Page 279 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2
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| Med a Watch Groups
claiming a budget five times the size of its older peer. Project Censored’s use of
students to perform much of its work has kept it going strong despite limited
funds. FAIR, an early pacesetter, has in some respects, such as its $800,000 annual
budget, been eclipsed in the increasingly crowded field on the left by Media Mat-
ters’s deepened pockets ($6 million annual budget) and the rise of Free Press from
a project of the Media Education Foundation to an independent and influential
organization with a $5 million annual budget, raised mostly from foundations.
Other foundation-supported media watch groups include the Institute for Pub-
lic Accuracy, led by Norman Solomon, and the Media Alliance, which supports
political action and other activities beyond critique. The Center for Media and
Democracy, which sponsors PR Watch, Sourcewatch, and Congresspedia, spends
about a half-million dollars a year, most of it from a long list of foundations, and
gets a good deal of bang for its buck by dominating criticism of the influential
public relations industry. Also dominating its media watch sector is the Adbusters
Media Foundation, which publishes the 120,000-circulation “culture-jamming”
Adbusters magazine, operates a Web site, and runs PowerShift, an advocacy
advertising agency. Diversified approaches to economic survival can be found in
the model of Media Channel, produced by Globalvision New Media, a project
of the Global Center. Fledgling media organizations can use the Global Center
Foundation as a fiscal sponsor by paying it an administrative fee, keeping open a
door for still more media watch and activism organizations to join the field.
Locally focused media watch efforts in the United States appear to have a
more difficult time staying afloat. Grade the News (GTN), an award-winning
media watch site focused on the San Francisco Bay Area, had to curtail its activi-
ties with the lapse of a Knight Foundation grant, just as the region’s journalistic
quality absorbed a major blow with the takeover of almost all of its newspapers
by the budget- and staff-cutting Medianews Group. GTN’s methods, utilizing
metrics such as column inches; numbers of seconds devoted to broadcast sto-
ries; source diversity; and story impact estimates, generate grades for newscasts
and newspapers. As incubators of novel media watching praxis, locally based
enterprises offer many interesting models that may take root if they survive their
beta stages. Retro Poll, also based in the Bay Area, uses students and volunteers
to survey randomly generated national samples, measuring responses to opinion
questions against answers to factual questions about news, to show that people
relying on certain news sources have an inferior grasp of documented facts, cor-
relating with distinct opinion responses at odds with what has in some quarters
been referred to as “the reality-based community.” News Trust, which allows its
readers to rate stories, and applies measures to rate and weight the value of the
raters and the ratings, offers a model for media watching that invites scalable
applications with potential value for prospective news consumers and produc-
ers alike. As Web 2.0 generates new interactive methods of surveillance of and
feedback to news producers, the world of media watching is likely to evolve in
diverse and unpredictable directions, but the struggle for funding will continue
to mute the effects of most such enterprises.
Hope springs eternal for the prospects of a media watcher breaking through
to broader consciousness through the viral characteristics of the Internet, but