.”


After setting the scene and covering the background of the action in that fashion, I would have quoted BMRN speakers and ideally News Corp. itself. Then concluded the piece.


But since I stated last week that Open Media Boston will not be covering actions by the Boston Media Reform Network - given that I am one of its organizers - I can only talk about the event here in my regular editorial. As such, I don’t have to be quite as humdrum in my discussion of what transpired as I would often be in a regular news piece. And I'll be able to kind of give you all a bit of a blow-by-blow view of how the event was organized, and what the initial press reaction was like. Plus encourage you all to join the fight for a more democratic media. Fun!

So, yes, the BMRN held our first rally last week, and I think that we were all gratified to get a respectable turnout to our first public action. Especially since we did the bulk of the organizing for it in about a week and a half. And since it required a number of face-to-face meetings and conference calls between the several people that devoted several hours of work each to the event. For example, most of the nice signs and masks we used at the action were made by hand at a “poster making party.” Such props don’t appear out of thin air, after all. Someone has to spend time putting them together, and someone has to donate the money for the supplies.

But that was a fairly painless process. The difficult work was developing the messages for the action. The first being the message we needed to telegraph to the press and the small portion of their audience that was actively following the News Corp. scandal, and then the message we needed to craft for the broad public and passers-by at the action that would help attract people to the BMRN and our News. Corp. campaign.

One of the things that we thought about a lot was the fact that most Americans don’t know much of anything about News Corp. But they do know who Rupert Murdoch is and they definitely know something about Fox News. So we decided to focus our press materials squarely on the matter at hand - News Corp.’s criminality. And focus our rally title, signs and popular outreach materials on Fox News - since it is the heart of News Corp.’s US operation, and since any action against News Corp. would inevitably affect Fox News.

As the rally began, it was obvious that our press work had struck a chord. A number of TV stations showed up including WHDH Channel 7, New England Cable News, WFXT Fox 25, and WWLP Channel 22 (all the way from Springfield, MA). There was also a camera person and a reporter from WGBH Channel 2’s Beat the Press panel show - which was interesting to us since we knew they talk about media issues. For radio, we got WBUR 90.9 FM and WBZ Radio 1030 AM. For print and web-based media we got Beacon Hill Patch.com and The Phoenix. We were also graced by high school journalists from Press Pass TV and Boston Teen TV.

The crowd we attracted through in-person and online outreach was fairly diverse by race, sex, gender, class, ethnicity and age - although the latter metric was skewed towards older folks. No surprise there given that it’s summer and many students are gone, and that we called the rally at lunch on a work day to make sure we held it early enough in the daily news cycle to guarantee same-day press coverage. So overall we had a good mix of pleasant well-informed attendees. Some sporting a political button or t-shirt - but mostly a bunch of very average looking people carrying signs and waving masks relating to News Corp., Fox News, the corporate media in general, and the need for Congressional action. All good.

In any case, the rally featured a short list of speakers - including Amy Grunder and Bill Hodges from BMRN, Mary Alice Crim from Free Press - the big national media reform group we work with, Sergio Reyes from the immigrant activist group Boston May Day Committee, and Kira Moodliar, a teenage activist . More good stuff from the speakers - who between them laid out the broad case for action against News Corp., its property Fox News, and corporate media in general.

After the talks, we gathered up the crowd and walked across the adjacent intersection of Beacon and Park Sts. and held a picket in front of Fox 25 for about 20 minutes. We all had a fine time doing some general and specific chants we’d all thought up, and that was that.

Quick fun political action, key points made, done and done.

Then at 5 p.m. or so, all the BMRN organizers started monitoring the press that had shown up for stories on the event. And we kept monitoring until about midnight - knowing that broadcast outlets would generally do their pieces the same day, and print and web outlets would take up to a week to show up depending.

A bit after 10 p.m., Press Pass TV posted their story. Which was nicely done. All the more so since the teens beat the rest of the press corps to the punch.

Other than that, we got no coverage on the day of the action. And not much since. Which should serve as a reminder than getting the press to show up to an event is only half the battle.

It's also worth mentioning that a number of the stories that did end up getting featured on the TV news shows we were monitoring on the evening of our action were of the trite entertaining variety that underscores the process of "Fox-ification" of the broadcast media that the Boston Media Reform Network exists in part to change. For example, who could forget the critical follow-up story to the blockbuster investigative piece of the day before "Guy Puts Up Sign Telling His Next Door Neighbor That He 'Hopes He Gets Cancer'" ... "Guy Puts Up Another Sign Apologizing to His Next Door Neighbor for His First Sign" ...?

Yet this is the kind of tripe that ran instead of coverage of our rally - and a bunch of more important stories like the big rally of unionized Verizon workers that were about to go on strike (and have since done so).

I mean what can one say?

The next day, Beacon Hill Patch.com put out a blurb and photos, and Boston Indymedia did the same (taking their blurb from an announcement I’d written before the action).

