"Freedom of the Press is for those who own one." This is a much-stated truism of the First Amendment. The continuing consolidation and merger of mass media into fewer and fewer hands of ownership has placed Free Speech far from the public's ability to practice it.
An immedia project must, of course, address this problem of ownership. We take great inspiration from the "squatters movement" of urban centers in the U.S. and abroad, in which citizens have reclaimed abandoned slums and buildings and rebuilt them for their own housing and creative ventures. Their actions to remove the landlords -- the Middlemen of property -- have provided us with a glimpse of an immedia tactic that begins to bypass the Middlemen of news and entertainment.
We find it helpful to think of public airwaves as a form of property. Television, radio and satellite transmissions invade the private airspace of everyone. Telephones, the Internet and cable television likewise take advantage of public wiring systems and enjoy considerable infrastructure support from local governments. These are the means of communication and expression in the Mediated Society. They must be democratized, of course, so that all may enjoy comparable access 25. But as urgently: the grids themselves must be transformed and, in many cases, the more centralized systems destroyed so that none may abuse them again.
We are watching, with great interest, a civil action underway in the 9th Circuit Court of the United States, in which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has fined a pirate radio operator for $2,000. But the FCC has lost on the merits of key motions before the judge, who has indicated a willingness to hear the case on First Amendment grounds 26. In this case, the pirate radio operators, in essence, "squatted" unused airwave frequencies to reclaim their Free Speech.
We are in close contact and active praxis with the largest such pirate radio project in New York City - 88.7 FM "Steal This Radio" - which hosts more than 30 programs by community artists and groups on the Lower East Side. Despite the high profile of the "Steal This Radio" station since November 1995, the FCC has not moved against the station 27. We suspect that the agency's defeats in the 9th Circuit Court have led to this regulatory timidity.
We count among our collaborators attorneys who are researching the legal possibilities for the squatting of unused broadcast frequencies, which lie dormant in every media market in the U.S. and most of the world. Having witnessed the success of New York's "Steal This Radio" in bringing together disparate groups who otherwise do not meet or talk, we view this project as an immedia laboratory. The station does not answer to advertisers or to media regulators; the participants' creativity therefore flows unrestrained. A spirit of improvisation has entered the 88.7 FM frequency where silence ruled before.
Last October, the Steal This Radio studios, which, appropriately, are located within a long-term squatted building on the Lower East Side, were remodeled and soundproofed. Live phone lines, for call-ins, have recently been installed, adding the public's voice to the broadcasts. The station has gone to a six-night-a-week schedule, and will soon broadcast on a "24/7" schedule; 'round the clock. The audience for the station grows in defiance of the "market niche" limitations that have calcified around commercial and public radio alike. An immedia project will continue our enthusiastic participation in this pirate radio station. We will record its progress, disseminate (and not consolidate) its arsenal of experience toward the launch of additional pirate stations, and to provide context in our mission as a "laboratory of language" as we develop an immedia dialect.
In the Spring of 1996, some of the principles in an immedia project developed, in Boston, a tactic by which ordinary citizens can begin to shoot back at the Media's cameras that invade our daily lives.
"TVTV NEWS NEWS," or "Television News About Television News," descended upon a particularly "spectacular" political event: The April 8 debate at Fanueil Hall, between U.S. Senate candidates John Kerry and William Weld.
This project began with a question: How would the news media react if the cameras were suddenly turned upon them?
We borrowed a video camera, lights and battery pack from a local cable TV station, secured credentials through collaborators in the working media, and printed our own "press passes" using Polaroid photographs of our crew. (To the extent our effort appeared, at times, to be the work of amateurs, this worked to our advantage by lulling our Mediating enemies into underestimating us, and by demonstrating that any small group can play with this tactic.)
In addition to our "news crew," another, separate camera (called "TV3") videotaped the interactions between our news crew and those from commercial television stations, as well as our crew's interactions with various print and radio reporters who were covering the debate.
The TVTV NEWSNEWS crew also asked members of the public, the candidates (including the Libertarian and Right-to-Life candidates, excluded from the debate), and the operatives for the competing senate campaigns, to comment on how they felt the media was doing its job.
TVTV NEWSNEWS has, subsequently, tested this tactic of SHOOTING BACK at the Media in other theatres-of-operations where the media has invaded.
During these tactical maneuvers, when we noticed a commercial news crew interviewing a source or a bystander, our crew shined its lights upon that interview, and then descended upon that individual immediately afterward, to ask whether they felt they had been treated fairly and whether they had been afforded the opportunity to say what they meant to say.
A few discoveries became obvious to us:
-- When members of the news media have cameras aimed at them by the citizenry, they often become overly defensive and exhibit the very same kind of behaviors that they provoke in their unwilling subjects. Some reporters have run from our camera crews. Others have tried to place their hands over the lens, leading to humorous - and gratifying - footage that demonstrated the power of media weaponry when transformed into "immedia weaponry."
