Posted Nov. 3, 2008
By Martha Gies
It’s easy to be bummed out by the media.
But the messengers, too, are bad. With their allegiance tied to the advertising dollar, and their willingness to pimp the administration’s priorities, they are indifferent to the interests of the community, leaving us with an ever increasing sense of disconnection, if not despair.
In Portland, corporate media reached a new low on Sept. 28 when The Oregonian mailed out to thousands of subscribers the DVD of an anti-Muslim hate film, tucked into the folds of the Sunday paper.
Was this in the interests of the community? Mayor Tom Potter didn’t think so. He phoned publisher Fred Stickel and urged him not to propagate fear and prejudice in our town. But advertising money was at stake. So, citing free speech, The Oregonian went ahead with their weekend plan, despite the fact that on Friday, Sept. 26, children were gassed in a mosque in Dayton, Ohio, following the film’s distribution there.
To this dismal scenario comes a good-news book long overdue.
“Rather than rail against the media, we are becoming the media,” writes Markos Moulitsas Zúniga in his exuberant “Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era.” “We are the first generation that has direct, individual access to the world and to the emerging technologies. We are the first generation that can bypass the old-world gatekeepers to communicate to the masses — that is, with each other.”
Markos Moulitsas, better known as Kos, the nickname he picked up serving in the army during the First Gulf War, is the founder of Daily Kos (rhymes with dose), an influential political blog visited by more than 74 million readers last month. He is not yet 40.
“Taking on the System” describes how bloggers, e-mail activists, online newspapers and alternative filmmakers have meanwhile built an effective progressive network. MoveOn.org, for instance, is a conspicuous force. Not only does it lob attacks on right-wing interests, but it raises money – lots of money – for progressive candidates.
Moulitsas argues that each era presents unique opportunities. It was Gandhi’s gift for getting newsreel attention that got him worldwide coverage of the brutality of life in India under the British, but that doesn’t mean that today’s citizen activists should try to revive the newsreel.
Using the example of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Moulitsas warns us that the “constant playing and replaying of those images” has driven activists into a rut.
“In fact, those riots are so embedded in our nation’s psyche that they still define what ‘activism’ should look like today. Post-boomer kids have grown up hearing how they are ‘apathetic’ and ‘uninvolved’ because of their failure to ‘take it to the streets’ like the boomers did in the ’60s.
“To be clear, those 1960s activists were trailblazers whose tactics and actions were finely tuned for the media of their era, but today’s media landscape is much more complex and presents a completely different challenge for activists.”
Moulitsas leads the reader through strategies that work – don’t wait for authorization, target your villain, set the narrative, work your niche, guard your credibility – illustrating with a huge variety of successful campaigns. Cindy Sheehan’s lonely wait outside Bush’s Texas ranch was effective precisely because the President refused to show up and because the bloggers got behind her.
And, as we’ve seen, the speed with which the internet can effect change is dazzling. Last month, Sarah Palin was scheduled to speak at an Iran Unity rally in New York. “The fact that Sarah Palin would be invited to speak to American Jews about anything, let alone an issue as important as Iran, is just ridiculous,” wrote Isaac Luria, the online director of jstreet.org. Self-described as the “political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement,” J Street supports diplomatic rather than military solutions in the Middle East.
“If we’re going to get Sarah Palin removed from the schedule of this important rally, we don’t have any time to lose,” Luria blasted in his email alert, followed by the now familiar: “After you’ve taken action, please forward this message as widely as possible.” Twenty-four hours later, J Street had collected 20,188 signatures, and rally organizers “came to their senses” and took Palin off the schedule.
While the media is the most conspicuous of the gatekeepers, Moulitsas is also writing for and about a generation of musicians who are learning to make successful end runs around the heavies in the record industry. He describes how enthusiastic fans of the Artic Monkeys made their first album the fastest selling album in British history by doing their excitement online. The same tactics can be used by young filmmakers weary of banging on the gates of Hollywood.
The subtitle, “Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era,” is a reference to Saul Alinsky’s 1971 volume, “Rules for Radicals.” Moulitsas dedicates his book to Alinsky who, as the teacher of Cesar Chavez, was the godfather of the farmworker movement, and the patron saint of a generation of organizers struggling against injustice.
Independent journalist Al Giordano, whose own group blog Narco News chips away at the big-daddy lie that is “the war on drugs,” calls Taking on the System “the must-read book of the year.”
I second that. Not only is it educational, but unlike those brilliant and indispensable analyses of what went wrong – Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower,” Jane Mayer’s “The Dark Side” – “Taking on the System” gives us hope.
Posted by Joanne Zuhl
