Ball, Jared | Whose Media | Edited by Saswat Pattanayak

My First Day As President I Would :: Jared Ball

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:18:45 -0400

My first day as president I would:

1. Pardon Leonard Peltier, Mumia Abu Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, David Gilbert and all other political prisoners.

2. I would immediately open investigations into a properly developed "Marshall Plan" for the US which would focus on rebuilding the most needy communities based on new Federal guidelines for minimum levels of housing, healthcare and education for all. This plan would include reparations for African descendants to all communities improperly treated by this society throughout history, with special attention to Indigenous communities who have been robbed and cheated by our government for decades.

3. I would undertake the immediate repeal NAFTA. This would be part of an initiative designed to improve the working conditions of all workers so as to eliminate concerns over immigration "legal" or "not."

4. I would repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (and free up licenses for low-power FM and increase funding to a redesigned public broadcasting community).

5. I would seek to immediately raise the requirements and pay of those in education (pre K - 12) to rival professional athletes. By capping salaries of both athletes and team owners we could fund the proper education of all our children.

6. I will never support legislating women's bodies. I would reject this even as an issue for discussion or debate. The debate must be redirected toward the issues women site as reasons such as, rape, poverty, disease, health care, for wanting an abortion. These are the real issues.

7. W.E.B. DuBois not only gave up on both major parties but this entire country in part in response to this nation's and Black America's inability to break from the two-party dominance fraudulently imposed on us. Our standards must be raised so as to make clear how neither major party has offered us anything but samples of what rights we were born with and long-since owed.

Statement of Candidacy for the Green Party Nomination for President :: Jared Ball

Thu, 19 Jul 2007 10:17:41 -0400

Greetings,

My name is Jared Ball and I am currently running for the Green Party’s presidential nomination. I have accepted an invitation to do this for several reasons. First among them are the horrendous and entirely unacceptable conditions of a majority of the people of this nation and world. To best address those conditions a new party is needed, a new style of politics is needed and we are developing just that kind of campaign. While looking to bring something new we are also looking to do so on the basis of some old and forgotten (or suppressed) politics. First among them are those of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. whose genuine goals have long been forcibly hidden beneath the frozen and isolated description of a dream. But 2008 being the 40th anniversary of his assassination demands that we run such a campaign on the basis of King’s truly revolutionary positions of calling for radical political organization around an end to systems which reproduce white supremacy, militarism and gross inequalities in wealth and access to society’s benefits. That campaign is here.

I have long been disillusioned with electoral politics and since 1992 only voted for members of the Green Party or those whose unaffiliated status necessitated that I write them onto the ballot. I joined the DC Statehood/Green Party several years ago specifically because it was the only electoral political party overtly, as clear by name, in favor of statehood for those colonized in the nation’s capitol and a broader platform which speaks to the continuing needs of a majority of the nation and world. I am not running to further bolster the mythology of the vote as panacea. I am not running for simple symbolism. I am running because the true majority of women, the poor, Black, Latino and Indigenous people need organization, need a place to cohere and the Green Party is the structure with the expressed platform that can provide just that kind of liberated space and I am the candidate that can properly articulate such a need. The party’s freedom from corporate dominance, its commitment to social justice and redistribution of society’s wealth and service and its call for diversity are far more substantive that those false claims of such made with varying degree by other parties. It is time to build a genuine populist party, one built on the proper politics of those who, like Kwame Ture once made clear, are no longer willing to accept the lesser of evil because, “we will not vote for evil, period.”

To that end we are developing a campaign which seeks to break convention by centering attention and focus on culture, those most oppressed and those who have long since given up on the vote and are looking for a new politics and new organizations. We are working with “the mayor of DC hip-hop” Head-Roc and others to provide a hip-hop and progressive artist tour which will reach out to the Indigenous, Black, Latino and poor communities who will help us develop new bases of support for the Green Party. This style of campaign will be brash and powerful representing the necessarily unorthodox politics we need and which are represented best by the Green Party. We are not targeting Democrats, Republicans or others to “steal” votes. We are not engaged in an effort to upset one or another major party candidacy as we do not see either as being able to legitimately represent the needs of the true majority and, therefore, see no reason to assist in the sabotage or ascendance of one or the other. And while we are not expecting to “win” the presidency we are expecting to help build a party to build community, society and a new world.

