Bill Moyers: "Facts Still Matter ...

"
Bill Moyers | Monday 14 February 2011
History Makers is an organization of broadcasters and producers from around the
world concerned with the challenges and opportunities faced by factual broadcast
ing. Bill Moyers was the keynote speaker at the 2011 convention on January 27, 2
011, in New York City.
Thanks to all of you for your welcome - and for the chance to be here among so m
any kindred spirits. Your dedication to factual broadcasting, to our craft and c
alling; your passion for telling stories that matter; for connecting the present
to the past, has created a community whose work is essential in this disquietin
g time when "what is happening today, this hour, this very minute, seems to be o
ur sole criterion for judgment and action." It is a sad world that exists only i
n the present, unaware of the long procession that brought us here. As Milan Kun
dera s insight reminds us, the struggle against power "is the struggle of memory a
gainst forgetting."
I talked about this gathering when I was in California this past weekend and spe
nt time with a good friend and supporter of my own work on television, Paul Orfa
lea. He's the maverick entrepreneur who founded Kinko's in a former hamburger st
and with one small rented Xerox copier and turned it into a business service emp
ire with more than two billion dollars a year in revenue. After selling Kinko's,
Paul became one of the most popular, if unorthodox, teachers of undergraduates
at the University of California/ Santa Barbara. When I told him what I would be
doing today he applauded and understood immediately the importance of what you d
o. He described to me how he teaches history "backwards" to college students who
have learned little about the past in high school, don't know that the past is
even alive, much less that it lives in them and question its value today. He han
ds his students a contemporary story from some daily news source, tells them to
begin with the "now" of it and to then walk the trail back down the chronology t
o trace the personalities, circumstances and choices that made it today's news.
Their assignment, in effect, is to begin at the entrance to the cave and rewind
Ariadne's thread in the opposite direction, back to the deep origins of the stor
y. In an era marked by the lack of continuity and community between the generati
ons, this strikes me as an inspired way to stretch young imaginations across the
time zones of human experience.
And it's, of course, what you do so often in your work. No one I know does it mo
re effectively than "Frontline." and I was pleased to learn that you are honorin
g its executive director, David Fanning, who is a genius, in my book, at story t
elling grounded in fact and presented with perspective. Over the past quarter ce
ntury, I have been privileged to collaborate occasionally with David. But beyond
my own personal and professional gratitude to him, all of us who produce curren
t affairs and history programming know that he has kept the bar high while produ
cing a body of work unequaled since Fred Friendly. Most of you are too young to
have seen the whole arc of David's extraordinary career or to have known Fred Fr
iendly's work. But some of us can never forget we're standing on the shoulder of
those two giants.
I also had the privilege of witnessing Fred in action. When he was president of
"CBS News" and I was the White House press secretary, he would come down from Ne
w York on the shuttle and slip in the back door of the White House and along the
hall past the Cabinet Room to the private entrance to my office for an hour-or-
so chat. I had done some preliminary work at the Office of Education on the futu
re of public television in 1964, and we were soon talking about the medium's fut
ure; he was a true believer in television "that dignifies instead of debases" an
d of the importance "of at least one channel free of commercials and commercial
values." Little did we know at the time that he would soon quit the job he relis
hed as president of the news division that he and Edward R. Murrow had built. Th
e two of them created "See It Now" and "CBS Reports," which set the standard for
investigative reporting and documentaries of unprecedented power and impact. On
e of their collaborations was the famous documentary on the demagogic and danger
ous Senator Joseph McCarthy. They made the brilliant decision to let McCarthy sp
eak for himself, an entire broadcast's worth of his bullying words and technique
s. McCarthy obligingly hanged himself on national television, far more effective
ly and fatally than anyone else's words could. His own words had turned American
s against his demagoguery - something for which the right to this day has never
forgiven what they denounced as the "Communist Broadcasting System." Watching th
at documentary over and again, I realized that it is through such unhurried hono
ring of reality that we can approach the myriad and messy truths of human experi
ence. For lasting effect, those truths cannot be forced into the mind of the pub
lic; they must be nurtured.
Fred never wanted to leave CBS, but in 1966, when the network refused to carry S
enate hearings on the Vietnam War, choosing instead to run a repeat of "I Love L
ucy," he resigned, became the media adviser to the Ford Foundation and was the p
rime mover in the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. He became
our Johnny Appleseed, persuading the foundation to put its money - millions of
dollars - where his mind was.
