Media in America & the Pro-Democracy Media Ecosystem, with Laura Flanders

[00:00:00] Sound on Tape: This podcast is presented by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. 

[00:00:07] Laura Flanders: There has not been a night where the Fox channel didn’t outrank every other channel for as long as I can remember. And we’re talking millions of viewers still going every night to Fox broadcasts. So the right has built up a pipeline that has still a tremendous grab, you know, a tremendous hold on a lot of people.

[00:00:28] And it’s not just Fox on news, on television. We’re talking radio networks, we’re talking billboards, we’re talking publishing, uh, you name it. Whether it’s music, all the way to the religious broadcasters. The right has put much more attention into media than any other side.

[00:01:01] Scot Nakagawa: Welcome to the Anti Authoritarian Podcast, a project of the 22nd Century Initiative. I’m Scott Nakagawa, one of your hosts. 

[00:01:09] Sue Hyde: Hello friends, I’m co host Sue Hyde. Scott and I first joined forces about 30 years ago to help defeat anti LGBTQ ballot measures proposed by Christian authoritarian groups. 

[00:01:22] Scot Nakagawa: It was as true then as it is now that those of us who believe in democracy make up a supermajority of people in this country.

[00:01:29] The challenge is, how do we go from being the majority to acting like the majority? 

[00:01:34] Sue Hyde: We dig into strategy questions like these and prescriptions for change. We talk with expert guests and commentators whose scholarship, political activism, and organizing Define the cutting edge of anti authoritarian resistance.

[00:01:50] Thank you for joining us.

[00:01:56] Scot Nakagawa: If you’ve ever wondered why we live in media bubbles and echo chambers, you are not alone. Decades of deregulation, media consolidation, and the hollowing out of local news along with newsrooms in our biggest cities is not a natural phenomenon. It is an intentional strategy on the part of those who finance these institutions, uh, who have been driving changes that we’re all feeling the effects of.

[00:02:21] To help us understand how we got into this mess and how we might get out of it is our guest, Laura Flanders, and for full disclosure, I’ve known Laura for 30 years, at least, Laura, and, um, we have had maybe a million conversations over those years, and I’m occasionally a co host of Laura’s show, which she will talk to us about later, but Sue, take it away.

[00:02:44] Tell us all about Laura. I 

[00:02:45] Sue Hyde: just want to say I haven’t known Laura for 30 years, but I love Laura. Laura is the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders and Friends, which airs on PBS stations nationwide. She is an Izzy Award winning independent journalist, a New York Times best selling author, and the recipient of the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Media Center.

[00:03:11] Welcome, Laura. 

[00:03:14] Laura Flanders: Oh, it’s so great to be with the two of you, heroes of mine and colleagues in this struggle. It’s great to be here. And congratulations on a podcast. 

[00:03:22] Scot Nakagawa: Thank you. Well, thank 

[00:03:23] Laura Flanders: you. 

[00:03:24] Scot Nakagawa: Yes, we feel very privileged to have you. And, um, are excited to talk. So, let’s just get into it. So, how has the media landscape changed since the time of the Civil Rights Movement?

[00:03:37] How is it, you know, different now than it was then? And how are those differences affecting us in terms of deregulation, media consolidation, etc., etc.? 

[00:03:47] Laura Flanders: Well, if we just look at since the civil rights era, I think we can say that we have seen both advances and, um, setbacks. On the advanced side, go back 50 years, 60 years, and you find yourself in a media environment with a few enormous players and very big gatekeepers.

[00:04:06] So it was hard to get a story on the nightly news. At the same time, you had a few nightly news programs that if you did get your story, your picture of, um, being, you know, attacked by dogs or water cannons in Birmingham, Alabama, or if you did get your story of what was happening on the Freedom Rides into one of those, uh, networks, your story was seen by just about everyone when they tuned into that evening news broadcast.

