Defend free speech hybrid town hall

This summarizes a hybrid “Defend free speech” town hall 2025-01-25 co-hosted by Friends of Community Media, PeaceWorks Kansas City, Pacifica Fightback, and the African People’s Socialist Party / Uhuru. A 29:00 mm:ss podcast excerpted from the event became the 2025-02-08 episode of the fortnightly "Media & Democracy" show syndicated for the Pacifica Radio Network of over 200 community radio stations.

It is posted here to invite others to contribute other perspectives, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view while citing credible sources and treating others with respect.

29:00 mm:ss podcast from Interview conducted 2025-01-25 of Omali Yeshitela, Elisa Mejia, Gerald Horne by Spencer Graves about Attacks by Trump and supporters on free speech

This summarized a hybrid "Defend free speech town hall" held 2025-01-25. Roughly 100 attended via Zoom and another 25 joined together at Simpson House, Kansas City, Missouri. The event began with three keynoters:

• Omali Yeshitela, chair of the African People’s Socialist Party / Uhuru,
• Elisa Mejia of Insurgencia Femenina (Feminine Insurgency), Spanish-language program on KPFK, Pacifica radio station in Los Angeles, California.
• Dr. Gerald Horne, history professor at the University of Houston and host of Freedom Now  on KPFK.

Keynotes

Yeshitela described how he and two others with the African People’s Socialist Party had been brought to trial in a US federal court on criminal charges of acting as agents of Russia without filing as such and for conspiring to spread Russian propaganda and sow political discord in the US. He said the government expected them to accept a plea bargain. They refused and instead fought and won: They were found not guilty of acting as foreign agents. They were convicted of conspiring to spread Russian propaganda and sentenced to three years probation and community service, and the judge acknowledge that they do community service routinely.

Mejia spoke about the need to expand Spanish-language programming, especially at KPFK in Los Angeles, and about her program, Insurgencia femenina. She said they organize community events that both build their audience and raise money.

Prof. Horne had two recommendations:

1. A campaign to raise funds for a national and international news bureau at WPFW in Washington, DC, to share content with the media organs from the BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and their allies, such as Telesur, Press TV, Radio Havana, etc. He said, "the anti-Jim Crow, anti-racist movement accelerated with the founding of Pacifica radio about 75 years ago and the ascendancy of TV as a household appliance. ... [A] turning point in our movement arose in 1955 when a black teenager, Emmett Till from Chicago, was lynched in Mississippi with his terribly disfigured body left in an open casket at his Illinois funeral with photos ... distributed globally, creating tremendous pressure on US imperialism. A particular target of the post-1945 Red Scare were unions. ...[M]y book, Class struggle in hollywood, ... deals with this fraught matter." ... [A] central thrust of the Red Scare was to weaken left-leaning unions, which largely succeeded. The National Maritime Union, for example, ... was weakened severely to the point where US vessels have been equted with being floating slums."
2. A new program for Pacifica with a name like "Fascism Watch" to fight back against Trumpism in joint with organizations like the National Lawyers' Guild, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Breakouts and report backs

The presentations were followed by questions for the speakers then breakout sessions with one session in Kansas City and the rest virtual. Most of the report backs from the breakouts focused on how to improve the five Pacifica-owned stations (KPFA in Berkeley, CA; KPFK in Los Angeles; WBAI, New York; WPFW in Washington, DC: and KPFT, Houston, TX).

Spencer Graves, who led the Kansas City breakout group, said we need to improve local news and social media. Media scholars including Robert McChesney and Victor Pickard have recommended citizen-directed subsidies for local news nonprofits. This would represent an Internet-savvy reincarnation of the postal subsidies provided by the US Postal Service Act of 1792, which helped give the US during the first half of the 1800s possibly more independent news publishers per capita or per million population than at any other time and place in human history. This encouraged literacy and limited political corruption, both of which helped the early US stay together and grow both in land area and economically while contemporary New Spain / Mexico fractured, shrank and stagnated economically.

Most people alive today benefit from newspapers published 200 years ago, which they have never read nor (in most cases) even heard of. Those newspapers helped build an open political environment that helped create demand for new products and services while also supporting research in basic science used by those new products and services. Public health measures adopted early in the US have yet to be adopted in some countries with less open media environments.

In the 1850s and 1860s, newspaper markets became increasingly dominated by publishers with expensive high speed presses. That trend combined with consolidation of ownership of media outlets gradually reduced the number of independent publishers. Today’s Internet allows anyone to become a publisher, but audience shares are still highly concentrated. This concentration of ownership includes commercial social media companies that make money through rates of market segmentation without precedents in human history, pushing people into echo chambers that reinforce and amplify their preconceptions.

This has increased political polarization and violence, while making billionaires out of Internet entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said, “the shortest path to a click is anger or hate.” Anger and hate have helped attract audiences to different media market segments for centuries. Internet companies can do that more easily than before, because of all the data they collect on user behaviors.

Graves recommended three responses to this threat.

1. We have to talk politics with people with whom we may disagree, but calmly, with respect and humility, because the alternative is killing people over misunderstandings.
2. Ask public officials, e.g., city council members, to match what they spend on accounting, advertising, media and public relations, with citizen-directed subsidies for local news nonprofits, as suggested by McChesney and Pickard. Many cities that do this can have local media matching the world's leading democracies. Graves has recommended experiments in different ways of doing this in a Wikiversity article on “Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government”; see also his interview with Prof. Pickard.
3. We need changes in Internet law to make it no longer profitable for Internet companies to make money amplifying political polarization and violence.

The threat

Internet company executives have knowingly increased political polarization and violence including the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, because doing otherwise might have reduced their profits. Documentation of this is summarized in Category:Media reform to improve democracy.

Discussion

[Interested readers are invite to comment here, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources and treating others with respect.]

Bibliography

• Gerald Horne (2001). Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930–1950 : Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds & Trade Unionists (in en). University of Texas Press. Wikidata Q132068114. ISBN 0-292-73138-8. 
• Timothy Neff; Victor Pickard (2024). "Funding Democracy: Public Media and Democratic Health in 33 Countries". The International Journal of Press/Politics 29 (3): 601-627. doi:10.1177/19401612211060255. Wikidata Q131468289. ISSN 1940-1612. 
• David Paul Nord (2015). 4. "The Victorian City and the Urban Newspaper". Making News: The Political Economy of Journalism in Britain and America from the Glorious Revolution to the Internet: 73-106. Wikidata Q132041708.