I had left the White House by then to be publisher of Newsday and would soon joi
n public television as anchor of a weekly broadcast. Fred's first teaching assis
tant, Martin Clancy, was my star producer. It was usually one of Fred's people w
ho taught me the most about our craft - how it was possible through the coupling
of word and image to come close to the verifiable truth and an honest accountin
g of reality. Fred played a critical role in my life when, after stints at both
CBS and PBS, I had to choose between the two. I had found it increasingly diffic
ult at the network to do the work I most wanted to do, but was reluctant to take
off the golden handcuffs and leap into the world of independent production. I w
ent over to see Fred at the foundation and there was nothing subtle in his advic
e. He said, "You're never going to do the work you most want to do until you do
it for yourself." So, I followed him overboard.
Fred was right, as he so often was: independence meant the best hope for me to p
ursue journalism as a mission. Perhaps, we were naïve, but in those days many of u
s still assumed that an informed public is preferable to an uninformed one. Hadn
't Thomas Jefferson proclaimed that, "Whenever the people are well-informed, the
y can be trusted with their own government"? And wasn't a free press essential t
o that end?
Maybe not. As Joe Keohane reported last year in The Boston Globe, political scie
ntists have begun to discover a human tendency "deeply discouraging to anyone wi
th faith in the power of information." He was reporting on research at the Unive
rsity of Michigan, which found that when misinformed people, particularly politi
cal partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in new stories, they rarely chang
ed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their belie
fs. Facts were not curing misinformation. "Like an underpowered antibiotic, fact
s could actually make misinformation even stronger." You can read the entire art
icle online.
I won't spoil it for you by a lengthy summary here. Suffice it to say that, whil
e "most of us like to believe that our opinions have been formed over time by ca
reful, rational consideration of facts and ideas and that the decisions based on
those opinions, therefore, have the ring of soundness and intelligence," the re
search found that actually "we often base our opinions on our beliefs ... and ra
ther than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to a
ccept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived
notions."
These studies help to explain why America seems more and more unable to deal wit
h reality. So many people inhabit a closed belief system on whose door they have
hung the "Do Not Disturb" sign, that they pick and choose only those facts that
will serve as building blocks for walling them off from uncomfortable truths. A
ny journalist whose reporting threatens that belief system gets sliced and diced
by its apologists and polemicists (say, the fabulists at Fox News, Rush Limbaug
h and the yahoos of talk radio.) Remember when Limbaugh, for one, took journalis
ts on for their reporting about torture at Abu Ghraib? He attempted to dismiss t
he cruelty inflicted on their captives by American soldiers as a little necessar
y "sport" for soldiers under stress, saying on air: "This is no different than w
hat happens at the Skull and Bones initiation ... you [ever] heard of need to bl
ow some steam off?" As so often happens, the Limbaugh line became a drumbeat in
the nether reaches of the right-wing echo chamber. So, it was not surprising tha
t in a nationwide survey conducted by The Chicago Tribune on First Amendment iss
ues, half of the respondents said there should be some kind of press restraint o
n reporting about the prison abuse. According to Charles Madigan, the editor of
the Tribune's Perspective section, 50 or 60 percent of the respondents said they
"would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, particularly wh
en it has sexual content or is heard as unpatriotic."
No wonder many people still believe Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, as his
birth certificate shows; or that he is a Muslim, when in fact he is a Christian;
or that he is a socialist when day by day he shows an eager solicitude for corp
orate capitalism. Partisans in particular - and the audiences for Murdoch's Fox
News and talk radio - are particularly susceptible to such scurrilous disinforma
tion. In a Harris survey last spring, 67 percent of Republicans said Obama is a
socialist; 57 percent believed him to be a Muslim; 45 percent refused to believe
he was born in America; and 24 percent said he "may be the antichrist."
The bigger the smear, the more it sticks. And there is no shortage of smear arti
sts. Last year, Forbes Magazine, obviously bent on mischief, allowed the right-w
ing fantasist Dinesh D'Souza to tar Obama with a toxic brew so odious it trigger
ed memories of racist babble - a perverted combination of half-baked psychology,
biology and sociology - that marked the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan. Seizing upo
n the anti-colonial views of Obama's Kenyan father, who had deserted the family
when the boy was two years old and whose absence from his life Obama meditated u
pon in his best-selling book "Dreams of My Father," D'Souza wrote that, "Incredi
bly, the US is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 195
0s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world
for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting t
he nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son."
