Below is a copy of our press release as well as a sneak preview of an article that will appear in the upcoming issue of Adbusters (on newsstands February 18th). Please give us your support by getting the word out there.
If our lawsuit is successful in Canada, we'll try to raise the funds necessary to launch a suit in the United States as well. What's at stake here is a critical new human right for our information age, the right to communicate.
PRESS RELEASE: THE RIGHT TO COMMUNICATE
On Monday,
January 7th, the British Columbia Supreme Court is scheduled to hear
arguments on whether or not Adbusters' lawsuit against Global
Television, the CBC, and the CRTC, should go forward. If the Adbusters
lawsuit clears this hurdle, media rights advocates will celebrate an
important victory in the battle against censorship.
For more
than a decade, Adbusters, a magazine and media foundation, has been
trying to pay major commercial broadcasters to air its public-service
TV spots, but these attempts have been routinely blocked by network
executives, often with little or no explanation. In 2004, Adbusters
finally turned to the courts. It filed a lawsuit against the government
of Canada and some of the country's biggest media barons, arguing that
the public has a constitutionally protected freedom of expression over
the public airwaves.
At issue is the right of all Canadian
citizens to have (as stipulated by the Canadian Broadcasting Act) "a
reasonable opportunity...to be exposed to the expression of differing
views on matters of public concern."
"This case will decide
if Canadians have the right to walk into their local TV stations and
buy thirty seconds of airtime for a message they want to air," says
Kalle Lasn, editor-in-chief of Adbusters.
Ryan Dalziel of Bull, Housser & Tupper LLP, who is representing Adbusters, explains the special nature of this suit.
"This
is not," he says, "a bare-knuckle family law dispute, nor is it a Bay
Street-style war of attrition between commercial entities. It is public
interest litigation, brought by a not-for-profit organization with no
chance of any monetary return."
Adbusters is hoping
Canadians will pay close attention to a landmark case that pits
ordinary citizens and consumers against powerful special interests. The
outcome will determine the future role of television in Canada.
EDITOR'S NOTES
For more information about Adbusters and the global media democracy movement visit www.mediacarta.org and www.adbusters.org.
[1]
Canadian Media facts: * Four corporations (CanWest, Quebecor,
Torstar and Gesca) control 72 per cent of the country's daily newspaper
circulation.
* Five major media acquisitions in Canada have
occurred or are currently in the making in the past two years: CHUM was
purchased by CTVglobemedia for $1.4 billion, which then sold five
CityTV stations to Rogers for $375 million; CanWest purchased Alliance
Atlantis for $2.3 billion; Astral Media bought Standard Broadcasting
for $1.2 billion; and Black Press and Quebecor are vying for the Osprey
Media newspaper chain in a deal that will be worth more than $400
million.
[2] Facts about Media Democracy:
*
More than 30,000 people have signed the Media Carta
<www.mediacarta.org> to voice their concerns about the way
information is distributed in our society. * In the past year a
growing number of grassroots media activist groups have been formed in
Canada to express their dissatisfaction with the continued
consolidation of the country's media: <www.democraticmedia.ca>
<www.mediareform.ca> <www.mediademocracy.ca>
THE MEDIA'S NEW AESTHETIC: WHY TV IS ABOUT TO HAVE A MAJOR MOOD SWING.
by Clayton Dach
The last few years have been hard on poor old television.
Viewership
has fallen across the board as core audiences -- guys aged 18 to 34 in
particular - are abandoning the device that raised them, opting instead
for game controllers and the internet. Meanwhile, those who have
remained loyal to TV are failing to remain similarly loyal to the
advertising that makes it profitable, increasingly choosing to get
their tube fix via commercial-annihilating digital video recorders,
advertising-light DVDs, and (horror of horrors) pirate downloads.
With
viewers putting up blinders to the ad-program-ad rhythm of for-profit
television, the desirability of conventional 30-second commercial spot
is tanking. For the first time in decades, a number of key markets have
witnessed decreases in the amount spent on traditional ads, as
marketers demand the ever-elusive bigger bang with in-program product
placements and full-on brand integration within storylines. The result:
as much as 15 full minutes of every hour of programming in North
America is now dedicated to thinly veiled product placements, with
shows like American Idol topping out at over 4,000 placements per
season -- all of this in addition to the average of 14 to 22 minutes
out of 60 still set aside for traditional spots.
