AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman. Democracy Now! is Pacifica Radio’s national daily grassroots election show. And if you have friends around the country who are not getting a chance to hear Democracy Now!, tell them to call their local community or public radio station and urge them to play Democracy Now!

Now, we’ve just returned from California, where a large conference took place over the weekend called the Media and Democracy Congress, which was put on by the Institute for Alternative Journalism. The idea is that journalism is under siege. Powerful forces dominating today’s media culture and shaping its development degrade journalism and undermine democracy. And so, more than 600 activists and journalists went to California to talk about what to do about this. We’re going to hear a few excerpts of what they had to say. In a little while, we’re going to be going to Herbert Chao Gunther, who is an Asian American media activist, runs the Public Media Center in California. But first we’re going to turn to Farai Chideya. She’s currently covering the Republican primaries for CNN. And she embarked on a mission to destroy racial stereotypes with her 1995 book, Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African-Americans, in which she systematically undercuts the argument that African Americans are at the root of problems like crime, welfare and drugs. On Friday night, Farai talked about these myths and talked about the media.

FARAI CHIDEYA: For me, the issue has always been that I have had more access to the mainstream media than an alternative person — alternative media person usually has. And the issue for me is censorship from the self. Most people do not really push the envelope. They simply say, “Well, OK, the envelope must be here, so I will stay in here.” Then the envelope goes to here, and they step back and say, “Well, the envelope’s there, so I’m going to stay here.”

And so, I think that what we see when we see this conglomeration of media, media companies buying each other out, sort of swallowing each other head to tail and becoming these big beasts, is that there are as many programs and there are as many publications. When you look at 24-hour news channels, we’ve got CNN. Soon we’re going to have MSNBC and then ABC and then Murdoch. So there’s going to be four times 24 hours’ worth of news a day on cable channels. But will there be a diversity of opinion? When we look at political opinion, we see a country where the acceptable range of opinion has really been truncated.

I did a piece on welfare reform. And you had — I wrote it for Vibe magazine, which has a young urban readership. And so I didn’t want to do the same old thing, so I did it as a game of “Let’s Make a Deal.” So I had the three doors. The one door was the far right, which was the House and Gingrich. The second was the right, which was Dole and the Senate. And the third was the centrist, whatever that means, which was Clinton. And I said that in the end, the first mistake that you made was picking a door to begin with, because any door that you pick relied on the stereotypes about welfare as opposed to the facts, the idea that, for example, the stereotype of a woman on welfare is someone who is Black or Latina, who has a bazillion kids, who’s doing drugs, who lives in a public housing project, who does not want to work. And according to opinion studies, some white Americans — or, according to one by the National Opinion Research Center, a majority of white Americans still believe that the majority of Black Americans prefer to live off of welfare, whereas the reality of welfare is more women are white than Black or Latina, that people are on for 22 months at a time, drifting in and out of the labor force, because they do not have the jobs and the training. Ninety percent live in private housing, not public housing. So you have this — two kids, two kids — not a bazillion kids, two kids. And so you have the very nature of the welfare debate being structured on a lack of information, on a real spectrum of stereotype as opposed to reality.

So, the problem I see with the media as it exists today is that you’ve got a populace who is making decisions, who is actually trying to be civic-minded to a certain degree, but based on information which does not allow us to accurately assess what is going on in the country. And so, all of what we do should be directed towards giving people information.

I did a story on white supremacists. And I agree with them on some things — not very many, but some things. They are the kind of people who Pat Buchanan is dying to meet, people who have legitimate economic concerns about the society. And I could agree with them on that. And so I went into it — I went into it with a lot of class bias. “Oh, I went to college, and these people are just, you know, these — these, you know, ruffians off the street who have these horrible ideas.” And then I realized as I did the piece that I couldn’t even possibly identify in many ways with what they were going through with not having good jobs and with seeing themselves living in neighborhoods, inner-city neighborhoods, some of them, where they saw African Americans as the problem, simply because they didn’t have any choice about where to live.

But, to me, you know, the solution to the media dilemma has to be finding ways to provide information to people who may want it, but who don’t want to listen to it in the formats in which we’re giving it to them. You know, when I go out and talk about issues, like I wrote a book on race in the media — when I go out and talk about race and the media, I try not to prescribe solutions. I prescribe solutions to not knowing the facts, but I try not to say, “You should feel this way about affirmative action, or you should feel this way about welfare.” But what I try to do is say, “You know what? Whatever your solution is, you can’t make a good one, you can’t make a good solution, you can’t make good decisions, based on inaccurate information. So let me tell you what the facts are. Let me explain to you class systems. Let me explain to you how the criminal justice system is intricately tied up with race and with class. And then decide how you like the death penalty, given that African Americans are four times as likely to get the death penalty as whites for committing the same crime, when you’ve got people getting five years in jail for possessing $250 worth of crack cocaine or $40,000 worth of powder cocaine. Know the facts, and then make your decision.”