We are looking to build the original and genuine Rainbow Coalition of Fred Hampton, a coalition that breaks racial barriers and fosters unity along real material needs as opposed to the empty rhetoric of hate and division. Success in this case will be additional membership for the Green Party from the tens of millions of eligible but dormant voters. Success will be in demonstrating the difference of the party through the radical difference in our presentation and campaign approach. Voting or not voting are actions which by themselves, while equally political, are also equally insufficient for change. Real change can only come from organization on the basis of a truly radical platform such as offered by the Green Party. This is why I am running.

For more information, visit voxunion.com where video of my initial statement of candidacy can be found along with future campaign updates and methods of contact. Thank you for your time and support. Your party and politics are here. As Fred Hampton said, to you I say peace, if you are willing to fight for it.

White Liberals and Glass Houses: A Reminder that Black Radical Journalism is a Tradition :: Jared A. Ball

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 10:48:29 -0400

Even as they decry the practice of exclusion among the mainstream press, the white left-led media reform movement does the same to Black American and domestic or local news. While just a brief overview, one far from being exhaustive in its study, this commentary is both a postscript to past analysis performed on the subject and a prelude of more in-depth forthcoming work. However, following a recent study published by the white-left media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting or FAIR and in advance of my own participation at next year's Media Reform Conference in Memphis, I would at least like to propose the following for consideration.

This situation is precisely why I make mixtapes. As crazy as it sounds to some, “FreeMix Radio: The Original Mixtape Radio Show,” a Washington, D.C.-based freely distributed mixtape CD, is as likely to let an audience in on the real conditions of the United States, particularly Black America, or to allow for the airing of the real critical political hip-hop, as any popular media, including that produced from the white liberal left. In other spaces I have analyzed, and will continue to analyze, the fact that maybe more than any other popular form of musical expression, political (or at least non-abusive) hip-hop is least likely to gain access to any airwaves in the United States. Even my beloved WPFW Pacifica Radio—here in D.C. and with whom I currently work—has an allegiance to jazz that relegates only 5 hours a week to hip-hop and that’s it for the entire city, at least when it comes to the type of hiphop of which I speak. This leaves our youth solely at the hands and whims of a commercial pop culture world which, in the words of Jonathan Kozol, is bent on their cognitive decapitation. In terms of news or perspective, little changes when it comes to the white left. We agree that the right-led mainstream news environment is a destructive mess, withÂ many of us considering even attempting change in that arena a hopeless waste of time. But perhaps we will yet again need to condemn our comrades on the left and further the development of more Black-centered progressive or radical journalism.

The October 13, 2006 edition of Counterspin—the 30-minute weekly radio show from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a white liberal media watchdog group—was dedicated to their recent study on PBS's “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” It detailed the right-wing slant of the show and an overall lack of inclusiveness in major media. Among the report's findings were that on the “NewsHour,” men appeared 4 times as much as women, Republicans twice as often as Democrats and that only 15% of all guests were so-called people of color. But even with such distinguished guests as FAIR's own Julie Hollar (who also co-wrote the study) and media scholar Robert McChesney, founder of the media reform group Free Press, nothing was mentioned of their own inclusiveness failure rates. It must also be noted, parenthetically, that their standard of inclusion also remained fairly conservative in that it only measured Republican versus Democrat, as if that is somehow enough of a distinction. In other words, their study would be even more damning were it to include even more white radical perspectives of Communism, Socialism, Anarchy, etc. not to mention were it to include the varied radical concerns among African Americans (or Africans in America or New Afrikans). That is, if inclusion of Democrats is a standard, then where are we to look for Pan-Africanism or African Socialism?

But if we take their radio programs as signs of their particular range of coverage and perspective of that coverage, understanding as we do that FAIR, for instance, also publishes a print edition called Extra!, McChesney and Free Press all publish widely, etc. and so on, we would notice an absolute paucity of focus on African America. Future analysis will expand on this but I am enough of a listener and reader (I read McChesney widely and have interviewed him myself twice and even once emailed him with these very concerns) I feel confident in saying that similar findings would result.

