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Rev. Jesse Jackson Pays Tribute to Parker Legacy, Calls Others to Pursue Media Justice

The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., founder of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, asserted that “communications issues are the civil rights issues of today” as he delivered the 30th Annual Everett C. Parker Ethics in Telecommunications Lecture in Washington today, Tuesday, September 25.  

The annual event, sponsored by the United Church of Christ’s Office of Communication, Inc. (OC Inc.), celebrates the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Parker, who launched the battle a half century ago to establish the public’s right to intervene in the awarding of broadcast licenses in the United States. This year attendees joined in marking Parker’s 100th birthday, which he will celebrate in January.

Paying tribute to Rev. Everett Parker's "tenacious" pursuit of justice, Jackson described the media system as critical, because the media are the means "our society uses to tell our stories--the stories we use to communicate our values and morals--the media is our window to the world."  He detailed several areas where lack of media access remains a concern:

•    The growing digital divide into first class citizens, the digital "haves" and the second-class digital "have nots"  Jackson noted that even though use of mobile devices is growing among young African-Americans, the devices can be used for playing "angry birds" but can’t be used “for research papers or filling out college applications,” and that many low income people do not have access to the Internet.

•    The "exploitive" system of predatory telephone rates that prisoners often must pay to stay in touch with their families. These rates, he said, "harm the least" among us, and exhorted the Federal Communications Commission to address the 10-year-old petition to address the issue;

•    Broadcast ownership rates for women and minorities that still lag well behind the share of the population those persons represent, and consolidation of radio broadcasting that removes studios and their employees from the markets that they serve.  He suggested resurrecting policies that helped underserved communities acquire media licenses.

•    The failure of several mainstream media networks to cover the plight of two Gambian-Americans who were among those threatened with death by the president of that African country. Jackson recently succeeded in winning the prisoners’ release. 

Rev. Jackson's remarks as prepared for delivery.

The gathering also honored two other media justice advocates.

Charles Benton, chairman of the board of Benton Foundation, received the Everett C. Parker Award in recognition of his many years of leadership and support for promoting the public interest in digital and traditional media.  In his remarks, Benton highlighted what he said were the three guiding principles of Parker’s advocacy: work driven by an ethical foundation, patience, and a willingness to take on difficult challenges. Benton recalled how Parker had inspired him as he took over the helm of the foundation that his family had started. “As Everett was trying to give voice to the voiceless, I was trying to find my own voice in carrying on his work and building on the public service traditions of my family, especially through the Benton Foundation.” The text of Benton’s prepared remarks is available online.

S. Jenell Trigg, chair of the Intellectual Property and New Media and technology Practice Group of Lerman Senter PLLC, received the Donald H. McGannon Award for her work to promote opportunities in telecommunications media for women and people of color.  In her remarks, Trigg described how when she had been nervous about starting law school after pursuing a career in broadcasting, her mother had inspired her by telling her for the first time about the efforts of her grandmother, Lucy Carrington Cooke.  Cooke fought segregation by challenging policies that  prevented the school bus from travelling an extra three miles to pick up young African-American children. The case, Trigg noted, was one of the earliest handled by future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

The event is the only lecture in the country to examine telecommunications in the digital age from an ethical perspective. Since its founding in 1959, the Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ (OC Inc.) has been a leading force in the struggle to ensure that women, persons of color and low-income persons have equal access to ownership, production, employment, and decision making in media. OC, Inc.’s work grows out of the United Church of Christ’s historic commitment to civil rights, and its belief that social justice cannot be achieved without a media system that reflects the nation’s diverse histories and struggles.

For more information on OC Inc., go to www.uccmediajustice.org.

Shown above is an image of Rev. Jackson giving the 30th Annual Parker Lecture at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Washington, DC, and an image of the honorees (L to R):  Charles Benton, S. Jenell Trigg, Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., and Earl Williams, UCC OC Inc. Chair.  Photo credit: Liz Roll.

CONTACT:
Cheryl Leanza
United Church of Christ Office of Communication, Inc.
Phone 202-841-6033
Email: cleanza@alhmail.com
www.uccmediajustice.org

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UCC OC Inc. and the National Hispanic Media Coalition just filed a letter at the Federal Communications Commission continuing both organizations' long-standing advocacy to ensure that underserved and underrepresented communities are "well served by the existing broadcast system and the new and emerging mobile wireless telecommunications infrastructure."  The letter, signed by UCC OC Inc. Chairman Earl Williams and NHMC President & CEO Alex Nogales, asked the Commission to explicitly consider the needs of small entrepreneurs in its upcoming proceeding.  

