Wouldn't it be cool, I thought, to be able to deconstruct, comment upon and analyze media in real time, not, as so many academics do, years later after it had become forgotten or part of an unread historical record? We wanted to intervene in the ongoing media debate, deepen it and organize around it.
It was in that period that my partner Rory and I looked out of our Globalvision offices in Times Square and saw the transformation of our neighborhood into a mecca for media and a physical epicenter of media concentration with all the big networks and ancillary businesses clustered in a ten block area, or at least represented with signage, studios and other symbols of the power of their "brand."
As if to symbolize the interdependence of finance power and media power, the NASDAQ exchange and an investment bank positioned themselves at each corner of the square. In the middle, a Toys R' Us shopping mall opened across the street from the new MTV store, with a bevy of other brand-name outlets that market their wares through advertising, much of it on TV. The legendary "crossroads of the world", the aptly named "Great White Way", for all its ostentatious lighting, now has a new mission as the epicenter of media empires.
Watching this transformation in front of own eyes led to another insight: our aspirations for producing independent media about the problems of the world would be forever limited unless we could somehow tackle that "beast."
We had to recognize that one of the big problems of the world, the Capital M Media, was right in front of us and barely acknowledged as a problem. Its legendary "gate-keepers" were there to dumb down the content, commercialize all messaging and keep our kind of progressive content off the air. It wasn't exactly a conspiracy but similar templates, ways or working and market logics operated to sanitize news and suppress more critical fare. Most of the time, programming was not rejected explicitly on political or content grounds. It was always rather "good work, but it's not for us." We began to call that knew jerk response: "NFU."
We were media people with some knowledge and insight into the way the industry works - and doesn't work in terms of deepening our democracy. This was our issue if there ever was one.
We were just a handful of people, but we hadn't shied away from tackling big problems. For three years, we produced weekly programs exposing apartheid in South Africa and the fight against it. Our South Africa Now series won awards and helped support the fight for democracy in that "beloved country." Our follow-up series Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television with Charlayne Hunter Gault did the same for under covered human rights abuses worldwide. Many of our films also broke ground in raising issues that others shied away from.
Tackling the media, in the way we wanted to do it, was no small task. How do you even get a handle on a problem, which is so well financed and so deeply accepted, in our culture? What's the "way-in" and how can you have any impact at all.
First we had to abandon the idea of a TV channel. It was far too expensive to even contemplate. Most channel start-ups back in the l990's were in the $50-75 MILLION dollar range. And even if you somehow come up with high-quality alternative programming, who would air it? Not the media monopolies controlling the cable systems. If there's one thing that media companies hate more than on target criticism, it's having those criticisms turn up on their own airwaves.
Next, we had to find a model for what we could do. If we couldn't get on-air, we could, we thought do it on-line. As an internationally oriented company, Globalvision always had an eye on what was happening overseas.
It was then we found the fledging One World network in England, which first launched in l995. Its organizer Peter Armstrong, a former TV producer like ourselves, realized that content from NGO organizations concerned with the issues of the South could be aggregated and brought together on one website, a "supersite" or portal that could bring a world of concerned people and organizations together in the same virtual space to offer news and information about shared hopes and problems.
The Omidyar Network would later describe it this way:
One World encourages people to discover their power - power to speak, connect, and make a difference - by providing access to information, and enabling connections between hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of people around the world.
The people drive the One World network and organizations it supports - people write the news, provide the video clips and the radio stories. Through this network, individuals have access to information previously unavailable to them - information that can broaden their world view and enable them to make better decisions.
I went to London, actually to Peter and his family's farmhouse in the rolling fields outside Oxford, to see for myself. I was impressed. A new world of media was emerging in the English countryside.
A Media Channel could be built along those lines. Peter was supportive and welcomed us to become a One World Affiliate. A colleague went to Oxford in 1999 to build a prototype that we would later use for funding what became our not for profit network.
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