This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under News, Connection, Media, Political Act, Class. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Bill Moyers on Fire, Burn with him
Last weekend the National Conference for Media Reform met in Memphis, Tennessee. Please don’t just pass over that information with mild interest. Video highlights and all audio are available for you to hear. Click. Listen. The depth of what is available is astonishing.
In particular, I want to mention Bill Moyers. He’s on fire, and I want you to burn with him. Yesterday’s Democracy Now! consisted only of headlines and a replay of most of Bill Moyers’ Plenary Speech to the conference (also available unedited). If you can spare only one hour listening online this week, listen to Bill Moyers.
Moyers hasn’t been silent since leaving PBS. He’s become even more outspoken than I recall him being in his years on television. The call for his return has succeeded. Bill Moyers will be back on PBS this Spring with “Bill Moyers’ Journal.”
A theme Bill Moyers has come back to often is the power of narrative. I’m sure I am not the only one who remembers his series from nearly 20 years ago, The Power of Myth, an extended interview with Joseph Campbell. It is clear to me that this experience had a profound effect on him and his understanding of the ways we use narrative. A speech he gave in December has been adapted as an article in the current issue of The Nation, “For America’s Sake”, published elsewhere as “The Narrative Imperative,” which gets closer to the heart of the matter.
What I hear Bill Moyers saying is this: we have the power, even the obligation, to change the stories being told us about our society. We should not sit passively listening to versions of how things came to be the way they are and why, versions that serve elites who hold money and power so tightly. This is what I have heard from one of my important teachers. Changing the stories is also an important means to change discussed in David Korten’s The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, a book that I read with a community group in anticipation of his visit to SLC last Fall (sponsored by the Sustainability Salon). Change the stories. How? There is no one answer.
After you are burning with inspiration from Bill Moyers’ speech from last Friday, what will you do to change the story?
Archive
January 26th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
[…] What does it take to get people moving? I’m going to venture back to the idea that we learn and pass on knowledge through story and say that we need a good story that tells us exactly what can happen when, for example, one media giant owns all local radio stations with no live operator, just a national feed. To get average American people fighting media consolidation, it takes a good story. We have that story in Eric Klinenberg’s new book, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media. Five years ago this week a train derailed in Minot, North Dakota leaking thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals into the air. One person died and hundreds were treated for immediate health problems. The city’s six non-religious commercial radio stations – all owned by Clear Channel – never aired warnings for local residents. […]