With Fear and Favor: How the Chattanooga News Media Distorted the Recall

I was recently invited to speak before a communications class at UTC about the Recall and media framing.

In my lecture I emphasize that the recall was, fundamentally, a referendum on business as usual. The Tea Party and the Occupy Movement, as different as they are (and they are very different), are both popular movements giving expression to feelings of frustration shared by a broad spectrum of society towards a system that largely excludes us. This was the spiritual source of the recall: the popular desire for a stronger democracy; democracy being defined as participation in the process of making decisions that directly affect us.

The local media, I argue, largely misunderstood and distorted the recall of Mayor Littlefield for the following reasons:

• Journalists are cozy with political and business elites: journalists often do NOT let grassroots people speak for themselves, but rather have establishment insiders speak to them, for them, and about them. No where is this fact more glaring than in the case of the Chattanooga Times Free Press editorial board, which consistently ignored all the requests from COA to meet with them and discuss our motivations for recalling the Mayor.
• Journalists often do not wish to alienate the dominant political and business establishments because they do not wish to lose access.
• Journalists do NOT provide broad historical context to current events, so stories and reports appear in isolation and abstraction decreasing the likelihood that the general population will recognize historical patterns of behavior by dominant institutions and individuals.
• Journalists do NOT provide space for nuance and complexity, but often rely on and cater to obvious media "frames", or pre-determined narratives to make sense of individual events.

Lastly, I argue that the purpose of the bourgeois or corporate press is NOT to create informed, engaged citizens capable of taking responsibility for their communities and capable of holding dominant institutions and authorities accountable. The purpose of the corporate press is to put as many advertisers before as many consumers as possible, truth and investigative reporting takes a back seat to profits and the demands of the market.

The following is my lecture in three videos with tags about relevant topics:

Video One: my story, media framing, COA and the beginnings of the recall, popular exclusion of citizens by dominant institutions and the definition of democracy, media exclusion and the denial of a voice to the citizens by the Chattanooga Times Free Press,

Video Two: Mike Weber and media access, the myth of objectivity in the press, the Chattanooga City Attorney and questions of bias, the Ron Littlefield Memorial Dump, recall as accountability and consequences for decisions that directly affect us, organizing/citizenship and manufactured ignorance, structural change is not voting

Video Three: Our power has been taken from us, change agents and the sound barrier (giving the voiceless an opportunity to speak), Tennessee as most corrupt state in the country, newspapers protect people in power, democracy is a threat to the establishment