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‘Independent Media Is About Introducing People to Each Other’

Janine Jackson interviewed Laura Flanders about independent journalism for the September 25, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

MP3 Link

Janine Jackson: It doesn’t matter how many channels you have; if you sift through them, you will find lamentably little journalism that isn’t mainly stale frameworks and rhetoric turning round on itself. News is press releases from the powerful; analysis is white men espousing variants on the status quo. At a historical moment demanding bold change, corporate news media serve as blinders, returning us again and again to the trodden path.

That insularity, that top-downism, is not a quality of journalism itself, of course, but only as it’s overwhelmingly practiced in the media we mainly see. Seek out new media, and you may also find a new way of doing journalism: different sources, different stories, different ideas and, most fundamentally, a different relationship to power and to change. It’s almost enough to make you want to get out of bed in the morning.

That’s what we’re going to talk about now with journalist Laura Flanders. Longtime listeners will know Laura as the original host and producer of CounterSpin; we co-hosted for many years. She now hosts the Laura Flanders Show, which, as of very recently, has expanded its reach, and will be airing on PBS stations from Arizona to Vermont. She joins us now by phone from Sullivan County, New York. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Laura Flanders.

Laura Flanders: Oh, thank you, Janine. Yes, get out of bed in the morning, we can do this!

JJ: We need all the help we can to do it, though. And that includes new visions. So let’s start right there. I mean, the Laura Flanders Show itself is not new, but it is coming to a new audience, for which we say congratulations. How do you talk about the vision for the show? What is it that you set out to do each week?

Laura Flanders: “The reality that we live in today is not immutable. It is the product of choices, of power dynamics, of motivations of certain sectors over others, a set of priorities that we can shift. And not just in some abstract, pie-in-the-sky, theoretical thinking, but actually right here, right now.”

LF: We say it’s “the TV and radio program where the people who say it can’t be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it”—from Jim Hightower, with his permission, I might say. And I think that about sums it up. We are, some people say, “the solutions of tomorrow, today.” Basically, what we’re saying is, the reality that we live in today is not immutable. It is the product of choices, of power dynamics, of motivations of certain sectors over others, a set of priorities that we can shift. And not just in some abstract, pie-in-the-sky, theoretical thinking, but actually right here, right now.

We try as much as possible to talk about and to report on examples of shifting power in the worlds of arts, politics and economics. So whether that’s land trusts or worker-owned co-ops, or community wealth-building in cities like Preston in the UK, or even right here in Sullivan County, it’s really trying to say, look, there may be experts in your neighborhood that you can team up with and make a real difference.

Not to say we don’t need government power, too; we do. I sometimes say we can do bottom-up change about as far as our bottom, and then we need help from government. But we try to hit that sweet spot of inspiring people to make change, and also to realize what more change needs to be made.

JJ: We literally have pundits arguing about whether something is possible that is actually happening somewhere else, and it can be so frustrating, which is why I love, “where the people who say it can’t be done take a backseat to the people who are doing it.” But it’s not just a what, of course; it’s a who. Media don’t just tell us what to think, they tell us who’s worth listening to, who’s an expert, and “regular” people are generally not considered experts, including on their own lives. They may get to say “I’m poor,” or “We want police to stop harming our community,” but they aren’t usually asked for more than a soundbite on their ideas about how to change things. They don’t lead the piece. And that’s something else that’s different, is who; who are the voices in the show?

LF: Well, you know, I learnt so much of what I do and how I think from you all, and our time at FAIR together. And I think even back then, we used to say, look, the corporate media is about directing public eyeballs and ears to corporations, to advertisers. And our independent media is about introducing people to each other. Our democracy, and the way we cover it, tends to cast our glance always upwards, like, “Who’s at the top of the ticket? Where are the powerful, and what are they doing?” As opposed to laterally, towards one another: “How do we together make change? And where are some examples of exactly that?” So that is exactly what we try to do on this show, is to give people some sense of how change happens, what goes into the pudding, and what people can do to change that.

I think my entire job, Janine, frankly, is introducing people to each other. That’s what we try to do on the show.