Given
televisions' incredible shrinking credibility, especially in the case
of broadcast journalism, it is little wonder that we have suffered
through the ceaseless debate over whether we live under the thumb of a
"liberal media" or a "conservative media." Luckily, we can safely
disregard the question of television's political affiliation, since we
are rapidly approaching a sort of McLuhan-esque implosion which will
render the answer irrelevant. It's that moment when the specifics of
the rock 'em sock 'em, talking-head debates may be school massacres or
missing pageant queens, but the message itself always remains the same.
That message is television, an ingenious device for the capturing of
eyeballs. Increasingly, this device is being pressed into the service
of a singular purpose. While this purpose could hardly be called a
philosophy in the proper sense, as a system of narrow values it does
require the exclusion of dissonant ideas to efficiently function.
Adbusters
began, in large part, as a product of outrage over just how
destructive, self-serving, and at times downright insane the deliberate
exclusions of this system have become. We've learned, for example, that
the keepers of the airwaves will permit you to expose the perils of
cardiovascular disease; you may not, however, tell the truth about a
major advertiser's fat-laden products. Similarly, you are allowed to
tell kids to get more exercise, but you can't tell them to turn off
their TVs in order to do so. You may encourage women to ignore the
images produced by the beauty industry and to feel good about their own
bodies, no matter the shape or size -- but only if you're selling soap
in the process. And, most gallingly, you can pay lip service to the
urgency of tackling climate change, and yet you can't challenge people
to buy less stuff as a way to actually go for it.
But it's
possible that you don't care. Maybe you gave up on television a long
time ago. Maybe you don't even own a TV set anymore. For your personal
peace of mind, that was probably a good move; with an estimated 112
million television households in the United States alone, however, we
ignore the stirrings of TV at our own peril. The last couple of decades
have seen unprecedented levels of consolidation in the realm of mass
media. Today, the movers and shakers of TV are the very same people and
corporate entities who control the majority of newspapers, of radio
stations, of book publishing, of outdoor advertising, of music
distribution, of film production, and of your favorite social
networking sites. The dirty tricks and the sleights of hand that are
used to keep urgent, dissonant messages off the air aren't in any way
specific to that TV. They are the natural consequences of corporate
rule, and they will be brought to bear whenever we are too distracted
to stand in the way.
Not by accident, more and more people
are doing just that -- stepping up to join the ongoing battle against a
media system that has left civil society out in the cold and in the
dark, a media system that has been busily propagating itself at the
expense of our social, cultural, political and environmental health.
It's a battle that Adbusters has proudly taken up with its ongoing
lawsuit against CanWest, Canada's biggest media conglomerate.
What's
at stake in this struggle is not just access, but the creation of a
whole new media aesthetic: a messier one, more spontaneous and
unpredictable, one that fosters participation and social relevance, a
genuine engine for the positive change. If Adbusters' lawsuit is a
success, one of the first manifestations of this aesthetic will be a
strange new mood - exciting, challenging, even slightly dangerous --
every time you switch on the box in your living room, where previously
there was only a moribund device completely sewn-up by private,
for-profit interests. This strange new mood will prove once and for all
that television (just like newspapers, magazines and radio before it,
and just like the internet after it) has the capacity to perform
services other than selling us on the idea of buying, services of vital
importance to the health of our species and its democracies. And like
with all exciting, challenging, and slightly dangerous new moods, we're
betting it will prove to be pretty damned infectious.
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Edmonton Small Press Association (ESPA)
P.O. Box 75086 RPO
Edmonton, Alberta
T6E 6K1 Canada
780-434-9236
www.edmontonsmallpress.org
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Jammers and creatives; today is our big moment in court. Ever since the first issue of Adbusters was published seventeen years ago we've been fighting to break the corporate monopoly on access to the airwaves. 