The FAIR study mentioned uses invited guests as a leading component in their analysis. Being that I am not able to determine in all cases the race or ethnicity of guests by listening to them or reading their names in show summaries and recognizing that the inclusion of Black faces is not necessarily a guarantor of Black-centered or Black radical perspectives, I can make an assessment based on keynote topic selection as to whether or not particular attention was paid, in this case, to Black America. If we just look at the last calendar year and the primary or central themes of Counterspin we notice that only four of those themes were potentially specific to the conditions or struggles of African Americans and every single one was related to Katrina (shows on: 10/14/05, 1/27/06, 3/10/06 and 9/1/06). Each of these shows were follow ups on Katrina, but while we can give some benefit of the doubt, there would need to be further investigation to determine exactly what percentage of these stories were about Black people as opposed to issues of finance or the funneling of tax dollars via friendly no-bid contracts, etc. Even still, the horrific event some thought would bring media into more of a discussion of race and class has largely failed to do so—even within the media reform left wing.

McChesney is no better in this regard. In his weekly one-hour radio show Media Matters there has been little discussion of race and the Black struggle or current condition and when there is his invited guest expert is likely to be white male. In roughly the last year he too has had only 4 shows which discussed race at all, and these not necessarily the condition of Black America or its ongoing struggle, and 2 of these shows had white male guests Robert Jensen (10/02/05) and David Roediger (7/24/05). I wrote him recently an email reminding him that during these shows while he twice referenced writer and journalist Glen Ford (formerly of Black Commentator and now BlackAgendaReport.com) he had yet to actually invite him on as a featured guest. McChesney did remind me of what I had known that in the 2 other instances Sundiata Cha-Jua (3/19/06) and Salim Muwakkil (1/29/06) had appeared bringing the grand total of Black guests to 2 in the course of roughly 50 shows in the past year.

In preparation for our participation in Free Press upcoming conference on media reform my IndustryEars.com colleague Paul Porter too noted the lack of inclusion of Black voices and was even inclined to remark how Free Press is the Clear Channel of Media Reform. Porter continued, saying that, It has become blatantly obvious that the media reform movement is as racist as media ownership. While we continue to lose ground daily for some strange reason our efforts often lead us to align with the groups that marginalize us. Groups like Free Press and forums such as Pacifica’s “Democracy Now!” have systematically added token voices to appear as if our agendas are the same. When you look at key reform groups over the years, they consistently hire people as public spokespeople who don’t look or think like us. Until we collectively form a unified partnership, we will continue to be marginalized and basically used until further notice. I am sure I will hear the benefits from some of you on why we need to align with larger reform groups, but the proof has been in past history. I am most interested in change. Speaking at the Memphis media reform or conducting a panel is of no use unless it changes the landscape.

Ah, yes. “Democracy Now!,” the new weekday darling of the New and Old Left. In my 2005 study of that show, I noted that of the 176 possible shows in the calendar year prior to the levees flooding in New Orleans, only 21 shows, or 12% had any focus on Black America. Of those 21, 10 were historical references to the Civil Rights era, including 2 about the historic—yet re-emergent—story of Emmitt Till, but only 4 with any contemporary focus. Of the 4, all were with the late activist Damu Smith surrounding much of his organizational work on issues of politics and environmental racism. One would hope that this powerful media outlet would not need to await another of the caliber of Damu before these issues gain coverage. Or perhaps such a figure will go unnoticed because of such inattention.

Now, this is not to say that the white left is the cause of the problem. But they are a problem. The pattern of abandoning Black American concerns for those considered more pressing or more exotic is again playing out in 2006. The fact remains that listeners to the radio programs discussed above will have a greater working knowledge of Iraq, Israel or Palestine than of Black America. I am sure part of the response will be that there is a war, or that international news is sorely lacking in mainstream press. No doubt this is true. However, I think it is more of a return of the left’s abandonment of the Movement when Civil Rights turned into Black Power:You don't want us? The fuck you too! We can cover Vietnam or the environment or the whales! It is necessary to inform the nation of its role in and relationship to international politics. However, an overly intense focus on international issues, or to domestically tend only to cover issues at the highest federal levels, borders on copping out. Why? Because in each case the mostly white audience will feel appeased of its guilt in being complicit with a North American juggernaut, seeing themselves as powerless to make real change. More attention to local and domestic concerns would be more likely to challenge people to become more active in fixing, internally, the nation that most of the world rightly recognizes as the greatest threat to world peace.

