On a crackling mobile phone line from a rented car, his patter interrupted by the voice of a GPS system as he navigates the streets of San Francisco, the Toronto producer is a man on a very big mission.

He's "running to meetings, raising dough, making allies" — all to build Independent World Television (IWT), "the world's first global independent news network," to beam it out to the English-speaking world and to base it right here in the GTA.

Jay's mantra?

"No corporate ownership. No corporate underwriting. No government funding. No commercial advertising."

Instead, he intends to "harness the economic power of the Internet," the way MoveOn.org and the Howard Dean and John Kerry presidential campaigns did in the U.S., raising tens and tens of millions of dollars in small donations.

Already Jay's got half a million in seed money from charitable trusts, foundations, wealthy individuals and unions. He has access to their email lists and to their memberships.

And he has a business plan (http://www.iwtnews.com) he's been labouring over for two years.

Two weeks ago, he unveiled it at the National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis, Mo., where he was hailed as a `'visionary" for devising a way to counter a celebrity and trivia-obsessed corporate media structure focused more on the bottom line than the public interest.

Backed by a who's who of progressive and liberal supporters — including Harper's editor Lewis Lapham, writer Naomi Klein (No Logo) and Canada's former ambassador to the UN Stephen Lewis — Jay's next move is to find half a million contributors with $50 each, plus a desire for "independent news and real debate" untainted by any corporate or government spin.

"We think that, as long as you're dependent on commercials, or if you're corporately owned and you have to be concerned about shareholders and the broader corporate interest, or if you have to take money from a government that appoints your president and your chair and can cut your budget at any time, you can't really have independent journalism," he insists.

You can be sure that Jay has developed many contacts, on both sides of the political scale, during his time as executive producer of CBC Newsworld's nightly debate show, counterSpin.

And, judging from his award-winning films, both for Canadian and American networks, including Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows and Return to Kandahar, he knows how to draw audiences.

Jay maintains that there's a demand for independent television news coverage, free of spin, sensationalism and Michael Jackson trials. He learned that from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

"Stewart is popular because he says the emperor has no clothes," says Jay. "He says audacious things that you don't normally hear on TV. Well, we're going to have a whole network that's willing to say audacious things, that doesn't have to worry about how the advertisers will respond.

"I'm not saying we are going beat Desperate Housewives," he adds. "But if we can get a significant portion of the 20-24 per cent of the population that's already quite politicized, that's a good base.

"We'd be doing equal numbers with most of the cable channels."

Jay says he got the idea for Independent World Television on Feb. 15, 2003, when as many as 20 million people around the world got out to protest the impending attack on Iraq.

It was a turnout that was grossly underplayed in the then-overtly flag-waving U.S. media.

"I don't think in human history there has been a political event on such a scale," he observes.

"So I said to myself, if we could harness the economic power of all this: There's enough people who feel a sense of urgency and consciousness, who have the sense that so much news reporting is just spin being reported as if it were news."

Jay believes the time to strike could not be better, as millions are turning to alternative sources on the Internet. But IWT is not going to a "liberal" channel.

"We're going to have lots of debate and we're going to be very fair about the debate," he hastens to say.

Now the challenge is to find distribution, on satellite and cable.

Jay says he has had encouraging preliminary talks with both Canadian and U.S. cable operators. He has also hooked up with the public interest group Link TV (http://www.worldlinktv.org) in the U.S. where satellite operators must set aside bandwidth for publicly mandated channels.

"So we have a big foot in the door in the U.S."

As for Canada, his hope is that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) licenses Independent World Television as a "must-carry'' digital channel.

"From a business point of view, we can't be critiqued," says Jay, explaining that distributors will get the programming for free.

"If anybody tries to stop us, it will clearly be for political reasons." And nowadays, politics have everything to do with the economics of journalism.

"We don't think it's only television," he says.

"We think the times are very very dangerous and that people aren't going to be passive about them. We think people have connected the issue of information, of knowledge, of having the right to know with deciding how to act.

"We'll see if we're right."

© 2005 Toronto Star

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