Big Media Meets Its Match

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Media workers 'don't need to come to our children's funerals, but they do,' says a woman representing the Children's Cancer Center.

'The media has never let me down,' says Mark Lunsford, the bereaved father of Jessica Lunsford, a 9-year-old girl who was murdered north of Tampa in 2005. 'I can't believe . . . someone has to tell you that you can't change the way the media has done things for me and the children across America.' (It doesn't go unnoticed that, just a few minutes earlier, Dan Bradley, Media General's vice president of broadcast news, paid a visit to Lunsford's seat.)

The stream of speakers continues all evening, with a half-hour break at the midpoint and another round of panelists kicking off the second half. The commissioners do not chime in, even when they're goaded by speakers to answer questions. They are here to listen, and they do so intently, taking only short, intermittent breaks.

Adelstein says that the hearing process is physically exhausting but mentally engaging, and that the time limit forces speakers to be concise. 'People are capable of saying an enormous amount in two minutes. Because of their eloquence and because of how interesting this topic is, I find myself pretty engaged, and I can sit there for a long time without getting distracted or bored. The speakers give me the energy to keep going.'

While the tone and tenor of the testimonials vary from city to city, the general themes remain the same: People are fed up with McPapers that don't cover important stories, TV news programs with the 'if it bleeds, it leads' outlook, radio playlists that cycle the same crappy songs ad infinitum, and cable service that costs much but offers little.

Copps and Adelstein 'are actually listening to what people are saying, taking notes, and digesting it,' McChesney says. 'And I think they feel a real bond and a real attachment to these tens of thousands of people who come to these hearings.'

Adelstein is on stage again, but this time he's not listening to testimony, and the only public interest he's serving is the human urge to get down and groove. A rock 'n' roll rebel in a button-down dress shirt and jeans, he's jamming on harmonica with the North Mississippi Allstars, a blues-rock trio that's come to the Memphis Marriott's ballroom on Martin Luther King Day weekend to play a gig at the 2007 National Conference for Media Reform.

As their brother-in-arms leans into a meaty riff next to guitarist Luther Dickinson, the harmonica barely concealing the smirk on his face, the crowd of alternative journalists, media activists, and wonky policy makers--two or three beers past the day's last seminar--lap it up.

Outside of work and family, music is Adelstein's favorite pastime: listening to it, going to concerts, and playing it, mostly on harmonica but also on flute, accordion, and percussion. (He confesses to playing along with the radio on harmonica, one-handed, while he's driving to work.) He calls himself 'a rock 'n' roll guy' with a predilection for jam bands and anything rooted in American traditional music, including bluegrass, country, Cajun, zydeco, and the blues.

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