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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Oct. 5, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
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SAN FRANCISCO

Protest hits corporate media control

Hundreds of people marched from San Francisco's United Nations Plaza to Union Square Sept. 23 to protest the National Association of Broadcasters convention and the corporate monopolization of the airwaves. The NAB was the main lobbying group that pushed the 1996 Telecommunications Act through Congress. The Telecommunications Act allows corporate broadcasting companies to own up to eight stations per city.

Another theme at today's protest was to challenge the criminalization of microband, low-power radio stations that pop up on radio dials across the country. At a rally before the march, the Chicano theater group Teatro Campesino described those stations as guerrilla media and an important alternative voice in poor communities.

Signs, banners and chants from the International Action Center denounced the corporate media for distorting or ignoring important issues, like the case of death-row political activist Mumia Abu Jamal, escalating U.S. intervention in Colombia and the deaths of 250 Iraqi children each day due to the U.S./UN sanctions.

--Story & photo by Bill Hackwell

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