[00:04:32] We may have had some challenges with how it was framed, or who was quoted, or the bias of the reporters, or the bias of the presenters. But you could be pretty sure that you were having the same conversation the next morning, or at least talking about the same newscast the next morning with your colleagues around that famous, and did you ever see one, water cooler.

[00:04:49] Um, on the other hand, so since then we’ve seen a tremendous decline in those, in the audiences consuming those big national broadcasts. So there’s much less of a problem. common news environment that we all share, no matter where we live, no matter what media we consume. There’s much less of that. Good side of that is there are far fewer gatekeepers.

[00:05:15] There’s far less control in the hand of a few people who decide what’s news. If you have a camera in your phone, you can upload your news to the internet in a matter of minutes. So, good news. That’s great. And we’re seeing stories come to us right now from places like Gaza where the government is literally not letting in reporters that are dominating our news cycles day after day and week after week and we’re horrified by what we’re seeing.

[00:05:40] So you’ve got good news and bad news, fewer gatekeepers with less control and at the same time a kind of, um, I don’t know, just a massive expansion of news sources and how do we make sense of it all? And what we’re seeing is that at the end of the day, people. are living behind gates. They’re picking, perhaps, the gatekeepers that work for them.

[00:06:02] And we may be able to build audiences around our programming, but there is no guarantee that our audience is getting a picture of the world that reflects in any way the audience of the guy next door with his independent podcast or TV broadcast on 

[00:06:19] Sue Hyde: YouTube. So you’ve noted that we live in bubbles and that we’re sorted by ideology.

[00:06:25] And from my perspective, it also feels like the anti democracy authoritarians have built a much more effective media ecosystem than the pro democracy forces. Can you talk a little bit about the state of both ecosystems and Where we’re headed. 

[00:06:52] Laura Flanders: Well, let’s face it, I mean, you’re absolutely right. While I talked about the decline in mainstream media, there has not been a night where the Fox channel didn’t outrank every other channel for as long as I can remember.

[00:07:04] And we’re talking millions of viewers, still, going every night to Fox broadcasts. So, the right has been built up a pipeline that has still a tremendous grab, you know, a tremendous hold on a lot of people. And it’s not just Fox on News. On television, we’re talking radio networks, we’re talking billboards, we’re talking publishing, you name it.

[00:07:25] Whether it’s music, all the way to the religious broadcasters, the right has put much more attention into media than any other side. And I, and I want to emphasize that we have lived at least for our lifetimes with people on the right. launching vitriolic attacks on what they call the liberal media. And in my lifetime, liberal has gone from meaning kind of wishy washy centrist to being progressive.

[00:07:56] And what they mean, the right, when they attack, MSNBC or CNN, or heaven forbid, public television, and call them liberal, or the New York Times or the Washington Post, as they mean basically liberal as socialist, liberal as, you know, backing the end of capitalism. What you and I know is that there is a whole nother perspective of people to the left of liberal who have never had a network, who have never had a broadcast system, who have had to cobble together an entire sort of ecosystem of independent media, local media in the civil rights era.

[00:08:28] It was the Black Legacy Papers who covered what was happening in Jackson, Mississippi and Birmingham, you name it. The white reporters weren’t there. So we’ve always had something of an independent kind of ecosystem out there or the makings thereof. And then we’ve had these two elephants just fighting and trampling us.

[00:08:49] One saying the other one was liberal and the other one The liberal, the one being accused of being liberal, just getting very, very cowed. So what we have seen, for example, just look at public television, but look at any of the fights over the licensing of TV or radio stations and how many people can own how many of these licenses.

[00:09:08] And you see vitriolic attack, organized campaign, year after year lawsuits, year after year challenges to the budgets of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and so on. Coming from the right. And the liberals, and I’ll call them that, basically conceding on every point, and trying to make themselves as kind of milquetoast as possible, and never offending anybody.

