Obviously, it's far easier to have your own show than to be a guest on a show whose host is aggressively hostile to you. Just how many Americans do you think know who James Carville or Jon Stewart is? Are they better known than Karl Marx or Michael Moore or even Noam Chomsky? If Ohio State students serve as a sample to study name recognition -- they tend to be as "Middle-American" as they come -- Americans are better acquainted with the latter than the former.
>><snipping stuff on resources and a liberation news service>
>
>part of the issue here, though, is *mass* appeal, not Yet Another
>Revolutionary Rag. seriously, it's like confining ourselves to a
>ghetto. it's what "the enemy" wants us to do, don't you think?
>that's one of the problems with a network like pacifica *in
>principle*: it's the progressive radio ghetto.
>
>another example to tack on with moore, and in many ways a more
>successful one: the twilight zone. rod serling had very progressive
>politics, and after getting shut down repeatedly, came up with a way
>to deliver a lot of the same messages, as kierkegaard, again, might
>say, indirectly.
>
>i obviously don't have any objection to unabashedly
>leftist/progressive discourse, reportage, etc. etc. not at all. on
>the contrary, it's a good thing. but it's not what we're talking
>about here, i don't think.
***** Perhaps the first shows to offer more varied reflections on US foreign policy were the anthologies (Worland 1996). _The Twilight Zone_ raised the possibility of US troops dying in Vietnam in 1963, a year before the Tonkin Gulf Resolution formalized US entry into the war as an acknowledged combatant. _The Outer Limits_ too offered stories that dealt with the situation in southeast Asia. Both dealt with other Cold War reflections, too -- sometimes critically, sometimes repeating established cliches. However, if the anthology shows periodically pushed the edges of the creative and political envelope, they were also shaped by the limited tolerance of controversial material by networks and sponsors. _Twilight Zone_ creator Rod Sterling once characterized himself not as "a meek conformist," but rather "a tired non-conformist." He noted, "I'm not writing any material that lies in the danger zone. . . . It no longer behooves us to bite the hand that feeds us" (Boddy 1984, 106). <http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/mepp/exofile/sftv.html> *****
Those are the limits and possibilities offered by the corporate media. Michael Denning's _The Cultural Front_ gives us an extensive discussion of examples of popular and avant-garde politico-cultural expressions in the media ranging from music, theater, literature, radio, to film in the days of the Popular Front (which came under severe attacks during the days of the Red Purge).
I'm not a mass media worker, however. Are you? If you are one, you may try to exploit the possibilities while learning to live with the limits. If you are not one, though, you will have to approach the question of communication differently. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>