The letter was filed just before the Federal Communications Commission embarks on authorizing new legislation authorized by Congress earlier this year.  Under the new law, television stations will have a financial incentive to reduce or eliminate their use of spectrum--and thus their over-the-air broadcasts--in exchange for financial compensation. The spectrum freed up by broadcasters will then be auctioned off to companies seeking to offer mobile wireless services.  The whole process is likely to take several years, and could potentially reallocate a significant amount of scarce spectrum used for both television and cell phones. 

UCC OC Inc. want the FCC to be sure that we do not lose important diversity in television ownership, and that women and people of color are able to participate equally, "not just in the use of wireless services, but in the ownership of the companies that offer service" explained the letter. 

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The United Church of Christ's media justice ministry, OC Inc., has been working to put a stop to the predatory rates that beleaguer families, friends, and pastors seeking to communicate with people in prison.  As our fact sheet explains, families can spend up to $300 per month for a weekly one hour phone call to someone in prison.  The Federal Communications can put an end to the practice, and has been considering a petition for ten years asking for help.  The so-called Wright petition, named for Martha Wright, the grandmother who filed the petition asks the FCC to cap phone rates at 25 cents per minute.

This year UCC OC Inc. and our allies have taken a number of steps to push the FCC to act.  In the spring we collaborated with conservative leaders to submit a detailed letter to the FCC--demonstrating that this issue has bipartisan support.  In June the UCC's Justice and Peace Action Network, The United Methodists and the Center for Media Justice collaborated on a call-in day in honor of Father's Day that tripled the FCC's typical daily call volume.  Over the summer, the press began to pay attention to prisoners' letters written to the FCC.  This month, a coalition of civil rights leaders met with the FCC Chairman himself, asking him to complete decision-making by the 10th anniversary of Martha Wright's original petition--which was filed in March 2003.  After that meeting, activists flooded the FCC Chairman's Twitter chat with questions about when the FCC will act, prompting a Twitter response from the Chairman. (Follow UCC OC Inc. on Twitter to keep updated).  Right afterward, two key members of Congress wrote a letter emphasizing the importance of action.

In addition, we have some exciting reinforcements coming from Hollywood.  Participant Media is releasing a film next month called Middle of Nowhere, and it will highlight the plight of individuals in prison.  They have chosen the prison phone rates issue as a social action campaign to accompany the film's release. Stay tuned for more opportunities to discuss the issue.  And if you haven't seen the phone justice campaign's action toolkit, download it now. 

If you haven't yet, don't forget to sign up with UCC's media justice team to get updates on how you can help. 

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Originally posted on behalf of Michael Copps on Benton's Headlines

I have written in this space before about the obstacles facing telecommunications and media reformers, about the crushing influence of big money in all things political, and the stubborn resistance of our leaders to harness the winds of social and technology change to the enhancement of American democracy in the Twenty-first century.

At the same time, I have expressed hope, even optimism, that we are capable of changing course. Changing course demands three things:

1. smart and totally committed leaders who know how to build and who are possessed of the courage to persist against whatever is thrown against them;
2. like-minded individuals and organizations pulling together on a common agenda; and,
3. a media environment that lays out the issues citizens need to understand if they are successfully to practice the demanding art of self-government during this time of grave national peril.

First point: reform has to be driven by savvy leaders. Across America there are a thousand points of light at work—good and needed causes that need to be advanced if America is to overcome the obstacles and inertia that have held us back for most of the past 30-plus years. The challenge is to present reform in a program of common objectives that people can understand and rally around. This requires us to out-think, out-strategize, and out-work the well-heeled lobbies of privilege and reaction whose easy access to the corridors of power has shackled needed change for more years than our country could afford.

This month, we gather for the annual Everett Parker Awards Breakfast in Washington, DC. If you want to know what kind of leader I am talking about, look no further. Everett Parker, who turns 100 in just a few months, personifies the savvy, toughness, organizational genius and unstoppable perseverance that are the enablers of change. If you don’t know his story, you’re missing something important. You need to learn—and learn from—it. I’d suggest starting with Kay Mills’ fine book, Changing Channels: The Civil Rights Case that Transformed Television Channels, or with Robert K. Horwitz’s excellent article entitled “Broadcast Reform Revisited” in The Communication Review (Volume 2, No. 3 [1997], pp. 311-348).

Dr. Parker, then Director of the Office of Communications of the United Church of Christ, put media squarely in the middle of the Civil Rights crusade of the 1960s—right where it belonged (and still belongs). He did so by taking on the license renewal application of WLBT-TV in Jackson, Mississippi, a station that somehow managed to ignore the fight for civil rights in the south and across America. Often the picture on the WLBT screen would be replaced with a notice like: Sorry, we’re having technical problems—just as, say, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was coming on the evening news. Civil rights news blackouts were common, and black Americans were conspicuous by their absence on a station that seemed more interested in white supremacy than equal rights for all. Dr. Parker thought this wasn’t how the peoples’ airwaves should be used and that WLBT was about as far away from serving the public interest as a station could get. He led the challenge to deny FCC relicensing to WLBT, courting and convincing other parties to join his crusade, and buttressing his case with overwhelming data gleaned from program logs and other telling evidence.