But what we are seeing now are the remnants of the Civil Rights and Black Power era sellouts and conformists who have abandoned any attempt at domestic revolution in favor of challenging mainstream coverage of federal-level or international concerns. In the end the white left follow an agenda set by the elite owners of media and the world and leave the rest of us unsupported, protected or covered. The issue of communication, as Mark Lloyd has said, is a civil rights one but we are not seeing the same kind of white liberal, progressive or radical journalism that supported those efforts. Meanwhile, popular Black media has convinced us we need no such similar effort in Black journalism.

White America, as Dr. King said 40 years ago, has not done enough to condition itself out of white supremacy. Today, I feel a sense from this wing of political struggle that says, We did that Black stuff already. You got your rights, you have celebrities and Black journalists. We're moving onward and upward. Well, despite the imagery, Black America is no better off today than at any other time. We remain imprisoned, ill-educated, with poverty and segregation levels that rival any other point in our history. Plantation slavery remains the standard by which we measure the condition of African Americans, which, unfortunately, prevents us from seeing that what currently exists is not progress but the proverbial knife being pulled 5 inches out of a 9-inch deep wound, as Malcolm X once made clear. And of any segment of the population who should be most able; given access, education and proclaimed criticism to see through the barrage of false imagery its our white friends of the upper-middle class left. But more likely is the reality that the trend remains much like Dr. King again said of the white left: They have in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor where it appears as though the white segregationist and the average white citizen has more in common with one ano ther than either had with the negro.

Dr. Todd Steven Burroughs and I have argued for the creation of a B-SPAN, a Black national news service dedicated to year-round coverage of Black struggle and condition. I make mixtapes, do low-power and Internet radio—all of which is meant to support or exemplify underground and alternative journalism or the development of space for the expression of a decolonized culture. But more will need to be done in media and political organization if real progress is to occur. We must remember that the primary reason, despite a lack of intent to include from the white left, that Black Americans have eschewed "media reform" as a "movement" is because from the beginning it was and is understood that dominant media work for the dominant and that there is little chance of democratizing media in a decidedly un-democratic society. From Sam Cornish to Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, Robert and Mabel Williams, Sam Napier, Malcolm X, et. al., Black radicalism has always included an underground/alternative press component. None argued that reforming media would reform society they all argued that in order to reform or revolutionize society a supportive media would have to be created. And this is not exclusive to Black America. As noted by Lauren Kessler, radical journalism is a "tradition", not an anomalous time-bound occurrence. This brief look at the white left need only be a reminder that we cannot expect that movement to be ours.

Black America, whether in journalism or larger political struggle, is fast-approaching complete isolation mostly from half-hearted and apolitical media inclusion and journalistic practice but also from a complete inattention from our white left comrades. As we work within we must also work without.

IN SEARCH OF 'B-SPAN' : The Promise of Black Media Self-Determination NOW :: Drs Jared A. Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs

Fri, 21 Apr 2006 10:30:47 -0400

“If the people only knew/ The power of the people” —From the 1970s song of the same name

“The Negro race has enough power right in our hands to accomplish anything we want to." —The late, great Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

“Power, culture and communication are indissolubly linked.” –– John Downing

Cell phones that record sound and take pictures. CD burners. iPods, audio and video. Digital cameras. Scanners. Mixtapes. Audio recording and posting software. Sites like youtube.com where anyone can post video.

Is this enough for a revolution? Nope, because revolutions overturn systems. But it’s enough for an evolution, or at least a movement toward one—if we choose to evolve.

We have historically spent decades complaining about mass media’s power to set the agenda of our minds, and we should. We must always remember that the term “media” is most often described narrowly and inaccurately by their technologies or methods of conveyance. Media are not merely “television, radio, film, books, internet, etc.” These are the technologies that make media available. Such a definition discourages a proper understanding of media as societal symbols, definitions, norms and ideology all intimately linked to questions of who will hold power and how will that power be maintained. As media are primary shapers of consciousness and, as the late, great Black psychologist Amos Wilson said, “consciousness may be perceived as the fundamental and essential form of power,” the charge with which we are faced is evident.