So, I think that a lot of what we have to do is find ways — you know, when we talk about information and the lack of information that’s out there, we have to work on two fronts. It’s sort of the, what I call the master’s house dilemma. Do you, as people who have progressive viewpoints, try to rebuild — tear down or, perhaps, I say, rebuild the master’s house with the master’s tools, or do you build a new house? And I think that progressives in the mainstream media are trying to rebuild the master’s house, and people in the alternative media are trying to build their own house. I would argue that you need both. Unfortunately, most people will never willingly leave the master’s house, no matter how horrible the conditions are. So you have to try in some ways to get them the information where they are within that system. And yet, you also have to have alternatives, where, hopefully, if you provide them with enough information, which gets under their skin, they will be able to then move to a place where they can really make use of it. And it really reminds me — I can’t remember who said this, but someone was talking about the civil rights movement and said, “You can’t make someone believe that there needs to be a solution to racial inequality. You can just provide them with enough facts so they begin to question the status quo and begin to believe that there is inequality, and then they will move on and try to find solutions to that inequality.”

AMY GOODMAN: Farai Chideya, currently covering the Republican primaries for CNN. Last year, her book came out, Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African-Americans. And you can get a copy of this full program, Democracy Now!, by calling the Pacific Archives at 1-800-735-0230. That’s 1-800-735-0230, as we move on to hear another speech that was given at the Media and Democracy Congress on Friday night. It was by Herbert Choa Gunther. For the past 20 years, he has been president and executive director of the Public Media Center, the nation’s leading nonprofit public interest advertising agency. PMC creates media campaigns for Planned Parenthood, Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace, along with 200 other environmental, women’s and social justice groups around the world. Herbert Choa Gunther.

HERBERT CHAO GUNTHER: We’re in California. I think it’s important for me to say, first of all, I’m an immigrant. I’m not an American citizen. And I can’t even vote in elections. And let me start there. Obviously, I’m a person of color. Probably, for — I can claim a greater degree of being an outsider than probably most people in this room can.

And what strikes me about the left and what puzzles me, certainly, in the work that I do, is, as someone who comes from another country — I was born in Taiwan, remember, a province of China, a colony of Portugal for some time, and I came to this country when I was 16. English is not my native language. But I’ve learned to speak it because, obviously, my identity is tied, to great extent, my ability to communicate. But, in fact, I speak Mandarin — I spoke Mandarin before I spoke English.

And the reason I go through this recitation of all my credentials as the consummate outsider is to tell you that I’m fascinated with how the left is so alienated from the notions that — you know, the fundamental sense of patriotism, the sense that America is an incredible, powerful experiment in democracy, a very powerful set of ideals, that certainly, being probably more cynical than anyone else in this room, as well, I find myself embarrassed, embarrassed to say that part of the reason that — I mean, because the issue here isn’t about who owns the media. The issue is about who wins, and who wins politically, because it’s about who then gets hurt. And I’m certainly here, and I’m motivated to try to defend and fight for the people who usually get hurt. And it’s all the constituencies that are represented by whatever jargon we have at the moment, whether it’s identity politics or whatever. And I suspect that motivates a lot of us. So, I’m not here to talk about the trends in corporatizing, whether it’s the media market or anything else, but simply how we have failed to win.

And we fail to win because, for among other reasons, we’re alienated from the core of values and ideas that this country is about. I mean, the reason Buchanan can coopt our language, our issues with the facility that he has is it doesn’t embarrass him to be patriotic. It’s not embarrassing for him to relate to working-class Americans. And despite the fact this guy drives a Mercedes-Benz, he’s never lived 50 miles outside of Washington, D.C., which anybody who’s been there knows that that is not anything close to what America is about, and certainly is not what anybody’s idea of a typical normal environment to grow up in. But here he is speaking to a constituency that romantically the left has been engaged in trying to connect with for all of its history. How does that happen? Well, it happens because he can speak to — because he learns the first thing about marketing in America, which is you have to operate in the language and the values of the people you’re trying to reach.

And I remember one of the remnants of my public education at Berkeley was — I was there the period that there was — the fad was reading Hermann Hesse and all that, you know, the German romantics of that period. And you remember, I think it was, Narcissus and Goldmund. But there’s a key passage where Narcissus looks at Goldmund, and he says, “You know, when I look at you, what I see are the similarities between us. And when you look at me, what you see are the differences.” And that, for me, always has reflected the dilemma of the left. We look at America, and we look at the differences. We look at what’s wrong. We look at how it doesn’t speak for our values. And we — as if we were in a permanent state of adolescent rebellion, we reject the very values that, in fact, are the motivating force of the ideals that we carry, the notion that — because, you know, in Taiwan, I can tell you, when I was growing up, we had to stand up in the movie theaters to salute Chiang Kai-shek’s picture that came on the screen while the nationalist Chinese anthem played, before every movie, and you were harassed and jailed if you didn’t stand up at the — so I come from a different political culture in my youth. And my experience is not to take for granted the sort of things that people on the left do.