JJ: Well, just a look at the guestlist for the show on Covid in a rural community: You’ve got an assemblywoman, a labor organizer, a cheeseworker and her daughter, a public health director, a school lunch manager, musicians. I mean, beyond the new content that they bring, it says something to put these people on the same plane as one another, as it were, instead of what we usually see, which is: “Power” means the expert, who’s in-studio; and those outside of power, well, they’re the colorful background or the soundbite or the B-roll.

Laura Flanders Show: Covid in the Country

Laura Flanders Show (10/4/20)

LF: That’s a great example. I love this “Covid in the Country” episode. You know, I’m a journalist, as you are, and when Covid hit, and my partner got Covid, we moved out of the city. We settled down in this little country cabin I’ve had for 30 years, but never thought of living in full time. And after about a month, I was like, “Oh, OK, now what? What’s happening right around here?”

And that was when I reached out to a friend of mine, who works in community radio at WJFF here at Jeffersonville, it used to be hydro-powered community radio, in the Southwest Catskills. And she knew lots of folks, had some idea what was going on, we teamed up together. I figured out I could do reporting with an iPhone on a very long selfie stick and a face mask.

And we went out to talk to people about what the heck was going on. Because I looked around and realized, even though the national news, the network news, every night was bringing me the news from Washington and New York mostly, a little bit of LA occasionally, what we were hearing was that rural America wasn’t really feeling this pandemic; it was an urban thing.

Laura Flanders coping with the pandemic by interviewing via selfie stick

Laura Flanders coping with the pandemic by interviewing via selfie stick (photo: Sullivan County Democrat/Sabrina Artel).

Not true! This little tiny county—which is just 100 miles out of New York, but it’s the sixth most rural congressional district in the country—the incidence rate, the number of cases per head of population, was actually higher than Manhattan! So we were all trying to figure out why that was. And when you looked at the geographic distribution of Covid-positivity, it concentrated in the towns that had the largest Latinx population, the populations that were working in poultry plants, of meat packers and dairies, and you name it.

So it was there that we focused and, sure enough, as soon as we started doing that, we found people at the Rural & Migrant Ministry, who were working their hearts off to get masks to workers and information to workers, and along with the information about health, the information about signing onto the Census. A really invaluable kind of organizing that paid off quickly—the rates started coming down — and really educated the people who lived here about how they, just like the big cities, were dependent on a very precarious, underpaid pool of fairly exploited labor, many of them undocumented, many of them female.  I think it was a wake-up call for the people of Sullivan County.

But there’s one other little bit of the story, Janine, that you would like, which is that as I did this work, I discovered, as if I didn’t know it before, just how important local media can be. It was the local radio station that was reporting these local town hall meetings that were being recorded on Facebook Live by a little guy in the town hall, who was holding up his iPhone to the health commissioner as she spoke every week. It was local newspapers—in this case, the River Reporter, the Sullivan County Democrat—who were reporting on what was happening. If people here had relied on the news from New York City, they would never have known what was going on, and they wouldn’t have known what to do to look after one another.

And then the final little coda for the story is, when we talk about an “ecosystem”: We put together this episode and we send out a press release to the local press, and who should respond, saying she wants to write about the episode, but a woman, Isabel Braverman, who had interned for me when we started the show years ago; she worked with Jeff Cohen at the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College! And I just thought, OK, there you have it. There’s our ecosystem in a nutshell: Independent media makers, independent media outlets, print and radio and TV, coming together to create some echo effect for an important story that was being missed by how many thousands of well-paid media outlets that are just 100 miles away.

JJ: Another thing that sets the show apart, that you touched on earlier, is its international scope. You know, we are one world, but corporate media hide that fact like it’s their job, and their world looks kind of like the board in a game of Risk.

But on your show, it’s not like, “Ooh, field trip to Europe.” It’s just that if you’re going to tell a story on worker cooperatives, well, that could be a story from upstate New York, or it could be a story from Spain. You’re just choosing to ignore some kinds of map lines. And does that, too, come from a particular approach to journalism?