So we have slowly begun to take command of what’s in front of us.

Some examples:

* Many of our national gatherings, including the National Urban League and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, are webstreamed from beginning to end by broadcastURBAN.com.

* Activists from across the country have created websites that contain large portions of audio, some historical some current (ex: voxunion.com, brothermalcolm.net).

* The Chicago Defender, a historic Black newspaper, has begun “Chicago Defender Inside Black America,” a podcast. Interview subjects have included journalist/author Robin Stone, cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson and Nation of Islam leader Minister Louis Farrakhan.

* We have established at least two national oral history interview projects–the National Visionary Leadership Project, based in Washington, D.C. and The HistoryMakers, based in Chicago.

Obviously, the five corporations that control the vast majority of what Earth knows about itself are not losing sleep over any of this. They still have access to political and economic power, and they have used it well to block any education or inspiration not sanctioned by them. (Our great ancestor, the African world historian John Henrik Clarke, repeatedly wrote and said that Europeans not only colonized the world, they colonized information about the world.) Unfortunately, we, like the other groups of consumers that comprise America, are following the “program.” And the scores of websites that now exist do not compare to the easy accessibility of CDs and DVDs from Hollywood and Bad Boy, or the so-called “free” media of radio conglomerates who pump the worst hiphop on the air 24 hours a day.

And it’s not like we can depend on cable channels and radio conglomerates such as Black Entertainment Television, TV One, the Black Family Channel and Radio One. They want to make money. Period. And with very few exceptions, they would not “waste” money providing information that would get Black people to critically examine their cultural environment. Programming like that won’t get you enough money to buy a mansion, a stable and some horses. Today we are in no greater proportional control over media or Black image and cultural expression than at any other point in our history. Ours is to reclaim a mission begun so many years ago to produce and provide media generated for our community’s benefit. We need to assure the production of news targeted to Black America that is not filtered through a dependency on White-elite-corporate funding. It is precisely this model that has resulted in a vapid substitute where ostensible Blackness is presented as authentic control or concern. A new mass medium (or media) must be cultivated in an insulated manner that allows for Black-centered news to reach the mass of Black America. It is essential and today’s need is no less so than at any other point in our history.

So, with apologies to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and the title of his last book, where do we go from here—chaos or community? Only the future knows, and it’s not telling.

But since King was brought up, the past has some bearing. King once said of education what could equally be said today of education and media. “Whatever pathology may exist in Negro families,” King wrote in that last book of his, “is far exceeded by this social pathology in the school system that refuses to accept a responsibility that no one else can bear and then scapegoats Negro families to do the job.”

Or how about this quote, from the same book? "How shall we turn the ghettos into a vast school?" King wrote. "How shall we make every street corner a forum, not a lounging place for trivial gossip and petty gambling, where life is wasted and human experience withers to trivial sensations?"

With the vast majority of Black America concentrated in about 30 metropolitan areas, what is becoming increasingly clear is that with increasingly less and less money, Black people could establish and sustain either an educational channel—or, at least, a forum for downloads, since channels could soon be a thing of the past. Such an institution could, eventually, help to solve some of our informational and spiritual needs. We could clear out our attics and basements and provide the world with raw historical memory not edited for the white, corporate mainstream—“content” that would make the Ancestors content.

The implementation of that idea, though, would require a kind of unity that wouldn’t get a 21st century “race man” or “race woman” a Porsche, a prestigious fellowship or a spot on the lecture circuit. We would need more than leadership summits on C-SPAN every February. We would have to want, and pay for, the same power over our own (perception of) reality as those who formed the broadcast networks and public television wanted—and got, thanks in no small part to white supremacy.

Any attempt at community uplift must consist of community consensus. This requires unfettered communication. We cannot continue to hold “State Of The Black Union”’s that are dependent either on white corporate giants like McDonald’s and Exxon or the graciousness of a C-SPAN that was created by the power players in the lily-white cable industry to protect itself from federal regulation. The 21st century must have an improved, multi-media Black national news service far more substantive than a Black-faced conduit for Disney, a la Radio One and its constant pipelining of ABC Radio Network News on its many stations. National agendas need national news on an ongoing basis. A B-SPAN would be part of that solution.