[00:09:31] And I think that’s why we end up, especially with public television, um, you know, once you’re defending Big Bird, you’re really not going to put a reporter on the ground in Gaza, um, even if you wanted to. And then you look to NBC, for example, and you see that they bring on as their head of news, someone with no history of news, but who’s apparently quite pally with, um, Ronna McDaniels, the former head of the RNC, and thinks it’ll be just fine to bring her on as a pundit, even though she’s been a paid liar for four years.

[00:10:00] So, I’m just suggesting that, There has been a right wing consciousness around the power of media going back to what some people may remember as the, the Powell memo of the 1960s, where the right saw that progressives and hippies and anti war folks and feminists and environmentalists and civil rights activists were wrong.

[00:10:22] getting into the sort of mindset of the country. We saw a turn in favor of civil rights. Wow, people are people. We saw a women’s movement. We saw the beginnings of the LGBTQ movement. We saw a very vivid and vivacious anti war movement, effective anti war movement, and the culture that was tending to the left, whether it was with respect to drug use or music or just hanging out with each other.

[00:10:50] Think Woodstock. Think, well, you know. So, I think what the right did at that moment was say, Whoa, we have been losing the culture war. We have to shift the culture if we want to get support for our policies. Our policies being, you know, neoliberal cutbacks to regulation, um, stripping away of, of any sense of, um, group rights or of inherent human rights, uh.

[00:11:19] If they were going to see their policies win, they were going to have to shift the culture. And they started investing it in the 1970s, in opinion making, in opinion shaping, in the whole circle of pundits, in the think tanks, and in the media, um, that they started acquiring en masse. Uh, and which they had much of in the first place, uh, coming out of the religious broadcasting networks.

[00:11:43] So, if you had, you know, the, the religious broadcasters with, uh, their ear to large congregations through TV and radio, it was easy to bring them to cable in the same sort of style, uh, to cable news, and now to TV. every other kind of media. So long answer to your question, but let’s just say the writers have always invested, always cared.

[00:12:02] Liberals have been scared to death and anybody trying to shift the spectrum on the progressive side has been up against both that fear, um, and up against the lack of resources. And then I think up against just impatience. I’ll tell you, I was part of Air America, the valiant experiment in progressive talk radio in the early 2000s when was it 2004 to 2008 and the funders that got behind that initiative that was saying why should the right rule right rule talk radio let’s buy some stations let’s hire some people let’s have talk of the other sort um they put their money into it for three years and they wanted it to turn a profit after three years and when it didn’t There was a crisis, and ultimately we were told we weren’t making any money, and we were, you know, it folded.

[00:12:50] Rush Limbaugh, who went on air in the early 1980s, um, was on air for ten years before he got any major sponsors, and before he made a profit. Some sponsors stuck with him, McDonald’s, others traded turns up to buying ads to keep him, um, viable, until he caught on, and until he had impact. They’re serious about changing the culture, they’ll put their money behind it over time, our funders.

[00:13:19] Sue Hyde: So, Laura, I just want to point out to our listeners that in your brilliant answer, you mentioned cows, elephants, And Big Bird. Way to 

[00:13:31] Laura Flanders: go.

[00:13:35] I try to be very inclusive, so

[00:13:40] Sound on Tape: hi there. This is Caden, the publisher of Convergence and the host of our weekly News magazine Block and Build. If you’re enjoying the show, I’d love to invite you to join me every Friday for a breakdown of the headlines with the kind of insight and analysis you’ve come to expect from Convergence Magazine.

[00:13:56] I also get to go deep with movement journalists about their crucial reporting, and get exclusive insights from some of the most strategic organizers fighting for the world that we deserve. If you’re looking for a break from the news cycle that feels grounded and strategic, come along for the ride. You can find Block and Build wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe today.

[00:14:14] I hope this helps.

[00:14:27] Scot Nakagawa: quite a bit to do with this. You referenced the Powell memo. That was, uh, 1971, right? Lewis Powell submitting that memorandum, um, uh, declaring that, uh, that there was a war on capitalism. Um, how has deregulation of news media, and I’m thinking here also about the fairness doctrine and, uh, you know, the movement away from it, um, brought us to this moment.

