Catch ‘Defend Free Speech’ on KKFI 2/4, 6pm

Cris Mann says Uhuru is much respected in Saint Louis.
Cris Mann, chair of the board of PeaceWorks, says Uhuru is respected in St. Louis for their work in the black community. She and audience members said Uhuru constructed a community center, a birth center for African American women, and a recreation area for youth, and Uhuru members work in useful community businesses such as bakeries, thrift stores, and moving companies. Their businesses are supplemented by requesting donations and sponsoring classes on topics such as demands for reparations and self-determination for all African people.

By Spencer Graves

A “Defend Free Speech” town hall Jan. 25 was held via Zoom nationally and in person at Simpson House, 4509 Walnut St., KCMO. You can hear highlights during the KKFI Community Radio, 90.1 FM, show “Radio Active Magazine” Tuesday, 2/4, 6-6:30pm. Listen up!

The town hall was co-hosted by Friends of Community Media and PeaceWorks Kansas City,  Pacifica Fightback, and the African People’s Socialist Party/Uhuru. Roughly 100 attended via Zoom across the country and another 25 came to the KC event. Three keynoters spoke:

Spencer Graves, encouraging discussion, listens to speakers.

* Chair Omali Yeshitela of the African People’s Socialist Party/Uhuru,

Elisa Mejia of Insurgencia Femenina,

Dr. Gerald Horne, history professor at the University of Houston and host of Freedom Now! on KPFK.

Yeshitela discussed how he and two others with the African People’s Socialist Party had been prosecuted for acting as agents of Russia without filing as such and for conspiring to spread Russian propaganda and sow political discord in the U.S. He said the government expected them to accept a plea bargain. They refused and instead fought and won: They were found not guilty of acting as foreign agents. They were convicted of conspiring to spread Russian propaganda and sentenced to three years probation and community service, which they have been doing for years.

Mejia spoke about the need to expand Spanish-language programming, especially at KPFK in Los Angeles, and about her program, Insurgencia femenina (Feminine insurgency).

Leading the Kansas City breakout group, I said we need to improve local news and social media. Media scholars including Robert McChesney and Victor Pickard have recommended citizen-directed subsidies for local news nonprofits. This would represent an Internet-savvy reincarnation of the postal subsidies provided by the US Postal Service Act of 1792, which helped give the US during the first half of the 1800s possibly more independent news publishers per capita or per million population than at any other time and place in human history. This encouraged literacy and limited political corruption, both of which helped the early US stay together and grow both in land area and economically while contemporary New Spain / Mexico fractured, shrank and stagnated economically.

Henry M. Stoever, board member of PeaceWorks, exhorts attendees to boldly contact all legislators—federal, state, and city—on free speech issues, just as conservative Tea Party activists did 15 years ago.

Dr. Horne recommended substantial improvements in the media, starting with an international campaign to raise funds for a national and international news bureau at WPFW in Washington, DC, to share content with media organs from the BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and their allies, such as Telesur, Press TV, Radio Havana, etc.

The presentations were followed by questions for the speakers then breakout sessions—with one session in Kansas City and the rest virtual. Most of the report-backs from the breakouts focused on how to improve the five Pacifica-owned stations (KPFA in Berkeley, CA; KPFK in Los Angeles; WBAI, New York; WPFW in Washington, DC: and KPFT, Houston, TX).

Most people alive today benefit from the flowering of innovations, inventions and scientific discoveries that resulted in part from the open political economy in the US of that day, facilitated by that diverse media culture — a benefit from newspapers we’ve never read, most of which we have not even heard of.

In the 1850s and 1860s, newspaper markets became increasingly dominated by publishers with expensive, high-speed presses.1 That trend, combined with consolidation of ownership of media outlets, gradually reduced the number of independent publishers. Today’s Internet allows anyone to become a publisher, but audience shares are still highly concentrated. This includes commercial social media companies that make money through market segmentation, pushing people into echo chambers that reinforce and amplify their preconceptions. This has increased political polarization and violence, while making billionaires out of Internet entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said, “The shortest path to a click is anger or hate.”

Anger and hate have helped attract audiences to different media market segments for centuries. Internet companies can do that more easily than before, because of all the data they collect on user behaviors. During the town hall, I mentioned three responses to this threat.

  1. We have to talk politics with people with whom we may disagree, but calmly, with respect and humility, because the alternative is killing people over misunderstandings.
  2. Ask public officials, e.g., city council members, to match what they spend on accounting, advertising, media and public relations, with citizen-directed subsidies for local news nonprofits, as suggested by McChesney and Pickard. I recommended experiments in different ways of doing this in a Wikiversity article, “Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government,” and in my radio interview with Prof. Pickard.
  3. We need changes in Internet law to make it no longer profitable for Internet companies to make money amplifying political polarization and violence.

________

1David Paul Nord (2015), “The Victorian City and the Urban Newspaper,” pp. 73-106 in Richard R. John and Jonathan Silberstein-Loeb, eds. (2015), Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet (Oxford U. Pr.)

—Spencer Graves is president of Friends of Community Media (based in KC) and secretary of PeaceWorks KC.

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