The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Opening Remarks of Wade Henderson for the July 26, 2001 Policy Luncheon

Speech by Wade Henderson on July 26, 2001.
Finding New Strategies to Achieve Media Diversity

Good Afternoon, I am Wade Henderson, Executive Director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

On behalf of LCCR and the Leadership Conference Education Fund, the education arm of the Leadership Conference, I would like to welcome you to the third event in our Communications and Information Technology Policy luncheon series, entitled, "Building A Civil Rights Agenda for the Digital Age."

This luncheon series is made possible through the generous support of the Markle and Ford Foundations and is designed to educate and engage members of the civil rights community about important public policy issues that will shape the digital age.

Today's briefing is entitled, "Finding New Strategies to Achieve Media Diversity," and we will be examining the three core components that comprise media diversity: ownership, programming, and employment.

As most of you know, the civil rights community has long recognized the important role the media plays in creating a more equitable and just society.

When, in 1964, the United Church of Christ began working with the local NAACP chapter in Jackson, Mississippi, this is the situation they faced:

Local stations did not allow blacks to advertise.

They did not give blacks the opportunity to respond to the views expressed by
representatives of the White Citizens Council.

They did not show any broadcasts of local or national civil rights demonstrations.

It was Dr. King who stated (writing from the Birmingham jail) in 1963:

"Injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
In Jackson, injustice was exposed when the Federal Communications Commission supported the local stations. The church took the FCC to federal court, and won.
As Mark Lloyd notes in his historical account of this episode, "Though the civil rights community, particularly the United Church of Christ and the NAACP led the charge, the victor was democracy. Though the skirmish was over arcane rules of standing and license renewals, the battle was for control over the public arena. The citizens of Jackson, Mississippi, black and white, could finally see the full ugliness of white racism and brutality. They could see, through the power and immediacy of television, the fire-hose sprays and the charging police dogs and the angry crowds. They could hear the eloquence of Dr. King and Fannie Lou Hamer." The recent activities of the civil rights community to ensure diversity in media trace their roots to these efforts.

Today, we face challenges on at least three major fronts:

First, in the current hostile judicial and congressional climate, many of our hard-fought victories are being overturned in the courts or repealed by Congress.

Second, the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act has led to a dramatic increase in media consolidation and an unfortunate reduction in ownership diversity.

Third, with the advent of new communications technological advances, we are now operating in a fundamentally re-shaped communications environment.

In this day and age, the task for the civil rights community in meeting these challenges, it seems to me, is two-fold.

First and foremost, we must determine what traditional public policy methods of ensuring media diversity are appropriate in this new communications environment and what new methods may be necessary and we must fight for them.

Second, we as a community must begin to think outside the box.

Every day, through the power of technology, individuals and organizations are seizing power away from large institutions by aggregating, producing, manipulating, and disseminating information on their own terms.

While radical power shifts have occurred in the past, today's technological advances offer the opportunity to democratize communications in new and powerful ways.

As a community, we ought to develop more ways to present our own stories, our own ideas, and our own images, on our own terms, without seeking the permission, approval, or sanction of traditional media outlets.

At the Leadership Conference, we are working toward this goal in many ways, including presenting today's forum on civilrights.org ? our own outlet.

In short, part of our task, it seems to me, is to come together to develop sustainable ways to leverage these new communication advances to ensure a strong voice for our entire community in the digital age.

You will be hearing from several excellent speakers, who will help educate us about all of these very important policy issues.

At this point, I would like to turn the discussion over to our moderator, Mark Lloyd, who most of you already know.

In addition to serving on the Board of the LCEF, Mark serves as the Executive Director at the Civil Rights Forum on Communications Technology and is the civil rights community's resident expert on media diversity matters.