Journalist-turned-scholar Robert W. McChesney wants to save you from this corporate-owned daily newspaper.

The founder and president of Free Press, a Northampton, Mass.-based nonpartisan, nonprofit organization, McChesney will be in Memphis Jan. 12-14 for his group's National Conference for Media Reform.

His goal: to make political issues out of the ownership of newspapers and TV and radio stations as well as government funding for public broadcasting.

"People do care about who owns the media they consume. They're smart," McChesney says from his office at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "They've just never been told: 'You have a right to weigh in on this.' "

After conferences in Madison, Wis., in 2003 and St. Louis in 2005, the Memphis meeting will be the third and largest for the National Conference for Media Reform.

It will feature a diverse group of well-known speakers, including Rev. Jesse Jackson, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein, "The Media Monopoly" author Ben Bagdikian, television host Phil Donahue, actress Jane Fonda and Helen Thomas, reigning queen of the White House press corps.

"If you look at the sort of people who will come out (for the conference), it will surprise you," says McChesney, who started his journalism career as a freelancer for United Press International and later founded The Rocket, a now-defunct Seattle music weekly.

"You'll find people from a rural Tennessee town talking about the need for a locally owned radio station as well as people from inner-cities talking about local newspapers obsessed with crime stories but not with covering their communities."

Designed to raise awareness of and lobby for public policies that protect and foster growth of independently owned media, the nonprofit Free Press operates on an annual budget of about $450,000 per year, two-thirds of it from private donations and the rest from programs like the upcoming one in the Bluff City.

Despite its wafer-thin wallet, the nonprofit has successfully influenced public policies, particularly those governing broadcast media and the Internet.

In 2003, after then-FCC Commissioner Michael Powell proposed weakening restrictions on how many media outlets one company may own in a single market, Free Press campaigned against the effort and forced the FCC to host public meetings across the nation to discuss proposed changes to media-ownership rules. In fact, the FCC hosted one of those meetings Dec. 11 in Nashville.

Most recently, Free Press waged its SavetheInternet.com campaign to protect "net neutrality" -- meaning bandwidth cannot be used to favor large companies or particular applications over individuals and other applications.

In April, after telecommunications companies lobbied in Congress for a bill that would have allowed Internet service providers to discriminate against users and applications, Free Press collected 500,000 online signatures, organized meetings with congressional representatives and helped squash the proposed legislation.

"Phone and cable companies, who are lobbying superstars, have dominated the discussions in Washington," McChesney says. "But that isn't true any longer."

Getting everyday people involved in the media debate hasn't been as difficult as McChesney once feared.

"To our surprise, media ownership is an issue that interests people across the spectrum," he says. "Issue after issue, there's actually a tremendous number of people who are concerned about media in our country."

The three-day National Conference for Media Reform will offer dozens of workshops addressing youth and ethnic media, public broadcasting, media watchdogging, and the digital divide, among other topics.

Free Press chose Memphis as the host city for its geographic convenience, McChesney says.

There was also a side benefit: As a city with one daily newspaper and dozens of television and radio stations controlled by media chains, Memphis is Anywhere, USA, in today's media landscape.

And that's what Free Press wants to help change.

"What's increasingly happening is that -- in town after town where you only have one newspaper -- radio and television stations have gutted their news staffs," he says.

"The burden of covering the community has fallen on the single daily newspaper. At the same time, it doesn't make logical business sense for these newspapers to devote lots of money to journalism. The owners think, 'I don't have any competition in town, anyway, so who's going to know?'

"That's created the awful situation we're in now," McChesney continues. "On one hand, newsrooms are getting slashed. On the other hand, people stop reading newspapers -- at least buying them -- because there's less and less news in them. Owners, in response, cut their news staffs even further to reduce costs. It's a death dance."

At the Memphis conference, McChesney hopes to persuade people from across the Mid-South and the nation to advocate and lobby for policies that will help return American journalism to its locally owned, rabble-rousing roots.

Among Free Press' proposed policies: offering tax breaks to locally owned media companies.

After all, in America's infancy, the government offered printing and postal subsidies to newspaper owners to foster an independent, and at times antagonistic, news media, McChesney says.

"Our country was not founded on allowing rich people to control the media and hope they do a good job," he says. "In fact, it was the precise opposite. The founding fathers' vision of freedom of the press was that it was built. You created it. It didn't happen magically."

-- Trevor Aaronson: 529-2864

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National Conference for Media Reform

When: Jan. 12-14

Where: Memphis Cook Convention Center

Expected Attendance: 2,500

Registration: $75 to $250

To Volunteer: Call (413) 585-1533, ext. 31

Sampling of Presenters:

Friday

10 a.m.: Bill Moyers

12:15 p.m.: Rev. Jesse Jackson

1:15: Phil Donohue

Saturday

11 a.m.: Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) of Memphis

4:30 p.m.: Judge D'Army Bailey of Memphis, Helen Thomas

8 p.m.: Congressman Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Geena Davis, Rev. Lennox Yearwood, Ben Bagdikian, Robert McChesney

Sunday

11:30 a.m.: Jane Fonda

On the Web: freepress.net; complete list of speakers and events: www.freepress.net/conference/=Schedule07

Copyright 2007 - commercialappeal.com / E.W. Scripps Company

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