In a sane political world, you might think at least a few Republican notables wo
uld have denounced such hogwash by their own kind for what it was. But no. Newt
Gingrich, once their speaker of the House, whose own fantasies include succeedin
g Obama in the White House, set the tone by praising D'Souza's claptrap as the "
most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama." D'S
ouza, said Gingrich, has made a "stunning insight" and had unlocked the mystery
of Obama. I could find only one conservative who stood up against this trash. Da
vid Frum, the former speechwriter for George W. Bush, wrote on his blog: "The ar
gument that Obama is an infiltrating alien, a deceiving foreigner - and not just
any kind of alien, but specifically a Third World alien - has been absorbed to
the very core of the Republican platform for November 2010." Once again, the rig
ht-wing media machine had popularized a false narrative and made of it a destruc
tive political weapon.
Disinformation is not unique to the right, of course. Like other journalists, I
have been the object of malevolent assaults from the "9/11 truthers" for not rep
orting their airtight case proving that the Bush administration conspired to bri
ng about the attacks on the World Trade Center. How did they discover this consp
iracy? As the independent journalist Robert Parry has written, "the truthers" th
rew out all the evidence of al-Qaeda's involvement, from contemporaneous calls f
rom hijack victims on the planes to confessions from al-Qaeda leaders both in an
d out of captivity that they had indeed done it. Then, recycling some of the rig
ht's sophistry techniques, such as using long lists of supposed evidence to over
come the lack of any real evidence, the "truthers" cherry-picked a few supposed
"anomalies" to build an "inside-job" story line. Fortunately, this Big Lie never
took hold in the public mind. These truthers on the left, if that is where GPS
can find them on the political map, are outgunned, outmatched and outshouted by
the media apparatus on the right that pounds the public like drone missiles load
ed with conspiracy theories and disinformation and accompanied by armadas of out
right lies.
George Orwell had warned six decades ago that the corrosion of language goes han
d in hand with the corruption of democracy. If he were around today, he would re
mind us that "like the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket," this kind of
propaganda engenders a "protective stupidity" almost impossible for facts to pen
etrate.
But you, my colleagues, can't give up. If you do, there's no chance any public m
emory of everyday truths - the tangible, touchable, palpable realities so vital
to democracy - will survive. We would be left to the mercy of the agitated amnes
iacs who "make" their own reality, as one of them boasted at the time America in
vaded Iraq, in order to maintain their hold on the public mind and the levers of
power. You will remember that in Orwell's novel "1984," Big Brother banishes hi
story to the memory hole, where inconvenient facts simply disappear. Control of
the present rests on obliteration of the past. The figure of O'Brien, who is the
personification of Big Brother, says to the protagonist, Winston Smith: "We sha
ll squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves." And they do. Th
e bureaucrats in the Ministry of Truth destroy the records of the past and publi
sh new versions. These in turn are superseded by yet more revisions. Why? Becaus
e people without memory are at the mercy of the powers that be; there is nothing
against which to measure what they are told today. History is obliterated.
Fight the lies and misinformation; support truth! Please make a tax-deductible d
onation to Truthout today and keep real independent journalism strong.
The late scholar Cleanth Brooks of Yale thought there were three great enemies o
f democracy. He called them "The Bastard Muses": Propaganda, which pleads someti
mes unscrupulously, for a special cause at the expense of the total truth; senti
mentality, which works up emotional responses unwarranted by, and in excess of,
the occasion; and pornography, which focuses upon one powerful human drive at th
e expense of the total human personality. The poet Czeslaw Milosz identified ano
ther enemy of democracy when, upon accepting the Noble Prize for Literature, he
said "Our planet that gets smaller every year, with its fantastic proliferation
of mass media, is witnessing a process that escapes definition, characterized by
a refusal to remember." Memory is crucial to democracy; historical amnesia, its
nemesis.
Against these tendencies it is an uphill fight to stay the course of factual bro
adcasting. We have to keep reassuring ourselves and one another that it matters
and we have to join forces to defend and safeguard our independence. I learned t
his early on.
When I collaborated with the producer Sherry Jones on the very first documentary
ever about the purchase of government favors by political action committees, we
unfurled across the Capitol grounds yard after yard of computer printouts listi
ng campaign contributions to every member of Congress. The broadcast infuriated
just about everyone, including old friends of mine who a few years earlier had b
een allies when I worked at the White House. Congressmen friendly to public tele
vision were also outraged, but, I am pleased to report, PBS took the heat withou
t melting.
