Defend Free Speech For All (Town Hall)

Federick Douglass 1860
Frederick Douglass 1860 plea for free speech

January 25, 2025 

6:00 pm


Stop the Non-Profit Killer Bill & Protect Non-Commercial Community Media!

January 25, 2025, 4-6 PM Pacific / 6-8 Central / 7-9 Eastern

Co-sponsored by Friends of Community Media, Pacifica Fightback, PeaceWorks Kansas City, and the African People’s Socialist Party/Uhuru.

Register now:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/VE-Hxs0kRw6qZrmBMs3TuA

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

ACCESSIBILITY: A-I captioning in English or A-I translation of your choice is available.

In-person attendance at Simpson House, 4509 Walnut, KC MO.

Speakers during the first hour (starting at 6 PM Central) include:

  • Chair Omali Yeshitela of the African People’s Socialist Party/Uhuru,
  • Prof. Gerald Horne, pre-eminent historian and host of Freedom Now! on KPFK, and
  • Elisa Mejia of Insurgencia Femenina.

The repression and de-platforming directed at whistleblowers, solidarity efforts with Palestine, the Black freedom movement, and voices for peace and justice are increasing exponentially, along with attacks on migrants and refugees, women and LGBTQ+ people, and labor.

The threat to non-profits, and specifically to non-commercial educational broadcasters expressed in Project 2025 and in proposed federal legislation, are aimed at suppressing freedom of expression and investigative journalism that can expose and oppose the social and economic forces and interests behind those attacks.

Denying freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of cultural expression denies your right to listen, to learn and to associate. Join us for a working gathering to strategize a campaign to defend our rights and protect targeted communities and their institutions.

The monopolization of commercial broadcasting and control of social media by a few is producing news deserts that provide space for well-financed reactionary and racist voices. Help restore local news and progressive discourse. Learn about the struggles and successes of popular movements globally and locally.

Video link: https://youtu.be/fu2kmWNdrsY. (The speaker in the videos is Spencer Graves, a leader of Friends of Community Media and of PeaceWorks KC.)

Register now:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/VE-Hxs0kRw6qZrmBMs3TuA

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Please share this invitation to all who are interested. Thanks!

Background

Last November 21, the US House passed HR 9495, which if passed by the Senate and signed by the President, would have given the Secretary of Treasury the authority to designate any nonprofit as a suspected “Terrorist Supporting Organization” and remove their tax-exempt status.

And Project 2025 recommends not merely defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which includes public television and NPR, but denying broadcasting licenses to any noncommercial broadcaster; they mentioned CPB and Pacifica radio by name. Trump denied knowledge of Project 2025, but he has nominated many of its leading authors to high ranking positions in his new administration.

More on this including citations to HR 9495 and Project 2025 are included in the discussion of an interview on, “HR 9495, the nonprofit-killer bill, per Michael Novick“, available on Wikiversity under, “Category: Media reform to improve democracy“.

The US has been rated the past few years as a “Flawed democracy” by The Economist Democracy Index, produced by the same organization as the conservative British news weekly The Economist. The US devotes roughly 0.005% (five thousands of a percent) of the national economy (Gross Domestic Product or GDP) to public subsidies for media while the world’s leading democracies spend between 11 and 50 times that, between 0.06% and 0.25%, according to data published by Neff and Pickard (2024); see Figure 1 and the numbers in the Appendix. Political polarization and violence is increasing in many countries worldwide, including in Germany, which is spending a quarter of a percent of GDP on public subsidies for media. However, political polarization and violence seem to have been increasing more in the US than in the world’s leading democracies.

Few if any of the organizers of this January 25 event want government bureaucrats censoring our media. The world’s leading democracies have addressed that problem with effective firewalls that virtually eliminate political interference in the content. The US does NOT have any such firewall: it funds the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB, which includes public television and NPR) one year at a time. Many Republicans have worked hard since Richard Nixon became President in 1969 to cut that, because they claim that CPB has a liberal bias.

A big problem with media bias in the US is corporate bureaucrats censoring the media. Neff and Pickard (2024) discussed, “Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries”. They noted that commercial media focus on people with money to spend, while public funding is more likely to help inform everyone. Moreover, public funding for media in their data was more strongly correlated with the Economist Democracy Index than commercial media funding.

Neff and Pickard did not claim a causal relationship. However, there is a substantial body of other work that says that better local news increases voter turnout, increases ticket splitting, increases competition for political office and improves the bond ratings of local government, thereby reducing the cost of borrowing; this is documented in the Wikiversity article on, “Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government“.

Ralph Nader (2014) documented how the big divide in politics in the US is not between Republican and Democrat, Conservative and Liberal: It is between the people who control most of the money for the media and elected officials on one side and the bottom 99% on the other.

The Wikiversity article on “Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government” recommends randomized controlled trials with different ways of improving the media in a random sample of small jurisdictions and measuring the impact of those changes: Does it improve the quality of government, accelerate local economic growth, improve public health locally, etc., like research says? Many city and county governments could fund such experiments within their own jurisdictions by matching what they spend on accounting, advertising, media and public relations with subsidies for local news with a firewall that effectively prevents political interference in the content.

Appendix. Economist Democracy Index and public funding for media as a percent of national income (Gross Domestic Product, GDP) for selected full and flawed democracies per Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard (2024) “Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries”, The International Journal of Press/Politics, 29(3)601-627.

Figure 1. Level of democracy vs. government funding for public media as a percent of national economy for 33 countries

(US = United States, NO = Norway, etc.; see the table below).

Full democraciesFlawed democracies
Countrycountry codedem indexpub media %Countrycountry codedem indexpub media %
NorwayNO9.870.116JapanJP7.990.123
IcelandIS9.580.154United StatesUS7.960.005
SwedenSE9.390.148EstoniaEE7.900.143
New ZealandNZ9.260.061IsraelIL7.860.053
FinlandFI9.250.197BotswanaBW7.810.102
IrelandIE9.240.059Cabo VerdeCV7.780.216
CanadaCA9.220.056TaiwanTW7.730.001
DenmarkDK9.220.155Czech RepublicCZ7.690.139
AustraliaAU9.090.070ItalyIT7.520.101
GermanyDE8.680.253LithuaniaLT7.500.085
United KingdomGB8.520.173LatviaLV7.490.077
UruguayUY8.380.066South AfricaZA7.240.016
SpainES8.290.144ColombiaCO7.130.001
MauritiusMU8.220.134ArgentinaAR7.020.024
FranceFR8.120.154IndiaIN6.900.018
ChileCL8.080.001TunisiaTN6.720.026
South KoreaKR8.000.035

Bibliography

Ralph Nader (2014) Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State (Type Media Center).

Timothy Neff and Victor Pickard (2024) “Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries”, The International Journal of Press/Politics, 29(3)601-627.

Copyright 2025 Spencer Graves, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 international license.

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