But if we learned that, in fact, when we look at middle-class America, at mainstream America, I mean, they are on the same lifeboat that we are on, and they make up a majority of people in this country. And we do subscribe to democratic values, and they do motivate more people to go to the polls to vote, oftentimes against their own interest, but they do vote and prevail. However they do it, by hook or by crook, we haven’t beaten them. And to the extent that we understand then that we, by creating differences between ourselves and them, by not understanding that we do operate from the same set of values and that we’ve got to get out of this adolescent phase of rebellion, of rejection, and defining ourselves by who we’re not, that we’re not like our parents, we’re not like the middle-class upbringing that the majority of these people — majority of you — come out of, then we can begin to understand how we win. Then we can understand that there is, in fact, a tremendous base of idealism, optimism that we can operate from.

And until we do that, I mean, we’re going to continue to frame issues, you know, in language and in conceptual forms that are bizarre, alien to the majority of Americans. We’ve all read our Marcuse and Marx. We understand from our political science classes at all the universities that we’ve gone to. I mean, this is not a typical group of Americans. The majority of people in this audience have college degrees. Now, that’s not true for most of Americans. And most of you have high school degrees. That’s almost not true for the majority of Americans. And, I mean, the fact that my favorite statistical indicators, four out of 10 Americans today, reported in The Washington Post last week, cannot identify the vice president of the United States. Seven out of 10 Americans cannot find Japan on a world map. If you think that’s ridiculous, three out of 10 Americans can’t find the United States on a map. So we’re not dealing with a society that has the kind of literacy, that reads books, that reads newspapers.

I mean, Pocatello, Idaho, is not — you know, I had a bizarre transition to America. I came here, and I lived briefly — I spent half a semester my junior year in high school in Elk City, Oklahoma, population 5,000. If you can find that on a map, I’ll buy you a beer. And I spent the second semester of my junior year in Enterprise, Alabama, in Coffee County, which is the peanut capital of the world, so I learned. They have a statue there to the boll weevil. And when I got to school, it was the last of the Jim Crow system. There was the Coffee County School for the Colored. I was sent to Enterprise Senior High School, and the first question I was asked by my homeroom teacher was “What are you?” And I had never been asked that question before. And I thought, proudly, I would say “Eurasian,” because I had read in Newsweek something about Eurasian culture. I figure my father is German, my mother is Chinese, I must be Eurasian. So I said, proudly, “Eurasian.” He looked at me, and he said, “You’re colored.” And I said, “Great. I’m colored.” I had no ideas what the implications were. But it was important to him, because he was filling out the desegregation form for that district, and I counted as part of the integration effort.

My experience is not your experience. I have lived in the South. I have lived and been mistaken for an Indian in Oklahoma, which, if you have any experience of being an Indian in Oklahoma, you will know that it is worse than how African Americans have been treated in the South, because there is an active hostility and hatred. It isn’t about keeping within the system, as I experienced as a colored person in the South. And I’m always constantly amazed at how ignorant the left is of the deep traditions that exist in this country and the richness of the culture. My point is simply that until we begin to understand the strategies that we need, which begin with understanding what we have in common with the majority constituencies in this country — and that doesn’t mean giving up on our values, and it doesn’t mean speaking to, you know, the patriarchy or anything else.

In our marketing work at Public Media Center, we’ve learned one of the basic principles. And that’s Americans, at the end of the day, don’t follow etiology. You know what they follow? The most massive piece of social research we were able to undertake for one of our clients, Planned Parenthood, on abortion, was a massive, controlled, qualitative-quantitative research project. The question was addressed at groups of voters who had identified themselves as conflicted on the issue of abortion. In other words, they had identified themselves as being, quote, “in the muddled middle.” And we had this huge marketing exercise to figure out what motivates them, what gets them to one side or the other of that issue. And all the focus groups that we had, all the people were told, “You have to, at the end of the session, tell us where you stand on abortion. You have to take a position: You’re pro-life, you’re pro-choice. And you have to write on a piece of paper why.” And about 85%, a majority of people, answered consistently. And these are all people. And keep in mind, in America, the political bell curve is, in fact, the case. Three out of 10 Americans are on our side. Three out of 10 Americans are on Pat Buchanan’s side. There’s nothing we can do to get them over to our side. Politics in America is about competing for the four people in the middle, out of 10. We have to win three out of the four. And we, in our etiology, in our values, in our compassion, and all everything else we care about, then is manifested in society. Now, the answer to the question, 85% of the folks said, “If I had to take a position on abortion, as conflicted as I am, I would pick the side I think is going to win. Not principle. Not etiology. Not my grandmother having fought for abortion, and not the Bible instructor on Saturday night that tells me it’s a sin. It’s going to be who I think is going to win.”

That reflects the deep alienation of this society. Mass media compounds that alienation. If you’re going to be effective in winning, you’re going to have to understand how, in fact, you communicate with that. But it starts with understanding that you need to stop denying that you’re an American. You need to stop denying that, in fact, this is a pretty remarkable experiment in democracy. And I certainly haven’t given up on it yet, seeing as how I am a guest in your country. And if Newt Gingrich gets his way, I’ll be deported soon.

AMY GOODMAN: Herbert Chao Gunther, president and executive director of the Public Media Center, the nation’s leading nonprofit public interest advertising agency. You’re listening to Democracy Now! Coming up next, a look at Georgia.