But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast”¦” — Bob Dylan
Go ahead, call me a Sixties retread – others have – but in times of stress or especially when seeking inspiration, I often find myself turn, turn, turning to the music and lyrics of that earlier era… Now more than ever (speaking of Sixties retreads!) I find myself stressed, seeking, and finding the inspiration I need from the songs of my youth.
Take what you have gathered from coincidence…”
Coincidentally, it’s moving day here at Globalvision and the MediaChannel – and moving on day as well, we hope, as the dust and detritus of decades of exhausting, joyous, and, one hopes, meaningful work is carted out along with lots of memories, most of them good. I don’t need to detail again the many crises – from the disruptive effects of the Internet to the media industry’s “lost revenue model” to the recent near-collapse of capitalism to funders’ near-abandonment of the so-called “independent” media sector – that have combined to leave us waiting for the Moving Man to take us to cyberspace. After all, my friend, close colleague and longtime business partner Danny Schechter has already amply dissected the situation on his companion News Dissector blog.
Instead, I’d rather look forward while looking back — back to those halcyon days years ago when Danny and I started Globalvision, out of our mutual desire to employ the skills and techniques we had learned in the commercial media world in service of something beyond the ever-thinner media gruel the bosses there commanded us to serve. Their goal was to gain “eyeballs” for advertisers in order to maximize profit; the oft-stated corporate goals at our newly formed company were instead to “marry meaning with money” and – here’s a blast from the past as well — to “do well while doing good.” If along the way we proved to be a lot better at doing good than doing well, it shouldn’t be too surprising; perhaps it was because, like many creative people turned “entrepreneurs,” we actually had very little idea of what turning those aspirations into reality really involved. If we had, we probably never would have embarked on this magical mystery tour – we’ve been going in and out of style ever since – but we stumbled forward as best we could, trying to learn from whatever mistakes we made in the daily swirl of funding, producing, publicizing and generally engineering an impact for our work while still paying the many financial and psychic bills associated with running a company – even a small one – in the Belly of the Beast that is Manhattan.
Crying like a fire in the sun”¦”
Although we began the company with the idea of making the world’s first global television series -the name Globalvision was but a contraction of “global television” – we soon realized how ambitious such an effort would be. At the same time, we were approached by a handful of South African journalists upset that their stories and images of the liberation struggle being waged by that country’s disenfranchised black majority weren’t making it onto television screens in “the developed world.” The major Western broadcast networks, it seemed, had cut a deal of complicity with the racist regime then in power in South Africa, trading continued access for ongoing silence. It was a mainstream media pattern we would see repeated time and again in the coming years”¦
In response, we produced a couple of television specials that soon morphed into South Africa Now, a news magazine that appeared weekly for three years on more than 150 public television stations (NOT, however, on PBS, which found our anti-apartheid stance too controversial) and was also broadcast in sixteen other countries. South Africa Now wasn’t “the world’s first global television program,” but it was a start”¦ Explaining why major broadcasters turned away from one of the great journalistic – and moral – stories of the twentieth century is another, longer tale, but embracing it put our fledgling company on the global communications map.
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets”
Next, we decided to ramp it up and cover human rights issues worldwide, instead of just in southern Africa. The result was the award winning series Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television, which appeared weekly between 1992-1996 on broadcast systems in sixty-two countries. Once again, despite our best efforts, PBS refused to have anything to do with Globalvision or the series, its’ chief executive infamously declaring human rights to be “an insufficient organizing principle for a television series” — unlike, as I pointed out repeatedly, “cooking, stock tips and purple dinosaurs.” Maybe she was right – more than a decade after going off the air, Rights & Wrongs remains to my knowledge the only television program in the history of the world to be dedicated solely to coverage of global human rights issues”¦
The antipathy our efforts were consistently met with at PBS surprised us at first. After all, both Danny and I had gotten our starts in television as on-air reporters and producers on the Ten O’clock News at WGBH, public broadcasting’s flagship station in Boston. We had both gone into media work hoping to do something about the world’s problems. But we soon realized that the state of the media itself was one of the world’s problems — that whatever the story was, the other story is always the media story.
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.”
So our focus shifted again, this time away from the Master Control-oriented television industry and its fearful gatekeepers, intent on keeping us away from our potential audience. Instead, we moved on to a newly emerging century and a newly emerging media ecology, with the Internet and its lower barrier to entry offering easier, direct access to audiences. We also began to pay more focused attention to the subject of the media system itself, with a newly created Internet “supersite” and media news aggregator, which we dubbed the MediaChannel.
Internet years being much like dog years, the ten-year old MediaChannel is now a septuagenarian, with newer, brasher, more partisan, polarized and “hipper” celebrity-and-gossip-oriented competitors suddenly elbowing for space in the newly popular field of media reporting and criticism. Along the way, we participated in and helped push forward a much-needed media reform movement.
We also caught and got caught up in the tail end of the dot-com boom, formed a “new media” subsidiary with the visionary Italian publisher Leonardo Mondadori, attracted investment, doubled in size and then watched our efforts go up in smoke as, in short order, the bubble burst, our partner passed away, and the Twin Towers came tumbling down just a few short and smoky miles from our offices in Times Square”¦
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue”
Flash forward to 2003 and Kabul, where I was working on a film about the plight of Afghan women and trying to convince the same mainstream media that had ignored South Africa to let me cover the country George Bush had just invaded and occupied. The media executives had, however, seemingly lost interest in the country that had harbored the masterminds of 9/11; instead they were intent on cheerleading Bush’s coming war in Iraq – a story of complicity and cowardice that Globalvision told the following year in the aptly named documentary film WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, and then amplified two years later in the film 911: Press for Truth.
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you”
Meanwhile, a rich young real estate magnate Danny met at the Nantucket Film Festival began to tell us horrors of the housing market, and suggested it might be fertile territory for investigation. By virtue of his backing, and Danny’s indomitability, we managed to produce two films about the American way of debt, and the impending collapse of the financial system: the 2006 In Debt We Trust (with its prescient subtitle America Before the Bubble Bursts) and this year’s Plunder, about the “Crime of Our Time.”
Meanwhile, however, back at the ranch times were tough and getting tougher. Grant money had largely dried up; investors were running for the hills, and the rent kept rising inexorably”¦ Although we had gotten a lot more business-savvy over the years, and had squeezed every last bit of fat (and then some) out of our business operations, it became increasingly difficult to sustain the level of quality and integrity that had become associated with the Globalvision “brand” over the years. The not-for-profit MediaChannel was struggling as well, kept alive only by a dedicated community who sent us contributions every time we asked — thank you all once again! – in much-appreciated ten, twenty and fifty dollar increments that nonetheless never added up to even one previous grant from the likes of the Ford Foundation, which had stopped even returning our calls.
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore”
So in the end, to paraphrase the late great Senator George Aiken -another Sixties retread, you could look it up – we’ve decided it’s best now “to declare victory and leave.” The Moving Finger has now writ, and like it, we are moving on. See you in cyberspace!
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue”¦”