Laura Flanders Show: Cooperation vs. Authoritarianism in Spain

Laura Flanders Show (9/11/20)

LF: Well, the Spain story arose from the fact that I thought, “Hmm, where could we tell this story?” You know, one thing we often do in the US commercial media, in the corporate media, is divide our economic stories from our political stories. So you have the economy over here, and if you have some human interest, cutesy story about a co-op, it’s on page B-39, but the political story is some other page, and the two never meet. And activism often splits itself in that way, too, that you have people working on the economy, and people working on politics.

And I was thinking about the coming election of 2020 and thinking, hmm, a lot of our progressive  folks are going to be focusing on the electoral, but what about this economic development story that we need to maintain a drumbeat on? Because the economy doesn’t go away and, gosh, it certainly hasn’t gone away as an issue this year.

Where could we look at the relationship of cooperative economics and solidarity economics as a way of resisting dictatorship, authoritarian government, far-right autocracy, you know? I didn’t think it was, let’s say, inappropriate or irrelevant to look at that question as we approach 2020.

And so Spain was the obvious example, because it was there that the world’s largest worker-owned co-ops grew up as a way for the occupied region of the Basque Country to survive under Europe’s longest dictatorship, the Franco dictatorship that followed the Spanish Civil War. So they were a great model of how solidarity economics and cooperation helped communities survive, that leadership in Madrid, in the capital city, had no interest in employing and giving healthcare to and caring for — any of it. It seems strangely relevant, Janine, to our experience here in the US, and I was really lucky to be able to do that story with the help of the Democracy Collaborative in Washington, and the Beneficial State Bank, who helped me go on a delegation.

JJ: I guess what I want to underscore is, just as on the story about Covid in a rural county, you could have told the story with some politicians, local politicians albeit, and an epidemiologist, and put some farm workers in the background; and you could have, on the worker cooperative story, said, “Oh, yeah, that’s a very interesting story, but that’s Spain, why would I tell that to a US audience?” It seems to me that you’re overwriting some of the rules of “traditional” or corporate journalism when you do things like that, when you elevate sources that aren’t generally elevated, and when you compare internationally, as though that were a relevant thing to do.

LF: Yeah, well, it goes back to that “introducing people to each other” thing. I mean, you’re completely right, I think we are given news from abroad with a very clear emphasis on “this is foreign, no relevance to you,” when, in fact, so many of these stories are examples of places and people not unlike ourselves, doing things that we could well do likewise, if we just got to hear about them.

We have another episode coming up from Preston, in the UK, one of the deindustrialized cities of the Industrial Revolution textile world, that, after many years of trying to tempt big corporations to come and give them a few jobs in exchange for paying no taxes for a long time, and then shuttling profits far away to, in this case, London, or corporate headquarters elsewhere, a local government said, “Enough of that. What if we kept our resources, such as they are, right here and used our government money, our city money, to invest in local businesses, local contractors, procure locally? And, sure, we may not be the wealthiest people in the world, but we can support ourselves and support one another, if we’re not busily trying to tempt Walmart in.” And that’s exactly what they did. And, again, a model that is relevant, is interesting, they speak English. I mean, this does not have to be a foreign story.

And I also think, when you talk about “who gets to be an expert,” it is always true, or almost always true: Poor people, women of color, women, people of color, immigrants, people who don’t speak English—in the US corporate media, they only ever get to be, like, the color, what you used to say at FAIR about being “wildlife footage” with your fist in the air. Women especially, I think, we get to have experiences—“Oh, my uterus hurts,” you know—but we don’t get to have expertise: “Well, I actually am a gynecologist with expertise; I know what I’m talking about.” Or, better than that: “I’m a Supreme Court justice.” You know what I mean? It’s different, who gets to be an expert. And I think that’s one of the fundamental things we try to shift on our program.

JJ: I’ve asked you this before: What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and solutions journalism? By which I don’t mean carrying water for the latest Bill Gates scheme, but just what we’re talking about: forward-looking journalism that takes human rights and justice as actual imperatives, as opposed to value-neutral things that some people disagree about.

Now, to some people, that might just sound like journalism. But somehow it has a reputation as being soft or uncritical, or else not objective, too advocatory or something. Why can’t we say “solutions journalism” without making people giggle, somehow?

