Beginning last Thursday, activists converged at the University and Lane Community College for a long weekend of workshops, films, visual arts exhibits, speakers, a “peace forum” and the like.
The four-day-long “Peace, Justice & Media Conference” featured speakers including — among others — anti-war activist Andrea Buffa of the Global Exchange Peace Campaign, radio’s Jim Hightower, “Labor Radio” host Don McIntosh and representatives of the Eugene Weekly and the Justice Not War Coalition. Organizers managed to import speakers from around the nation to give lectures and lead discussions on a wide range of topics, from media images of women to “media literacy” and from “war taxes” to public broadcasting. Indeed, organizers billed the conference — sponsored by the Justice Not War Coalition — as “Empowering the Movement for Fair, Accurate and Diverse Media.”
Despite the conference’s clearly extensive planning, which included arranging more than 40 events, something was conspicuously missing: politically conservative and even moderate elements.
Many sessions were clearly planned from a leftist — if not counterculture — slant: “We Interrupt This Empire,” a video presentation credited to “Bay Area’s independent video activists,” recalled March’s anti-war protests that snarled San Francisco’s financial district.
According to the conference schedule, “Military Recruiting vs. Reality” exposed “myths perpetuated by military recruiters.”
The video “Fear and Favor in the Newsroom” suggested that “ownership of the press by a small corporate elite constricts the free flow of ideas and information upon which our democracy depends.”
Finally, Sunday’s agenda included the self-explanatory session “How to Fight the Bush Agenda.”
Now, there’s nothing wrong when a conference that bills itself as fair and balanced includes politically oriented content. In fact, when tackling issues such as politics in the media, it’s practically unavoidable. By not including a variety of political opinions, however, the meeting is unbalanced and undiverse, and therefore it was unfairly misrepresented to potential participants.
Surprisingly, organizers acknowledged the lack of diversity.
“We did not try to get a balance,” event organizer Michael Carrigan said in an Emerald interview. “We tried to get a conference that reflects what Eugene is like.”
In fact, the lone apparent deviation from the otherwise homogeneously leftist speakers came in Saturday afternoon’s section “Discussing Talk Radio: Is It Just Too Damn Liberal?,” wherein “Ed Monks and Alan Siporin will discuss the question whether or not special guests Lars Larson from Portland and Don Carlin of KUGN accept the invitation to participate.”
But even this limited approach to political diversity was apparently unethically aborted: Carrigan said that organizers had invited Larson, but Larson denied in an e-mail to the Emerald that he had ever received an invitation (“Event to analyze media bias,” ODE, Oct. 9). The day after that article ran, Larson told the Emerald in a phone interview that he had received a phone invitation earlier in the day from another of the conference’s planners, who told him organizers had intended to ask him to join the conference earlier, but that they had “overlooked” sending the invitation.
Whatever the details are, it’s clear the conference was nowhere near as “fair, accurate and diverse” as the kind of media it supposedly sought to empower. Moreover, organizers seem to be guilty of limiting the free exchange of ideas, while hiding under the guise of fairness and balance — the very injustice that they accuse the mainstream media of committing.
While this hypocrisy is certainly unfortunate for those participating speakers whose ideas were valid and important in their own right, the real victims are the participants who weren’t getting what they’d bargained for.