[00:14:50] Um, and, you know, basically exaggerated how polarized we really are. 

[00:14:55] Laura Flanders: Well, first you have to know where the regulation came from. So, just for people to remember, you know, how did we get TV and radio? Well, first we had radio, and radio came about in the end of the 19th century and by the early part of the 20th century, people had radios, mostly AM, um, radio broadcasts.

[00:15:12] And their licenses, you know, where you are on the dial, are you 99. 5, are you 89. 3, are you 101, you know. where you are on the dial mattered and you couldn’t have two broadcasters on the same dial or you would just on the same spot on the dial or you would just hear fuzz. You had to award those licenses on the basis of some kind of criteria.

[00:15:33] Uh, and in the 1920s, uh, there were fights over those criteria and it was established that the airwaves as it was understood them were public, were a public resource, a finite public resource. There are only so many spots, um, that you could broadcast your, um, programming on and be picked up by the antennas of the day.

[00:15:53] So it was established that it was the people’s resource, just publicly owned, like the water, like the air, and would be licensed to people on the basis of their service, fancy that, to the public interest. As you could imagine, there’s lots of ways of identifying public interest or defining public interest, and throughout the 20s and 30s, there were fights about that.

[00:16:13] You saw the rise of right wing talk, you saw the rise of demagogic pro Nazi, pro fascist, pro Hitler, um, ideologies, Father Coughlin and others. And by the 1930s, under FDR, you had a realization, actually, we have to regulate this more. It’s not enough just to declare this public interest. public resource and give people licenses.

[00:16:34] We have to do more than that. And they, FDR actually appointed a civil rights attorney, Clifford Durr, um, to be the head of his FCC, which was founded in the mid 1930s. And Clifford Durr sought to, kind of, assert civil rights principles in a way, arguing that, uh, these licenses could be taken away if the broadcasts were used for, um, the spreading of, of lies or of defaming other people.

[00:17:04] That you had to have some local broadcasters, uh, in any station so they couldn’t just be beaming in content from far away. An ideology, you know, an ideologue from, from, from, Berlin, perhaps, or a particular political party and not the other. So, the Fairness Doctrine kind of grew out of that. And to fast forward, you had, you had saw a lot of this regulation being tuned and adapted for television.

[00:17:30] But by the time you get to the 70s, The right’s very clear. We need to deregulate. We need to own some of this technology just for ourselves. We need to be able to broadcast in a more powerful way. And we need to get the hands, you know, get the hands of government out of this whole field of regulating media.

[00:17:48] So that was an ongoing campaign. First you vilify the broadcasters, ooh, they’re leftists, they’re liberals, oops. Um, they’re promoting all sorts of horrendous and. Sort of, um, family destroying values. Um, then you, once you’ve cowed the policy makers, then you bring proposals that cut the length of time that people can hold a license so they have to constantly reapply, that shrink the appropriation for budgets for, you know, for, um, particularly public television, public broadcasting from, I don’t know, six years down to like two years.

[00:18:21] So they’re constantly there in Congress appealing for money. And by the 1980s, you had Ronald Reagan really carrying the banner for doing away with the Fairness Doctrine, which required that you had a diversity of viewpoint over the broadcast day. Um, and then by the 1990s, Wow, look at that, you have Bill Clinton submitting to a right wing argument that these regulations on how many people, how many media outlets a single entity could own, that they were anachronistic, holding back progress, and so on.

[00:18:51] So in 1996, you see the Telecommunications Act, um, which, among other things, and it did a lot of, it didn’t do a lot of things, like regulate, uh, internet. That’s, although there’s pluses and minus to that, um, it did, um, lift, um, I can’t remember what the numbers went to, but you were able to own, own many more outlets, uh, in a certain area, in a single area, than ever before.

