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March 22, 2008

Students Organize Media Reform Group,Make Plans to Send Group to NCMRBy Kevin Gosztola

In my efforts to further commit myself to pushing progressive reforms incommunities I am part of, I have recently decided to head a media reform studentorganization at Columbia College Chicago.

So far, this looks like it will be a truly remarkable organization for students to be apart of. Faculty members from the college are involved in the process and eager towork with students to push media reform not just in the area of access to news but inthe fields of film, music, graphic design, photography, radio, fiction and nonfictionwriting, etc. where censorship and corporatization has affected artists ability toproduce quality art.

The decision to volunteer to run a media reform group was made at an antiwar forumheld on campus.

At the forum, I spoke on a panel about the need for students to oppose the Iraq warand to go beyond just rejecting it personally. As artists, I spoke of the need for themto speak out about the Iraq war or the problems the Iraq war raises in the art

students create. (*This was where I came up with my Creating the Ethos One Step ata Time campaign for my student government run here at Columbia College.)

It was amazing how much students were upset with the media during the forum.They were not so much upset with the Iraq war. Instead, they were very upset thatthe media had up to this point kept the truth of what was going on in the Iraq warand in the pre-invasion from them.

Towards the end of the forum, a faculty member told us about how we could go to amedia reform conference in June and how she wanted to start a media reform group.I jumped at the opportunity and offered the services of OpEdNews to anybody whowanted to utilize them because OpEdNews is at the front of the battle for mediareform.

One month later, we had our first meeting and came together with a little over ten

people (four of them being faculty members at Columbia). We spoke of all the thingswe want to do on campus for media reform. Our campus has many issues for us totake up and deal with.

If youve followed the trends of media consolidation in this country or the currentcrisis in journalism in America (through books like Tragedy & Farce by Nichols andMcChesney), than you wont be surprised by the fact that Columbia Collegesnewspaper and radio station is atrociously bad.

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Our school newspaper is administrative-run. That means that students do not run it.Now before you tell me how there are only a few student-run school newspapers inthe country, let me just say that doesnt mean we should allow our administration toturn our newspaper into a rag.

Our ACLU group on campus is buying ad space which they will use to publisheditorials because our student newspaper will not run them in our editorial section.

I sent a press release for an event I held on campus to combat media blackout on theWinter Soldier Investigation held from March 13th to March 16th. The plan was toshow testimony on a screen, discuss what was said, and then discuss how we asstudents would respond in action to what was being said by these veterans. Thenewspaper did not even bother to open the attached press release and instead, theycalled our schools student organization office and asked what we had planned to dofor that night. The school wrote down Winter Soldier projection from 5-9 and so thepaper took that to mean we were showing the Winter Soldier documentary from the1970s from 5-9.

In order for the paper to cover a progressive issue on campus, we have to submit aresolution on that progressive issue in our student government. Since the studentgovernment is where conservative minds go to seek refuge on our liberal campus

(and thats because our administration will back them up), vetoes of theseresolutions normally occur, which creates conflict that journalists working for thenewspaper sensationalize in the same way that rag publications across Americasensationalize conflicts between Obama and Hillary.

The schools radio station transmits from University of Illinois-Chicago, which meansstudents on campus cannot pick up the radio station without going online to listen toit. The station only plays music and does not offer any talk radio whatsoever.

As you can see, our school has some work to do in the fields of journalism and radioon campus. But more importantly (and this is an issue our ACLU group has justchosen to pick up), we are a group that will seek to acknowledge the simple fact thatall media reform begins with taking action to preserve the Internet now before thecorporations do any more damage to it than they have done already.

Eliot D. Cohen, Ph. D and Bruce W. Fraser sums up how important it is for this to bedone in the wonderfully written book The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Mediaand Power Hungry Government Are Turning America Into a Dictatorship.

Through forums where we invite speakers like Robert McChesney, John Nichols, JeffCohen, etc. and show video clips and documentaries on media, we will uncover howmedia is in dire need of reform.

A key component of the media reform groups startup will be sending students to theFree Press National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis in June. We have anevent planned for April to get students interested in that.

From that point, in the fall we will become recognized by the school and begin tocontribute to and improve our colleges community. We will lead the way in Chicago

by working with the Metro Chicago Progressive Media Action Network.Most importantly, we will promote the idea that college students must create theethos for the world that they live in and college students and Americans can do thatby fighting the corporatization, consolidation, and crisis in journalism by fighting for avision of a world that truly functions in a democratic manner and truly promotes thetradition of civics independent thinking that are etched in the very essence of ournations history.

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Authors Bio:

Kevin Gosztola goes to Columbia College in Chicago where he is studying film. Hehopes to become a documentary filmmaker and an independent filmmaker. He iscurrently working as a production assistant on a documenary called "SeriouslyGreen" which traces the development of the Green Party throughout the 2008election. Kevin is currently in a documentary film course working on a piece to look atstudents in the antiwar movement in Chicago and then he hopes to take a look at themilitarization of public schools in Chicago. He is more than anything a student activistthat believes in questioning their very way America's systems work(it's electoralsystem, it's military-industrial complex, it's foreign policy of Americanexceptionalism, it's media which has become the Fourth Estate,etc.). He believes in

peace, love, and goodwill toward men, and while some will tell him what can bedone, he is only concerned about what should be done. Feel free to email himanytime especially if you have any good ideas for articles or documentary topics.