LF: It’s an experiment, I will say. You’ve said this many times on this program—and huge props to you for maintaining CounterSpin; it’s one of my go-to podcasts every week— you regularly point out that we don’t have a free market of choice in our media, when it comes to what show would we prefer to watch, because there often isn’t anybody in the D-E-F-G section of the choice spectrum.

This is an experiment, our program. We are also told: People like drama, they like the cat fight, they like partisan politics; we’re offering none of that. Will people watch? Well, we’ll find out.

I think there’s never been a better climate for programming that’s forward-looking, not altogether partisan, really about alternative models. I mean, we’ve just lived through, we are living through, the greatest economic depression in our lifetime. We’ve got 30% to 40% of all the jobs that have been lost since Covid unlikely to return. We have one in four restaurants that are closed now probably going to stay closed, and 14 million kids in food-insecure households, which is three times as many as we had in 2008.

We’re facing a crisis; we’re on a precipice: Are we about to rebuild our economy as just Amazonland, with massive amounts of hedge fund capital and vulture capital swooping in and buying up bankrupt and hard-up small businesses? Or are we going to find models, maybe even in other countries, of investing locally, preserving our some kind of semblance of democracy at the local level, at the economic level, and then begin a conversation about how we could reprioritize people versus profits in our society? If we can’t find an audience for programming that talks about that, in this moment, I’ll hang up my spurs.

You know, I probably won’t; I’d keep trying. But this is the moment to give this particular exercise a try. Is it “solutions”? I’m not sure. I think it’s smart thinking; I think we’re putting the public back into public affairs. We’re not serving up solutions, necessarily, but we are serving up ways to think about what new questions we need to raise, and to remind ourselves that we’re constantly making choices that bring us to where we are now. And I think it was Einstein that said we can’t get ourselves out of the crisis with the same kind of thinking that got us into it. We’re on the same page; I love what you do, Janine. And we’ll just keep at it. I think that one thing that can be said about our generation is, we don’t stop. And I refuse to stop.

So now we are going from being on satellite television, Free Speech TV and Link TV, to being on public television stations all across the country, and on YouTube, so people can still find us on YouTube, and we have a podcast and a radio show playing on many of the same stations that carry CounterSpin.

But if you want to see the premiere every week, you go to the PBS World Channel, and we premiere every Sunday, 11:30 a.m. Send a message that you appreciate this programming; we are going to need you to, and if your station’s not so far playing our show—and you can find out from the little tracker on our website—ask them to. We need you. We don’t have the well-paid PR and promotions outfit that, I don’t know, Wall Street Week has.

JJ: You say this launch on PBS is, at this point, an experiment, but it didn’t just happen. There was a lot of work there. Are there particular barriers to getting that broader platform that independent projects face?

LF: It is almost insurmountable, Janine, and if it hadn’t been for a lot of philanthropic support to make this leap, we would never have done it. You know the dirty little secret of public television is that—apart from a handful of programs, and I mean fewer than a handful, basically two thumbs’ worth—all of the content that you see on your local public television station, you’ve not only paid for through your taxes, but also probably through philanthropy, because it’s independently produced, independently funded and independently distributed at a cost to the maker, which is to say a little outfit like mine.

So it’s not an ecosystem that is easy to penetrate, but it is one that I think needs fresh content. And if we’re going to keep our public television system at all, in any shape at all, we need to watch it, we need to support it, we need to bring it some fresh programming.

And maybe PBS World, which is also streaming online, could be some sort of future lifeboat for the system. It’s getting a younger audience, more diverse audience; but they have no money for publicity.

So, we’ve talked about this before, there needs to be way more public investment, which is to say government investment, in a noncommercial public television system. That would make it a whole lot easier for people like me to get on. But in the meantime, we do it by hook or by crook, and with a whole lot of contributions. We get nothing back, not a penny, not one.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Laura Flanders. You can learn more about the Laura Flanders Show, including whether you can watch it on your local PBS station, on the site LauraFlanders.org. Congratulations again, Laura, and thanks for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

LF: Thank you, Janine, and thanks for being there all the way.

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