But shining the spotlight on political corruption is nothing compared to what ca
n happen if you raise questions about corporate power in Washington, as my colle
ague Marty Koughan and I discovered when we produced a program for David Fanning
and "Frontline" on pesticides and food. Marty had learned that industry was att
empting behind closed doors to dilute the findings of the American Academy of Sc
iences study on the effects of pesticide residues on children. Before we finishe
d the documentary, the industry somehow purloined a copy of our draft script - w
e still aren't certain how - and mounted a sophisticated and expensive campaign
to discredit our program before it aired. Television reviewers and editorial pag
es of key newspapers were flooded with propaganda. Some public television manage
rs were so unnerved by the blitz of misleading information about a film they had
not yet broadcast that they actually protested to PBS with letters that had bee
n prepared by the industry.
Here's what most perplexed us: the American Cancer Society - an organization tha
t in no way figured in our story - sent to its 3,000 local chapters a "critique"
of the unfinished documentary claiming, wrongly, that it exaggerated the danger
s of pesticides in food. We were puzzled. Why was the American Cancer Society ta
king the unusual step of criticizing a documentary that it had not seen, that ha
d not aired and that did not claim what the Society alleged? An enterprising rep
orter named Sheila Kaplan later looked into those questions for the journal Lega
l Times. It turns out that the Porter Novelli public relations firm, which had w
orked for several chemical companies, also did pro bono work for the American Ca
ncer Society. Kaplan found that the firm was able to cash in some of the goodwil
l from that "charitable" work to persuade the compliant communications staff at
the Society to distribute some harsh talking point about the documentary before
it aired - talking points that had been supplied by, but not attributed to, Port
er Novelli. Legal Times headlined the story "Porter Novelli Plays All Sides." A
familiar Washington game.
Others also used the American Cancer Society's good name in efforts to tarnish t
he journalism before it aired, none more invidiously than the right-wing polemic
ist Reed Irvine, who pumped his sludge through an organization with the Orwellia
n name Accuracy in Media. He attacked our work as "junk science on PBS" and dema
nded Congress pull the plug on public broadcasting. Fortunately, PBS once again
stood firm. The documentary aired, the journalism held up and the publicity libe
rated the National Academy of Sciences to release the study that the industry ha
d tried to cripple.
However, there's always another round; the sharks are always circling. Sherry Jo
nes and I spent more than a year working on another PBS documentary called "Trad
e Secrets," a two-hour investigative special based on revelations - found in the
industry's own archives - that big chemical companies had deliberately withheld
from workers and consumers damaging information about toxic chemicals in their
products. These internal industry documents are a fact. They exist. They are not
a matter of opinion or point of view. They state what the companies knew, when
they knew it and what they did with what they knew (namely to deep-six it) at pe
ril to those who worked with and consumed the potentially lethal products.
The revelations portrayed deep and pervasive corruption in a major American indu
stry and raised critical policy implications about the safety of living under a
regulatory system manipulated by the industry itself. If the public and governme
nt regulators had known what the industry knew about the health risks of its pro
ducts when the industry knew it, America's laws and regulations governing chemic
al manufacturing would have been far more protective of human health. But the in
dustry didn't want us to know. That's what the documents revealed and that was t
he story the industry fought to keep us from telling.
The industry hired as an ally a public relations firm in Washington noted for us
ing private detectives and former CIA, FBI and drug enforcement officers to cond
uct investigations for corporations under critical scrutiny. One of the company'
s founders acknowledged that corporations may need to resort to "deceit" and oth
er unconventional resources to counter public scrutiny. Given the scurrilous cam
paign that was conducted to smear our journalism, his comments were an understat
ement. To complicate matters, the Congressman, who for years had been the single
biggest recipient of campaign contributions from the chemical industry, was the
very member of Congress whose committee had jurisdiction over public broadcasti
ng's appropriations. As an independent production firm, we had not used public f
unds to produce the documentary. But even our independence didn't stop the corpo
rate mercenaries from bringing relentless pressure on PBS not to air the broadca
st. The then president of PBS, Pat Mitchell, stood tall in resisting the pressur
e and was vindicated: one year later, The National Academy of Television Arts an
d Sciences awarded "Trade Secrets" an Emmy for outstanding investigative journal
ism.
Now, you can understand how it is that journalism became for me a continuing cou
rse in adult education. It enabled me to produce documentaries like "Trade Secre
ts" and out-of-the-box series like "Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth." It e
nabled me to cover the summits of world leaders and the daily lives of strugglin
g families in Newark. It empowered me to explain how public elections are subver
ted by private money, and to how to make a poem. Journalism also provided me a p
assport into the world of ideas, which became my favorite beat, in no small part
because I never met anyone - philosopher or physicist, historian, artist, write
r, scientist, entrepreneur or social critic - who didn't teach me something I ha
dn't known, something that enlarged my life.