-- The vanity of many Media Workers also created an advantage. Some, rather than run from the cameras, acquiesced to interviews, in which they were asked how much (or little) they were being paid and other questions about their own individual roles in the process. Thus, the TVTV NEWSNEWS project succeeded in illuminating the illusory nature of the news media, and thus exposed that its power is also illusory, and available to anyone with a videocam.
-- When citizen cameras are aimed at the Media, they cause a clear change in how the Media does its job. Aware that they were being monitored, commercial Media reporters suddenly turned more respectful of their sources. Upon noticing that TVTV NEWSNEWS was asking sources to expound upon their own feelings after having just been interviewed by the press, the commercial reporters turned more solicitous toward the public. Some began asking interviewees "have you said what you wanted to say?," aware that they themselves were being watched. Interviews became more substantive. The "Heisenberg Principle" surfaced: the act of studying the subject of Media changed the behavior of the group being studied.
When we think about all the public creativity that is currently poured into submissions to a television program like "America's Funniest Home Videos," we get a glimpse of the tremendous energy that could be unleashed if the lenses were turned against the Media 28. Millions of households have a video camera in the closet (and many more have still-cameras, audiotape recorders and computers), awaiting the conversion of these tools into a kind of peaceful weaponry to reclaim the terrain of daily life from those who mediate it.
And when we also consider the impact of the "Rodney King video," in which a bystander filmed Los Angeles police beating Mr. King, we begin to get a sense about how society could be transformed - if citizens became inspired to actively "shoot back" at the Media (and, in the widest definition of the concept, turned their cameras upon all Mediators, from police and landlords to polluters and corporations.)
Let us not forget how Media's own language-of-organization reveals Media's inherent agenda. The television reporter, for example, reports to the "control room," where the "news" is processed and mediated before it reaches the viewer. The "control room" reports to "master control." As Danny Schechter ("the news dissector") has pointed out; "it's about control."
Projects such as TVTV NEWSNEWS bypass the Middlemen of the control rooms by destabilizing their "remote control" over reporters in the field. No matter how many electronic beepers, radios or instructions of how to behave "objectively" accompany a commercial TV news crew on the job, the presence of citizen cameras tends to break the scripts and unravel the rules. A dose of theatricality or "secret theater" during such operations can also serve to further dismantle Media's rules of the field; no one is more gullible than a reporter searching for a "story."
The tactic of shooting back at the Media has already found us some unexpected conspirators: Of interest is how commercial camera operators and technicians who accompany reporters have repeatedly expressed a sympathy and solidarity with TVTV NEWSNEWS crews, even as their reporters revealed anxiety over having the lenses turned against them; maybe even because of how this tactic knocks reporters off their illusory pedestals.
We are in the process of bringing the TVTV NEWSNEWS project to New York City - the media capital of the world - and continue to develop tactics toward detonating such an immedia insurrection by ordinary citizens. Among our projects: the counterfeiting of "official press passes" which any member of the public may use to turn the tables on the Media.
25. The repeal, by the Federal Communications Commission in the 1990s, of the "Fairness Doctrine," which had previously offered legal recourse to those sectors of Civil Society whose views were not considered by the television and radio news media, and legal mechanisms to force broadcasters to grant comparable free airtime to other points of view, was perhaps the final straw for Democracy in the United States.
26. The 9th Circuit Court eventually ruled against the California pirate station on the grounds that it had not, prior to broadcasting, applied for a federal license. The Radio Free Berkeley folks have appealed the ruling. See: http://www.nlgcdc.org/briefs/0799replybrief_hiken_dunifer.html
27. In the Spring of 1997, we ceased active participation in the "Steal This Radio" project in New York, after problems of censorship and over-mediation began to rear their ugly heads there (a la Pacifica or NPR). The station closed in 1998, after mere threats by the FCC. There have been various back-and-forth litigations since then, but the fact remains, silence rules again on the 88.7 FM frequency in New York City. Contrast the response of the New York station to government repression to that of the long-term Community Radio stations in Venezuela, who, despite much heavier and more violent repression stayed their course throughout the years (in some cases, decades) before community media was legalized by the 1999 Bolivarian Constitution in that country. They won that victory precisely because of their courage. This contrast of examples is one of the reasons we have changed our position and now state that the revolution against Media is, by definition, a class struggle. It was the community-based poor and working classes of Venezuela who had the spirit to fight no matter what the personal risks. The New York group - dominated by college-educated children of privilege (with important exceptions; you know who you are and therefore are not offended by this characterization) - folded its tents at the receipt of a mere letter from the FCC. This is not, in our experience, the recipe for success. We prefer the triumphant Venezuelan model.
28. The TVTV NEWSNEWS project, it seems to us, was one of the most valuable projects of the first wave of the immedia project in the mid-1990s. It is something we would like to add to the Authentic Journalism Renaissance in our América. If you, kind reader, have skills and readiness to rumble on an updated TVTV NEWSNEWS project, please contact salonchingon@hotmail.com and tell us your thoughts and what skills and ideas you bring to the effort.
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