[00:19:18] And it was really at that point, I remember going to meetings where people would say, well, you know, regulation of newspapers and TV and radio licenses doesn’t matter anymore because you have the internet, and that’s this free, open space where everybody’s going to be able to. communicate. And I remember saying at one point, I said, may I please keep TV, radio, and the newspapers and you can have the internet.

[00:19:38] And I still wonder who would have gotten the right, who was right in that deal, who would have benefited most in that deal. 

[00:19:46] Sue Hyde: You mentioned Lewis Powell, and I just want to remind listeners that this is Lewis Powell who became a justice on the U. S. Supreme Court and was the author of the majority opinion In the decision in Bowers v.

[00:20:06] Hardwick, Bowers, which declared that there was no right to privacy for homosexual sexual behavior, and according to Lewis Powell, that was because he was basing his opinion on millennia of moral teaching. So 

[00:20:33] Laura Flanders: He’d read all those millennia of moral teaching, hadn’t he? 

[00:20:36] Sue Hyde: Indeed. Indeed. You know, getting, getting back to the pro democracy media ecosystem, certainly there’s, there’s the problem of money.

[00:20:47] There’s the problem of, uh, maybe it’s not profitable enough, but what, what do you see in that current media ecosystem that is missing? What’s the missing piece? What do we need to strengthen? our own media.

[00:21:11] Laura Flanders: Well, there’s a lot there. I mean For one thing we shouldn’t give up critiquing the other people’s media. We need to get clear about that It’s it’s not okay What we see on on our national most powerful broadcast media and we have to maintain our critique being told that we can go and make Our own it’s what i’ve done for 30 years, but it’s not easy and it can’t compete.

[00:21:32] We don’t compete We can provide an alternative if people can find us we can You Lift up people who then get picked up, perhaps, and brought into some kind of pipeline from the margins to the mainstream of the media. We can contest certain framings, and I think particularly about, you know, illegals and aliens.

[00:21:52] I think we shifted that framing very successfully. We shifted the framing on, on abortion and choice, and we’re shifting it again today. But the, uh, That doesn’t mean that our, you know, individual abilities to create a brand around ourselves and somehow find an audience and somehow scrabble together the money means that our way of thinking about media in this country or the, the world.

[00:22:18] The structures that we have of media and communication in this country are fine. It’s like saying, you can have a third party, just nobody can vote for you. You can’t get into any debates, you can’t, you know, we’ll give you no coverage, but go right ahead and run. We’re a democracy. That’s kind of where we are now.

[00:22:33] We’re being told, you know, that let a thousand or a million or several million media flowers bloom. And we, all of us, are surviving with a teeny tiny pocket of audience while, The vast questions of our democracy are being framed, asked, and answered by still the most powerful players in our society. And that’s politicians, even more than politicians, it’s profiteers, it’s corporate leaders, and it’s the puppet politicians who work for them.

[00:23:08] So we have a big problem. big challenge of how do we compete? I think we could compete better than we do if we’d learnt more effectively how to collaborate, how to network, how to support each other, how to, you know, um, create echo effect with each other. We’re discouraged from doing that by the fact that we all have to fundraise and we all fundraise from poli from foundations that want us to say that we’re the best and the brightest.

[00:23:32] Uh, and, uh, We know that critique of how the, I call it philanthro feudalism, we’re all just peasants in the philanthropist lord’s mansion. We know that this is not a good way to build alliance and mass movement in any field and certainly that’s true in media. But I do think at this moment it is important to look at where we are as a turning point in the same way that we were in a turning point in the 30s with new technology of tv and radio reaching millions of people that had never had that kind of direct communication from uh announced somebody that they didn’t know or a newspaper from you know a journalist that they couldn’t meet in the street we are now in a in a time of technological transformation that is perfectly suited to cultivating support for authoritarian leadership.

[00:24:25] And we do not have an adequate defense mechanism in the media sphere any more than we have it in the political sphere, and obviously they’re, they’re related. This

[00:24:42] Scot Nakagawa: podcast is presented by the 22nd Century Initiative, a hub for strategy and action for frontline activists. National leaders and people like 

[00:24:51] Sue Hyde: [email protected], you can sign up for our newsletter. You can learn from our anti-authoritarian Playbook, which includes resources on how to block rising authoritarianism bridge across the multiracial majority, and build an inclusive pro-democracy movement in your community.