That evening, we were hoping that Beat the Press would do a segment on us - and they did. I wasn’t personally around to watch it when it aired, but I caught it a few hours later via their web page. And felt mixed about what I saw.

The nature of such weekly panel talk shows is that regular panelists discuss a number of issues every episode. They start each segment with a brief background intro on whatever subject is up for discussion, then talk for a few minutes and move onto the next subject.

I understand that, and I also understand that panelists on such shows - being busy professionals - have little time to prepare for the array of topics they cover each week.

But even with that broad understanding, I thought their host and panelists did a pretty muddled job with the segment over all. Some of them kind of agreed with us, and some of them kind of disagreed with us - which was obviously fine. What wasn’t fine was the way that most of them slugged away at straw men (and women) in their effort to say something more or less informed about their take on the whys and wherefores of our action.

Which was more disappointing than surprising. Because I have been around the media block a few times - as a journalist, as a scholar, and as an advocate - and have seen this act before in an unfortunately large number of forms and venues.

I’m quite clear that shows like Beat the Press aren’t going to let advocacy groups speak on their own behalf very often. Their panel format almost structurally precludes that kind of interaction anyway. And that’s a bit of a drag, but that’s the way it is. For now, I just have to be happy that we got covered at all. Which I am.

The one thing that did come through clearly, though, was that the Beat the Press panelists said that they thought we needed to focus our message squarely on News Corp. They thought it was confusing that we talked about Fox News at all, and some were oddly puzzled as to why we’d picket the local Fox affiliate in an action focused on their parent corporation.

And ok, I even understand why they’d say that. I edit a news publication, right? Sure, we’re a small weekly, but I have to make decisions about what to cover and what to editorialize about, too. And if groups sending me press releases aren’t clear about their intentions, then it’s hard for me to frame a news story or an editorial. I get that.

Problem is, our press release was crystal clear that the target of our action was News Corp. There was no confusion about our message to the local news media at all. Every news outlet in the state got at least two copies in advance of our action. And every journalist on site at the action got a hard copy, and a supporting article from the New York Times.

The simple fact is that the journalists and professors on the Beat the Press panel have little or no understanding about how to organize a grassroots political issue campaign. So by spending most of their airtime expressing opprobrium that our action's public title, and our signs and chants, talked more about Fox News than News Corp., they were essentially missing the point - in some cases willfully - that advocates have to “walk on two legs” when doing messaging work for any ground-level organizing effort.

Put plainly, we have to speak both to pundits like themselves and to the grassroots activist base we’re trying to build. To the news media we give the policy wonk line that we’re aiming to push Congress to hold hearings on News Corp.’s wrongdoing. To the grassroots activists we’re recruiting to our cause, we do say that, but only after we’ve gotten people’s attention by talking about Fox News - which is reviled by a great number of people across the political spectrum, which is News Corp.’s flagship property in the US, and which probably the best advertisement in existence for the many problems of letting huge corporations own media empires.

There’s always room for improvement in the messaging for a new campaign like BMRN’s; so I’m glad of the modicum of useful advice that percolated through the fog of Friday’s Beat the Press segment. But I’m certainly hoping to see that show be more even-handed with us in the future.

And I’m hoping that at that next BMRN action we not only attract lots of news media, but that they then follow up and actually publish news pieces. Aside from this editorial, the couple of blurbs in Patch and Indymedia, and the Beat the Press segment, the only other press we’re expecting is a mention in a larger piece about a number of local summer actions in The Phoenix this Thursday. [Though I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention the nice blog entry Mary Alice Crim filed on the Free Press website.]

All useful to one degree or another, but certainly not the kind of serious straight news coverage we’d like to generate in the months to come on the News Corp. fight and other key media reform issues. Enough said on that.

So there you have it. I’ve laid out kind of an insider's take on the making of a good first action by the Boston Media Reform Network, my take on what the group’s aims are, and an explication of some of the challenges we face.

Why I have I done that? Because I want the Open Media Boston audience to see that the Boston Media Reform Network is a vibrant new progressive activist group that’s thinking on its feet, doing good work, and worth supporting … and joining, if you’re interested in the News Corp. campaign or a host of other media reform issues.

Once again, before I turn my editorial attention back to the many other pressing issues working families are facing in Boston and Massachusetts - like the Verizon strike - I ask you to check out BMRN’s Facebook page and sign up for the BMRN announce-only email list if you’d like to get involved.

After all, there’s little chance of building the big social movements we need to build a better, more democratic society if the mass media is in the pocket of a few multinational corporations. So any work you do on media reform is going to pay off ten-fold down the line. Think about it, then join the Boston Media Reform Network. Next meeting is August 20th.

If you'd like to get involved with the Boston Media Reform Network, sign up for our announce-only email list at http://groups.google.com/group/bosmediareform-announce/ .

Dig the Boston Media Reform Network? Then Like us on Facebook athttps://www.facebook.com/bostonmediareform/ .

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston. He is also an organizer of the new Boston Media Reform Network.