HELP CHANGE MEDIA AS WE KNOW IT
October 10, 2008
It's probably safe to say that when our nation's founders secured freedom of the press in the First Amendment, they weren't aiming to create a media system dominated by just a half-dozen gigantic global corporations with a virtual deathgrip on what Americans can read, hear, and watch. The point of the First Amendment wasn't to allow the powerful to control the public dialogue, but rather to protect and encourage individuals like Thomas Paine and other pamphleteers, whose writings helped inspire the birth of this nation. The point was to ensure that ordinary people had the right to expose corruption and abuse in government and other powerful institutions by publishing ideas and information that the powerful would rather keep under wraps.
Today's "Big Media" outlets don't resemble those early pamphleteers nearly so much as they resemble the powerful institutions the pamphleteers were supposed to protect us from. Companies like Viacom and Disney are, indeed, incredibly powerful institutions, with the ability to not only shape public opinion to their own ends, but to hold vast influence over our political and regulatory systems through lobbying, campaign contributions, and the implicit threat of bad press for those that cross them. Clearly, it's ludicrous to suggest the founders believed that the way to secure American liberty was to concentrate ownership and control over speech in the hands of the powerful. More likely, the framers would look at today's mediascape and quickly recognize today's equivalent of those early pamphleteers as the bloggers, the freelance journalists, the independently-owned newspapers and other "Mom & Pop" media companies.
Today's technologies offer us a rare opportunity to bring media back in line with that original vision. With the ability to produce and globally distribute virtually every type of media with an ordinary desktop computer, "We The People" have a chance to finally wrest control of media away from the likes of Time-Warner and News Corporation and allow small and mid-sized independent media operations to thrive and compete, without having to suck up to the powerful. American freedom quite probably depends on us doing just that.
This is the vision of media under which TV Humboldt operates. As a project of United Citizen Media (UCM), our channel is part of a long-term strategy to seize this historic chance to level out the media playing field by building a new media paradigm built not around the interests of the powerful, but the interests of the people who create media, and the people who consume it.
That's why TV Humboldt plans to share its advertising revenue with the people whose videos we run on the channel. It's also why we built the Media Makers Club, an online community site designed to facilitate more and more collaboration and team-building among local media-makers. And, it's why UCM is working on creating a new video-publishing platform where video creators will be able to easily hook up directly with advertisers so they can start making decent money with their videos, and build truly independent media careers.
UCM is based right here in Humboldt, and our hope is to team up with other local media businesses and other interested parties to implement a plan to transform Humboldt County into a major center for the emerging independent media industry. If you'd like to take part, please e-mail Paul Benson at citizenmediaman AT gmail DOT com.
Edited: October 10, 2008 12:15AM
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