[00:25:16] Scot Nakagawa: Laura, let’s talk about the relationship between. Media and these media ecosystems that you speak of, and the kind of fundamental logics that guide people in life, you know, the way that we understand who we are and how we relate to others, what’s wrong, how to fix it, all of those things, how do you understand the relationship between that public imagination and media, especially for folks who want to move pro democracy ideas into the public imagination?

[00:25:49] Laura Flanders: Well, which one of us feels happy when we’re scrolling? Which one of us feels better about our fellows, the state of the world, or our own place in it when we’ve spent half an hour in social media? I will say I know that my mood plummets after 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes on social media scrolling.

[00:26:18] Do I find some interesting things from time to time? Maybe, but I can feel my level of tension. growing. On the one hand, there’s that. On the other hand, like, where do we find community, conversation, clarity, complexity? There are local newspapers still in the place where I live, both in the city and New York Times, there’s a variety of competition.

[00:26:40] Upstate in a little rural area, there’s three local papers. There’s a sense that they cover things I can recognize and see, particularly the upstate paper, and I can, you know, meet people who write for those papers. I have a little sense of, oh, I, I, I. can recognize this place that’s being reported on. But if I turn on the nightly news, often when I read the New York Times, I don’t see my reality reflected there at all.

[00:27:05] You can have thousands of people demonstrating against the war in Bogaza, it doesn’t appear, just as you had two weeks of Occupy Wall Street, or at least ten days before they reported on it at all. So I think the way that we make sense of the world starts with the reality. in believing that we’re in a world, that we are actually in and of a place.

[00:27:25] And we have media today that is mostly not based in the place that we’re in, that is owned by people that have no investment in the place that we’re in. And the people that they bring on to discuss the news are the same handful of well paid pundits that appear all over the country. And they don’t know that I had an earthquake where I live today, and I actually did in New York City.

[00:27:46] But that’s They, more importantly, don’t know how COVID is playing out in my rural town quite differently from how it’s playing out in a, in an urban center. They don’t know that there was a, um, gas leak in my neighborhood that I know is going to have more effect on my life than this White House report that is getting repeated on every show all evening.

[00:28:08] So, first, I think we’re living in an environment that has alienated, you know, good Marxist term. We’re not only alienated from the means of production when it comes to media, but we’re alienated from our own place in the world and one another. And then we have a few big voices either telling us kind of pablum and the same old pablum hour after hour, and I’m thinking of most of the so called mainstream media.

[00:28:33] Or ideological excitement telling us that we’re on a team that is the winning team, the best team against those other people out there who are out to get you. So you’ve got the dreaded combination, I think, of alienation, anxiety, and fear. I mean, alienation, fear, anxiety, fear, and not really kind of knowing where you are.

[00:28:59] And I think that that’s the Danger, dangerous. The danger about the, of the moment that we’re in media wise, that we don’t have the media that brings a complexity or a cred, you know, even Mm-Hmm. really much credibility, and we don’t have time. We’re not having the length of the conversation that we need to be having.

[00:29:21] I, I was just talking to some people about the. coverage of the abortion issue. And they said that NARAL had done a study a few years ago that showed that 98 percent of all the abortion stories, the stories that mentioned abortion, were on Fox News because the so called liberal media had just thought they would stop talking about it for fear of getting in trouble.

[00:29:43] Um, I thought that was interesting. It’s not that some topics are not being talked about. They’re not being talked about by us. Um, and then, of course, the complexity of by the time somebody needs an abortion, a whole lot else is going on in their lives. Um, but we never get to that part of the story. So we have this this abortion question entirely decontextualized from all the reasons that somebody might have an abortion.

