Democracy Now! Committee Shifts Strategy

I’m sorry to report that we’ve called off the April 7^th Public Forum on Democracy Now! because WXXI President Norm Silverstein is refusing to meet with members of the Democracy Now! Committee. We’ve been working on this campaign since the summer and it’s been very interesting to watch a large and established station like WXXI react to our campaign.

 

You might have seen the letter that WXXI is sending to community members who have asked WXXI to try Democracy Now! In the letter they say that the WXXI Community Advisory Board has reviewed Democracy Now! and concluded that Democracy Now! is biased. When we look at the minutes of the May 12^th Community Advisory Board meeting, it’s no wonder that they reached this conclusion. According to minutes, WXXI Vice President Jeanne Fisher, stated that Democracy Now! is “anti-republican” and that Democracy Now! “admits that host Amy Goodman has a political agenda and that the content of the program is driven by her agenda,” and that Amy Goodman “is not able to fairly present all sides of an issue and is driving the content because of a right or left political bias.” Ms. Fisher also said “Amy Goodman was recently arrested in an anti-war protest in front of the White House for participating in the demonstration.”

 

As many Metro Justice members already know, these accusations are a combination of distortion and outright fabrication [e.g. Goodman was actually arrested while covering the protest- you can hear the audio of the action of http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/07/0320252 ]. But when I explained to Norm Silverstein during a phone conversation on March 4^th that the inaccuracies presented to the Board of Advisors would prejudice them against Democracy Now!, Silverstein stated that “it doesn’t matter.” When I then asked him for specific instances when Amy Goodman had violated journalistic principles, Mr. Silverstein responded by hanging up on me.

 

Mr. Silverstein also said that Metro Justice was harassing him with spam. Keep in mind that Mr. Silverstein had this reaction to only a few hundred emails. Little does he know that hundreds of handwritten letters and 3,000 postcards are lying in wait in the Metro Justice office (yes, we reached our goal of 3,000 postcards! Thank you! But don’t stop sending in those postcards. It can’t hurt to have four thousand.)

 

We were going to personally deliver these missives to him at the public forum. Instead, the Democracy Now! Committee is making copies of all the postcards and letters, boxing them up, and mailing them to each member of the WXXI Board of Trustees, asking them to direct their staff to be responsive to the community.

 

Meanwhile, Members of the Democracy Now! Committee are meeting with major donors to WXXI to ask them to sign a support statement to present to the Board of Trustees. Democracy Now! Committee members will then attend the April 25^th meeting of the WXXI Board of Trustees (1pm, Monday, April 25, WXXI,

 

Here are my notes from my 3/4/05 conversation with Norm Silverstein:

 

“Norm Silverstein called. He said that he would be willing to meet but that WXXI had already made the decision. I said that was OK, but that we’d still like to meet with him to talk about the decision. He said that he wasn’t obligated to talk to us. I agreed with him but also said that we’d still like to hear from him.

 

He said that Metro Justice was harassing WXXI and that we were spamming his email address and that he had to have it stopped. He said that if we did it again they would contact the police. I told him that Metro Justice had just provided the mechanism (email) for WXXI members and community members to give WXXI feedback about programming. At this point his voice was shaking. He replied that we had lost all our credibility at the station and that in the past the station had covered our press conferences (This appeared to be a threat that WXXI might stop covering our events). I asked how that was possible since we hadn’t misrepresented anything. How had we lost any credibility? We were gathering people’s feedback for the station. (I resisted the urge to point out WXXI had hurt their credibility by misrepresenting Amy Goodman’s reporting at their Community Advisory Board meeting)

 

He said the decision had been made. I asked him about community feedback- how many community members would need to contact the station  for WXXI to consider putting Democracy Now on the air. A few thousand? More than half of the members? He replied with the non-sequiter that their programming was not for sale.

 

He said Metro Justice already knew about the decision being made. I informed him that we hadn’t talked to anybody at WXXI since the decision had been made and said that we’d be interested in hearing about how the decision had been made. He said that he would meet only with me. I said that I’d be interested in meeting with him with other committee members in attendance, but not one on one. He said the staff and community advisory board and board of trustees had made their decision. I said that the Community Advisory Board was given faulty information about Democracy Now and that I had the minutes from the advisory board meeting.  I said that Jeanne Fisher had reported that Amy Goodman was arrested for doing civil disobedience when if fact she hadn’t. He said that the circumstances were hazy. I replied that they weren’t hazy and that I had the audio of the arrest and that it was quite clear that Goodman was arrested while reporting, not arrested while doing civil disobedience. He said, raising his voice, “It doesn’t matter.” The staff had decided that Democracy Now! didn’t meet the standards for ethics and it was biased. I calmly said that was quite a charge to make of a journalist like Amy Goodman and asked him if he had any examples of how Amy Goodman had violated the Society for Professional Journalism guidelines on ethics.

 

At that point he hung up on me.”

 

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