In my efforts to further commit myself to pushing progressive reforms in communities I am part of, I have recently decided to head a media reform student organization at Columbia College Chicago. This group is making plans to send a bus of students to the Free Press' National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis in June.

::::::::

In my efforts to further commit myself to pushing progressive reforms in communities I am part of, I have recently decided to head a media reform student organization at Columbia College Chicago.

So far, this looks like it will be a truly remarkable organization for students to be a part of. Faculty members from the college are involved in the process and eager to work with students to push media reform not just in the area of access to news but in the fields of film, music, graphic design, photography, radio, fiction and nonfiction writing, etc. where censorship and corporatization has affected artists’ ability to produce quality art.

The decision to volunteer to run a media reform group was made at an antiwar forum held on campus.

At the forum, I spoke on a panel about the need for students to oppose the Iraq war and to go beyond just rejecting it personally. As artists, I spoke of the need for them to speak out about the Iraq war or the problems the Iraq war raises in the art students create. (*This was where I came up with my Creating the Ethos One Step at a Time campaign for my student government run here at Columbia College.)

It was amazing how much students were upset with the media during the forum. They were not so much upset with the Iraq war. Instead, they were very upset that the media had up to this point kept the truth of what was going on in the Iraq war and in the pre-invasion from them.

Towards the end of the forum, a faculty member told us about how we could go to a media reform conference in June and how she wanted to start a media reform group. I jumped at the opportunity and offered the services of OpEdNews to anybody who wanted to utilize them because OpEdNews is at the front of the battle for media reform.

One month later, we had our first meeting and came together with a little over ten people (four of them being faculty members at Columbia). We spoke of all the things we want to do on campus for media reform. Our campus has many issues for us to take up and deal with.

If you’ve followed the trends of media consolidation in this country or the current crisis in journalism in America (through books like Tragedy & Farce by Nichols and McChesney), than you won’t be surprised by the fact that Columbia College’s newspaper and radio station is atrociously bad.

Our school newspaper is administrative-run. That means that students do not run it. Now before you tell me how there are only a few student-run school newspapers in the country, let me just say that doesn’t mean we should allow our administration to turn our newspaper into a rag.

Our ACLU group on campus is buying ad space which they will use to publish editorials because our student newspaper will not run them in our editorial section.

I sent a press release for an event I held on campus to combat media blackout on the Winter Soldier Investigation held from March 13th to March 16th. The plan was to show testimony on a screen, discuss what was said, and then discuss how we as students would respond in action to what was being said by these veterans. The newspaper did not even bother to open the attached press release and instead, they called our school’s student organization office and asked what we had planned to do for that night. The school wrote down Winter Soldier projection from 5-9 and so the paper took that to mean we were showing the Winter Soldier documentary from the 1970s from 5-9.

In order for the paper to cover a progressive issue on campus, we have to submit a resolution on that progressive issue in our student government. Since the student government is where conservative minds go to seek refuge on our liberal campus (and that’s because our administration will back them up), vetoes of these resolutions normally occur, which creates conflict that “journalists” working for the newspaper sensationalize in the same way that rag publications across America sensationalize conflicts between Obama and Hillary.

The school’s radio station transmits from University of Illinois-Chicago, which means students on campus cannot pick up the radio station without going online to listen to it. The station only plays music and does not offer any talk radio whatsoever.

As you can see, our school has some work to do in the fields of journalism and radio on campus. But more importantly (and this is an issue our ACLU group has just chosen to pick up), we are a group that will seek to acknowledge the simple fact that all media reform begins with taking action to preserve the Internet now before the corporations do any more damage to it than they have done already.

Eliot D. Cohen, Ph. D and Bruce W. Fraser sums up how important it is for this to be done in the wonderfully written book The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power Hungry Government Are Turning America Into a Dictatorship.

Through forums where we invite speakers like Robert McChesney, John Nichols, Jeff Cohen, etc. and show video clips and documentaries on media, we will uncover how media is in dire need of reform.

A key component of the media reform group’s startup will be sending students to the Free Press’ National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis in June. We have an event planned for April to get students interested in that.

From that point, in the fall we will become recognized by the school and begin to contribute to and improve our college’s community. We will lead the way in Chicago by working with the Metro Chicago Progressive Media Action Network.

Most importantly, we will promote the idea that college students must create the ethos for the world that they live in and college students and Americans can do that by fighting the corporatization, consolidation, and crisis in journalism by fighting for a vision of a world that truly functions in a democratic manner and truly promotes the tradition of civics and independent thinking, which are etched in the very essence of our nation’s history.

Authors Bio:
Kevin Gosztola is managing editor of Shadowproof Press. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, "Unauthorized Disclosure." He was an editor for OpEdNews.com