Here's an example: One of my favorite of all interviews was with my sainted fell
ow Texan, the writer and broadcaster John Henry Faulk, who had many years earlie
r, been the target of a right-wing smear campaign that resulted in his firing by
CBS from his job as a radio host here in New York, one of the low moments in th
at network's history. But John Henry fought back in court and won a landmark leg
al victory against his tormentors. After he returned home to Texas, I did the la
st interview with him before his death in 1990. He told me the story of how he a
nd his friend Boots Cooper were playing in the chicken coop when they were about
12 years old. They spied a chicken snake in the top tier of nests, so close it
looked like a boa constrictor. As John Henry put it, "All our frontier courage d
rained out our heels - actually it trickled down our overall legs - and Boots an
d I made a new door through that henhouse wall." Hearing all the commotion Boots
' momma came out and said, "Don't you boys know chicken snakes are harmless? The
y can't harm you." And Boots, rubbing his forehead and behind at the same time,
said, "Yes, Mrs. Faulk, I know that, but they can scare you so bad, it'll cause
you to hurt yourself." John Henry Faulk told me that's a lesson he never forgot.
Over and again I've tried to remember it, too, calling on it to restore my reso
lve and my soul.
I've had a wonderful life in broadcasting, matriculating as a perpetual student
in the school of journalism. Other people have paid the tuition and travel and I
've never really had to grow up and get a day job. I think it's because journali
sm has been so good to me that I am sad when I hear or read that factual broadca
sting is passé - that television as a venue for forensic journalism is on its way
out and that trying to find out "what really happened" - which is our mandate -
is but a quaint relic in an age of post-structuralism and cyberspace. But despit
e all our personal electronic devices, people are watching more television than
ever. Much of this programming is posted online; I believe at least half the aud
ience for my last two weekly series on Friday night came over the weekend via st
reaming video, iPods and TIVO. I was pleased to discover that the web sites most
 frequented by educators are those of PBS and that our own sites were among the
most popular destinations. That's what keeps us going, isn't it? The knowledge t
hat all the bias and ignorance notwithstanding, facts still matter to critical t
hinking, that if we respect and honor, even revere them, they just might help us
right the ship of state before it rams the iceberg.
That's why, on balance, I count WikiLeaks a plus for democracy. Whatever side yo
u take on the controversy, whether or not you think this information should be d
isclosed, all parties - those who want it released and those who don't - acknowl
edge that information matters. Partly because I grew up in the south and partly
because of my experience in the Johnson White House, I'm on the side of disclosu
re, even when it hurts. The truth about slavery had been driven from the pulpits
, newsrooms and classrooms during the antebellum days; it took a bloody civil wa
r to drive the truth home. At the Johnson White House, we circled the wagons and
grew intolerant of news that didn't conform to our hopes, expectations and stra
tegies for Vietnam, with terrible, tragic results for Americans and Vietnamese,
north and south. I say: "Never again!"
Here's a sidebar: I remember vividly the day President Johnson signed the Freedo
m of Information Act (FOIA): July 4, 1966. He signed it "with a deep sense of pr
ide," declaring in almost lyrical language "that the United States is an open so
ciety in which the people's right to know is cherished and guarded." That's what
he said. The truth is, the president had to be dragged kicking and screaming to
the signing ceremony. He hated the very idea of journalists rummaging in govern
ment closets, hated them challenging the authorized view of reality, hated them
knowing what he didn't want them to know. He dug in his heels and even threatene
d to pocket veto the bill after it reached the White House. Only the courage and
political skill of a Congressman named John Moss got the bill passed at all and
that was after a 12-year battle against his Congressional elders, who blinked e
very time the sun shined on the dark corners of power. They managed to cripple t
he bill Moss had drafted and, even then, only some last-minute calls to LBJ from
a handful of influential newspaper editors overcame the president's reluctance.
He signed "the f------ thing," as he called it and then, lo and behold, went ou
t to claim credit for it.
It's always a fight to find out what the government doesn't want us to know. The
official obsession with secrecy is all the more disturbing today because the wa
r on terrorism is a war without limits, without a visible enemy or decisive enco
unters. We don't know where the clandestine war is going on or how much it's cos
ting and whether it's in the least effective. Even in Afghanistan, most of what
we know comes from official, usually military, sources.