[00:30:05] And then we’ve decided we’re going to call it not a choice now, but a health care, which is not quite getting it either for most people. For most people, it is a decision that has to do with how they’re going to live their lives, given the resources they have and the goals they have and who they are. So that’s just one example where I feel like we’re not Swimming in the water that will help our ideas float.

[00:30:28] Is that a good metaphor for you? That’s 

[00:30:31] Sue Hyde: a very good metaphor. So What would you advise people? Uh who want to support? local media who want to support independent media What should we be doing? 

[00:30:46] Laura Flanders: Well, for one thing, as I said, there’s always been, and there is in this country more than I think anywhere else in the world, uh, a large number of independent media outlets at the level of print, radio, TV, you name it.

[00:30:59] With YouTube, podcasting, there’s a huge array of media out there that you can support. There are some core media institutions, I think, in any community, that if you’re lucky enough to have one, pledge. Subscribe. I’m talking, if you have a credible, independent newspaper, subscribe. If you have a listener supported radio station, subscribe.

[00:31:27] You may not love everything about it, but more likely than not, they have local reporters, they’ll pick up, you know, they’ll answer your email, or at least, if you, you, there’s a building you can go to to talk to them. Um, and they’re struggling. Most independent media in this country have yet to crack a budget of 100, 000.

[00:31:44] I’m talking independent little newsletters and publications. Some of the best black media, black old newspapers in the South, at least 10 years ago when I last looked, were surviving with one writer and everybody else was a volunteer. Same with a lot of community radio stations. And if you look at the map, a Venn diagram of where there are, for example, community radio stations, um, You see, these are the progressive pockets, often, of red states.

[00:32:12] These are the progressive pockets that you kind of leapfrog from one to the next across the country, if, for example, you’re scarred, or somebody on a book tour. Um, that’s where you can rely, you can rely on there being some, um, community having been built. And it’s not just a political community and a cultural community, it’s also a commercial community.

[00:32:32] When you cut out the local paper, when you cut out the local media, you’re cutting out the place where local small businesses advertised, where local small businesses took out sponsoring announcements. And you may be against commercials, but You wouldn’t be so against that model of supporting your local media.

[00:32:49] What’s hurting us is when our media is entirely bought and paid for by huge multinationals that edge everybody outside of the business. So you don’t want a media that’s entirely reliant on the underwriting of the corporations that bring us war and big pharma. But if you have a newspaper that’s supported by the local, I don’t know, printer and the local, um, gas station.

[00:33:11] Keep them alive. That’s what I say. 

[00:33:15] Scot Nakagawa: Well, and to, um, those philanthropists that you spoke to, spoke of earlier, um, you know, invest. Let’s 

[00:33:21] Sue Hyde: say that Laura spoke to them. 

[00:33:23] Laura Flanders: I mean, I could, my heart breaks. I, I, there are a lot of, there are some, you heard me go from a lot of to some. People I’m sure go into philanthropy wanting to do good.

[00:33:33] And then it seems to me it’s kind of like the White House. Something happens. Sometimes they get a few good things done, but the institutions are for the most part pretty frightened, pretty intimidated, and very self perpetuating. Short sighted, particularly on our side. On the right, again, the Lewis Power Mamo spurred a lot of right wing foundations to work collaboratively and to make sure that their core issues and projects and institutions were funded.

[00:34:05] Didn’t have to be by the same foundation every single year, but they made sure that their basic bases were covered. Ours don’t do that. We leave people hanging out to dry. And I’ve watched just too many good, good media outlets specifically dry up for lack of funding. It’s just, just heartbreaking. We advertised for a freelance editor the other day on the, on Laura Flanders and Friends.

[00:34:28] I think we got 400 applicants in two days. People are that desperate. 

[00:34:34] Scot Nakagawa: Yeah. Wow. I’ve heard of a, um, uh, communications, um, strategy organization putting out a call for content producers and getting hundreds and hundreds of applications, among whom many, many were, um, teachers who either quit their jobs or had been fired from their jobs and, um, college professors who were, um, leaving academia because they just felt it was too full of strife and, 

[00:35:02] Laura Flanders: I mean, it’s like healthcare, right?