Talk about obstacles being thrown in the path! WLBT, many of its friends from other broadcast stations, and high-paid industry lawyers and lobbyists all swarmed the FCC and argued that ordinary people without a property interest in a station had no standing to appeal a license. And the FCC, to its shame, agreed. Disappointed but undaunted, Dr. Parker and his growing band of supporters went to court. It quickly became obvious that the D.C. Circuit Court, under Judge (and later U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice) Warren Berger, had more sympathy for Parker’s case than for the station or its seeming ally, the Federal Communications Commission. To make a long story short, Dr. Parker and his colleagues had to go to court twice—because the Commission continued its stubborn resistance to denying the license to WLBT. In the end, Judge Berger, who made the historic decision to grant standing to the Parker-led petitioners even though they didn’t have property in the station, virtually commanded the Commission to take the license away. As quoted in Horwitz’s excellent article, Judge Berger said that “the broadcast industry does not seem to have grasped the simple fact that a broadcast license is a public trust subject to termination for breach of duty.”

It’s a fascinating and exciting story to which this brief synopsis does small justice, but I hope the lesson comes through that savvy, committed and consensus-building leadership is essential for genuine reform. Dr. Parker’s leadership didn’t end with the WLBT case. His long and exemplary life is marked with achievements too numerous to discuss here. I’ll just mention two more. Without the Parker brand of leadership, the FCC would likely have dragged its feet for years in approving Equal Employment Opportunity rules and affirmative action initiatives to diversify employment in the broadcasting industry. And then there is the wonderful Emma Bowen Foundation, co-founded by Dr. Parker and another civil rights legend, Emma Bowen. This Foundation works to prepare minority youth for meaningful careers in media. Nearly 500 graduates have already benefited from this visionary yet practical initiative.

Second point: Everett Parker didn’t fight alone. He found allies and recruited them to his mission. He encouraged maximum coordination of effort and smart utilization of always-scarce resources. Today we are fortunate to have many good and effective champions of reform, some working in Washington, many more around the country. They are working to bring fairness to our elections, justice to the denied, openness to our democracy and equal opportunity for each and every one of us. With the floodtide of special interest money and disinformation inundating America, we have to find new ways to maximize the resources available to these agents of democratic change. Money-wise our resources aren’t remotely competitive and they never will be. People-wise, our side wins—or, better put, our side can win. It’s not so easy as going out and harvesting support that is just waiting to be asked. Truth be told, there is a lot of convincing yet to be done. All of us have been bombarded with the best disinformation money can buy for three decades. But each of our organizations has information, facts, insights and proposals to address our current policy short-falls. Each of our groups has a somewhat different constituency and outreach. We have to work smarter together. Policy-making, like politics, is a game of addition.

Third point: Marshaling the forces of reform has been made incredibly more difficult because America’s media is doing such a poor job in teeing up and explaining the issues upon which our country’s future depends. Here’s what we see, for example, on the major TV network news: before the program begins, two anonymous political ads—one each from opposite sides—suggesting the criminality of the other candidate/party/side of an issue. That’s followed by 20-some minutes of glitzy infotainment that seldom gets around to the real problems of the nation and world we live in. Politics is covered by citing the latest poll, a sound-bite of the day’s most outlandish charge, and airing the latest damning ad from each camp. Then it’s on to celebrities, puppy dogs and kitty cats. Does anyone truly believe that out of this toxic brew of information-free chatter we are supposed to be sufficiently informed to cast intelligent votes in an election that comes as America confronts challenges that threaten its very well-being?

Broadcasters, newspapers, and the big consolidated interests who increasingly run the Internet aren’t going to repair our media shortfall. It’s silly and futile to expect them to do that. Only real reform—fueled by leaders that can lead and by citizens across the land who understand—can do that. This kind of thorough-going reform comes in cycles and spurts, but eventually it comes. It’s happened before. It can, it will, happen again.

An early “Happy Birthday” to you, Everett, and may those 100 candles on your cake re-ignite in each of us the spark and spirit of reform that makes you such a champion of civil rights and the public interest.

Benton Foundation Chairman, CEO and Trustee Charles Benton will be honored at the UCC's Annual Everett C. Parker Ethics in Telecommunications Lecture and Breakfast. Benton will receive the Everett C. Parker Award in recognition of his many years of leadership and support for promoting the public interest in traditional and digital media.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

TELECOMMUNICATIONS LEADERS TO BE HONORED

FOR PROMOTING PUBLIC INTEREST, DIVERSITY IN MEDIA

            The United Church of Christ’s Office of Communication Inc. today announced the honorees it will recognize at the 30^th Annual Everett C. Parker Ethics in Telecommunications Lecture and Breakfast on September 25, 2012:

•        Charles Benton, chairman of the board of the Benton Foundation, will receive the Everett C. Parker Award in recognition of his many years of leadership and support for promoting the public interest in traditional and digital media.