Thus, a relative handful of people have enormous power to keep us in the dark. A
nd when those people are in league with their counterparts in powerful corporati
ons, the public is hit with a double whammy. We're usually told the issue is nat
ional security, but keeping us from finding out about the danger of accidents at
chemical plants is not about national security; it's about covering up an indus
try's indiscretions and liabilities. Locking up the secrets of meetings with ene
rgy executives is not about national security; it's about hiding confidential me
mos sent to the White House showing the influence of oil companies on policies o
f global warming We only learned about that memo from the Bush White House, by t
he way, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act.
Consider WikiLeaks, then, to be one big FOIA dump. Were some people in high plac
es embarrassed? Perhaps. They did squeal, but I don't think they were stuck.
And even so, we learned some important things from WikiLeaks. For example, as Re
za Alsan writes in The Atlantic, the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may
not be as fanatical as we think he is; the diplomatic cables released by WikiLe
aks portray him as "a moderate reformer who'd like to cut deals with the West, b
ut can't because hard-liners are calling the shots." One of them even slapped Ah
madinejad across the face when, at a high-level meeting. he proposed that the go
vernment allow more personal and press freedom at the height of the 2009 public
protests in Iran. Such information can help us evaluate the incessant demands of
neoconservative warmongers - the very people who rode the circuit with news of
"weapons of mass destruction" in an effort to build support for invading Iraq -
that we use military force against Iran to eliminate its nuclear capacity.
There are other uses of the disclosures from WikiLeaks admirably compiled by Gre
g Mitchell in the current edition of The Nation, where the one-time editor of Ed
itor and Publisher performed an important public service by culling the gold fro
m the dust.
I will close with an urgent appeal to you about one fight we won't win unless al
l of us join it. I'm sure everyone here agrees that we will eventually be moving
to the web, all of us and that "free, instant, worldwide connectivity" is the f
uture. But I'm sure you know that this incredible, free, open Internet highway i
s at risk, that corporations are on the brink of muscling their way to the front
of the line. Media companies want the power to censor Internet content they don
't like, to put toll booths on the web so they can charge more for the privilege
of driving in the fast lanes, to turn it into a private preserve.
You may have heard that last month the FCC decided to protect free/open Internet
access only on landline connections, not wireless - which is to say, there's no
net neutrality in most of the online world. As Jenn Ettinger of the nonpartisan
, nonprofit Free Press reported in Yes! magazine just two days ago:
The rules that the FCC passed in December are vague and weak. The limited protec
tions that were placed on wired connections, the kind you access through your ho
me computer, leave the door open for the phone and cable companies to develop fa
st and slow lanes on the Web and to favor their own content or applications.
Worse, the rules also explicitly allow wireless carriers ... to block applicatio
ns for any reason and to degrade and de-prioritize websites you access using you
r cell phone or a device like an iPad.
Perhaps the FCC is biding its time, waiting to see how things develop technologi
cally, with the current FCC chair seemingly more open to citizen input than was
his predecessor. Or, again, maybe the landline regulation was meant simply to ge
t media reformers off the commission's back. We can't relax our vigilance. In Et
tinger's words:
The FCC still has the opportunity to put in place a solid framework that would p
ut the public interest above the profit motive of the phone and cable companies
that it is supposed to regulate. And the FCC should take immediate steps to clos
e the loopholes it created, to strengthen its rules and to include wireless prot
ections. The fight is far from over. We can work to change the rules, demand bet
ter oversight and consumer protections and make sure that the big companies can'
t pad their bottom lines on the backs of their customers.
In this effort, we have a strong ally in FCC commissioner Michael Copps, who. on
my broadcast last year, spelled out how "our future is going to ride on broadba
nd. How we get a job is going to ride on broadband. How we take care of our heal
th. How we educate ourselves about our responsibilities as citizens ... And it's
absolutely imperative that we have a place, that we have a venue to go to, to m
ake sure that that Internet is kept open ... That's our decision to make as a pe
ople, as citizens: who's going to control this ultimately?"
With all the media consolidation that's happening today, the web may be the last
stand of independent factual broadcasters like you. The stakes are high and we
have come to the decisive round. I'll leave you with a story Joseph Campbell tol
d me years ago for my series "The Power of Myth." It seems a fellow rounding the
corner saw a fight break out down the block. Running up to one of the bystander
s, he shouted: "Is this a private fight or can anyone get in it?"
The Internet fight for democracy is a public fight. Come on in!
Source URL: http://www.truth-out.org/bill-moyers-facts-still-matter67571
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