[00:35:03] I mean, if we care about the health of our democracy, um, we can’t leave it to the market. Any more than we can leave caring for the most vulnerable to private hospitals. For those who can pay for insurance. If we don’t want healthcare, If we actually believe that it’s important that people have information, that they feel engaged in their community, that they feel like there’s some role for them in making decisions about what happens where they live and internationally, then we have got to invest in media.

[00:35:38] And I mean invest through structures that have existed in other countries forever, whether it’s a taxation on advertising or a taxation on those broadcast licenses or a regular appropriation Congress that is actually, you know, a routine appropriation, not up for debate every two years or every two minutes, but a regular income flow.

[00:36:01] I grew up in England where if you wanted a television or a license, you had to get a license to watch the television, and you had to pay for that license, and that license pays for the BBC. And you get fined and you get fined still today if you are somehow hacking into the BBC stream without paying your TV license.

[00:36:19] There are lots of ways to create insulation around some core media. Um, we don’t do it. We choose not to do it. We’ve left it to the market and this is where we are, I think, in a very dangerous place, just like we were with COVID. in a very dangerous place. When a pandemic hits your private health care system, you are in a very dangerous place.

[00:36:40] And when, you know, Christian nationalism and authoritarianism hits are deregulated. Each one fund one brand media environment and whoever gets the most clicks wins environment. Um, we are in a very dangerous place because fascism gets clicks. Wow. Sorry. Well, 

[00:37:01] Scot Nakagawa: um, Laura Yes. I have now had my dose of all of the kind of anxieties that haunt me every day.

[00:37:11] But um, Laura, you mentioned your show. So um, it’ll be in the show notes, but um, just in case people aren’t reading. 

[00:37:22] Laura Flanders: Well, I’m happy to say that we are entering our fifth season on Public Television. Now, Public Television, they don’t pay us to make the show. This is an independently funded show by viewers and listeners and a handful of very good philanthropists, and I love them.

[00:37:37] And we can be found on local public television all across the country, but you can find out where that is through going to our website, where you can also actually watch us on YouTube or listen to the podcast or the radio program. So go to lauraflanders. org and you will find all the information and sign up for our newsletter and you’ll find out about our web exclusives and how to get access to our uncut interviews with amazing guests like, well, the lineup we have coming up right now is Angela Davis, Ai Weiwei, um, Lori Loughlin.

[00:38:09] you, Scott. It’s going to be on very soon. So, um, tune in and connect. And if you can throw a few dollars our way, do it too. 

[00:38:17] Sue Hyde: Subscribe. Well, 

[00:38:18] Laura Flanders: thank you very much, Laura. 

[00:38:21] Scot Nakagawa: Yes, subscribe. 

[00:38:22] Laura Flanders: There you go. You can subscribe for free. You get the info. But, uh, if you want to keep media free, and you can put a bit of support behind any of this public media we’re talking about, do it.

[00:38:33] From each according to their means, right? 

[00:38:36] Scot Nakagawa: Yes. And you can become a donor like me. So, um, thank you very much, Laura. Thanks Scott. Thank you. Hey, 

[00:38:54] Sue Hyde: thanks again for listening. Find more episodes of the anti authoritarian podcast on all of your favorite platforms and also at 22ci. org and convergencemag. org.

[00:39:08] Direct links to these and other resources referenced in this episode are Are in the show notes.

[00:39:20] Sound on Tape: The Anti-Authoritarian Podcast is created by the 22nd Century Initiative and published by Conversions Magazine. Our theme music is After the Revolution by Cari Blanton and is licensed under creative common. The show is hosted by Scott Nawa and Sue Hyde. Executive producers are James, mom and Tony Esberg.

[00:39:38] Our producer is Josh Stro and Yong Chan Miller is our production assistant.