•          S. Jenell Trigg, chair of the Intellectual Property and New Media and Technology Practice Group of the law firm of Lerman Senter PLLC, will receive the Donald H. McGannon Award in recognition of her work to promote opportunities in telecommunications media for women and persons of color.

OC Inc., the media justice advocacy arm of the United Church of Christ, previously announced that the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. will deliver this year’s Parker Lecture, the only lecture in the country that examines telecommunications in the digital age from an ethical perspective. The annual Parker Lecture and Awards event was created in 1981 to recognize the Rev. Dr. Everett C. Parker’s pioneering work as an advocate for the public interest in broadcasting. This year’s Parker Lecture will be held at 8 a.m. on September 25 at First Congregational United Church of Christ, 945 G Street NW in Washington, DC.

For the past three decades, Charles Benton has served as chairman of the foundation that bears his family’s name, leading its evolution to become an organization focused on articulating a public interest vision for the digital age and recognizing the value of communications in addressing social problems. In the 1960s, Benton became involved with the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting (NCCB), one of the first organizations to build on Everett Parker’s work as a leader of the United Church of Christ. In 1973, under Benton’s chairmanship, the NCCB board hired retiring Federal Communications Commissioner Nicholas Johnson as executive director to carry on the fight to make broadcasters more responsive to community needs, following OC Inc’s legal victory establishing the public’s right to participate in the broadcast licensing process.

In 1978, President Carter appointed Benton chairman of the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science and in 1979 Carter appointed him chairman of the first White House Conference on Library and Information Services. In 1997, President Clinton appointed Benton to the Presidential Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters.

Benton has not only been a leader in the policy arena, but also a leader within the philanthropic community, particularly in championing the importance of supporting media to help achieve philanthropic goals. Through Benton’s leadership, his foundation has provided a progressive voice in helping to shape the National Broadband Plan and working on the transition of the Universal Service Fund from analog telephone services to digital broadband. Through his work in government, business and the nonprofit sector, Benton has demonstrated a long-term, steadfast commitment to the values of access, diversity and equity that also guided Everett Parker’s work.

S. Jenell Trigg
            Before turning to the private practice of law, S. Jenell Trigg served as assistant chief counsel for telecommunications for the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, where she directed the office’s involvement in telecommunications and Internet policy issues before the FCC, other federal and state agencies, the White House and Congress. She also served on the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s Interagency Task Force on Diversity and EEO. She has served as a consultant and subject matter expert to the FCC’s Federal Advisory Committee on Diversity for Communications in the Digital Age since its inception, and also as a member of its Funding Acquisition Task Force.

Trigg served as the first executive director and chief operating officer for The Telecom Opportunity Institute, a non-profit corporation that promotes career and training opportunities in telecommunications for disadvantaged youths, minorities and women. She is a former member of the board of directors of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council, and currently serves on its board of advisors. While in law school, Trigg served as the senior telecommunications policy analyst for the FCC’s Office of Communications Business Opportunities. Before pursuing a legal career, she served for 16 years as a broadcast television sales and marketing executive in the Chicago and Baltimore markets.

Trigg is widely known for representing media and telecommunications companies owned and operated by persons of color. Through her professional work and volunteer efforts, many of these companies have achieved success in the highly competitive telecommunications and media industries. For example, she was a principal in the legal team that successfully petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit to vacate FCC rules that would have seriously hindered the ability of small and minority-owned and women-owned new entrants to successfully participate in FCC auctions for wireless spectrum.  Trigg has been a tireless, strong advocate, working to ensure that the traditional and digital media in the United States are as diverse as the country they serve.

The United of Church of Christ is a Protestant denomination rooted in social justice that recognizes the unique power of the media to shape the public’s understanding and thus society itself. For this reason, the UCC’s OC Inc. works to create just and equitable media structures that give a meaningful voice to diverse peoples, cultures and ideas. Founded in 1959, OC Inc. ultimately established the right of all citizens to participate in proceedings at the FCC as part of its efforts to ensure that a television station in Jackson, Mississippi, served its African-American viewers during the height of the civil rights movement.

Based in Cleveland, the UCC has 5,700 local congregations across the United States. It was formed in 1957 through the union of the Congregational Christian Churches and the Evangelical and Reformed Church.

Find out more about the Parker Lecture. Or contact Cheryl Leanza at cleanza AT alhmail.com or by calling 202-904-2168.

United Church of Christ Office of Communication, Inc.

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