A day of action based on three themes:
- Education - understanding how the media shapes our world and our democracy
- Protest - against a media system based on commercialization and exclusiveness
- Change - calls for media reforms that respond to public interests, promote diversity, and ensure community representation and accountability.
Home
You are invited to a
Public Meeting
about Media!
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When: Tuesday, June 23, 6:45-9:00 pm
Where: VIVO Media Arts Centre
1965 Main Street (near 3rd Avenue)
Close to Main Street/Science World Skytrain station
and Main Street #3 bus (see Map)
*Snacks and bus tickets provided*
*Free childcare available onsite with advance request*
Please R.S.V.P. by net, phone, or email to save your spot! (see details below)
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We’ll start the session with a brief presentation about the current state of media in Canada and then move into facilitated discussion and visioning.
Co-Presenters:
Maya Rolbin-Ghanie is an independent journalist and Indigenous solidarity activist living in Montreal.
Kat Norris is Coast Salish/Nez Perce, has lived, worked, danced and advocated in Vancouver community since 1976 when she became educated on Indigenous issues by joining the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee. She contributes to the BC Native Newspaper Kahtou, the St’at’imc Runner newspaper, and blogs for the Indigenous Action Movement. She was honoured in the Georgia Straight’s Bright Lights of Vancouver as a “local hero” and as a “newsmaker of the year” in the Vancouver Province.
Steve Anderson is the Coordinator of Campaign for Democratic Media, and an organizer of Media Democracy Day
The visioning process will be facilitated by Reilly Yeo from the SFU Centre for Dialogue
Description:
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-Where do people tell our own stories?
-Which independent or grassroots media do you like?
-Whose voices and stories are missing in the mainstream news?
-how do we keep the Internet open and develop democratic communications infrastructure?
-What speakers, themes, skills, and values would you be excited to include in a public event about grassroots media?
-What else would you like to include in the next Media Democracy Day?
Share your thoughts on these questions and more!
Come to this fun and relaxed public meeting to help design the next Media Democracy Day.
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Background:
Media Democracy Day Vancouver is an annual, volunteer-driven public forum addressing many different media issues.
In past years, some of the themes and goals at MDD have been:
-building community among independent and grassroots media makers
-developing our own democratically governed communications infrastructure
-fighting big media like CanWest and Global
-social media
-racialized communities and media
-indigenous peoples, colonization and media
-women and media
-free and open source software,
-Net neutrality (preventing corporations from controlling our use of the net),
-copyright issues
-building media skills for community organizing
-citizen journalism
-access to media to tell our own stories
-and more!
In past years, MDD has included a media fair, panels, workshops, discussions, and film screenings at a fun and informative event.
This year, MDD will be held on Saturday, November 7 at the Vancouver Public Library.
MDD needs your help!
On Tuesday, June 23rd, at VIVO Media Arts Centre,
you are invited to a public meeting
to shape the agenda for this year’s Media Democracy Day.
We want to hear what you envision for MD Day.
Which speakers do you want to invite?
What themes are important to you?
What skillshares would you be interested in coming to or offering?
How should the day be organized?
Through facilitated decision-making, you will help generate ideas that will be the foundation for the next MDD.
Everyone is Welcome!
MDD 2008 Vancouver Video
Watch all MDD videos separately.
MDD 2008 Pictures
Copyright 2008 Tris Hussey. Non-commercial use permitted with attribution. If you would like to use this picture in a commercial work, please contact the photographer. See Tris Hussey's blog
Get info on the 2008 Media Democracy Day events that happened in...
Featured Supporters:
What is Media Democracy Day? Why is it? Who is it for?
More & more people are concluding that the dominant, agenda-setting big media are a problem for democracy, and a key obstacle to positive social change. Why should that be? According to the civics textbooks, journalism is supposed to provide a quality of information, and a wide range of perspectives and voices, to promote participation in public discussion, and informed citizenship. But behind the buzzwords of the day — convergence, global competitiveness, de-regulation, consumer choice — the reality is a media system with fewer and fewer owners controlling more and more media outlets (eg.
General Electric, Time/Warner/AOL, - and CanWest/GlobeMedia/Rogers in Canada). More and more integrated into the profit-making imperatives of trans-national conglomerates. More and more driven by marketing and commercial pressures rather than an ethic of public service. More and more shaped by the corporate agenda and its neo-liberal ideology of slashing taxes for the wealthy, and public services for the rest of us.
No wonder the American writer Robert McChesney (author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy; and Corporate Media & the Threat to Democracy) says:
Regardless of what a progressive group's first issue of importance is, its second issue should be media and communication, because so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible, across the board.
FIND CANADIAN INDEPENDENT MEDIA!
So, who is MD Day for?
- environmentalists who see commercial media as part of a marketing system which prioritizes limitless consumerism over ecological sustainability;
- peace advocates who see media too often contributing to war hysteria, and witch-hunts against dissent in the wake of Sept. 11;
- people in poverty, the elderly, single parents, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, aboriginal peoples — all those people whose issues and concerns are generally trivialized or invisible in the corporate media, and thereby marginalized in public discourse.
- media workers and professionals who see standards and jobs compromised by the priorities of corporate employers;
- alternative journalists and independent media producers, who want to build community-based media independent of State and corporate control;
- working people who want to see issues of working conditions, wages, and the goods & services they provide treated as more than just a cost to consumers;
- advocates of social change and social justice who want to find avenues of cmn more effective than corporate media;
- parents who see kids being socialized by mass-marketed violent video games & media entertainment;
- communities of faith who want to see media too often undermining ethical values of human dignity and respect for the other;
- anybody who wants to see issues around govt, taxes and public ownership of important companies like Ontario Hydro publicly discussed in a fair and balanced way;
- students who want to learn more about the biases and power of dominant media;
- anybody who wants to be able to trust the media not to censor important voices and issues, even if it means treading on the toes of conventional thinking or powerful interests;
In short, Media Democracy Day is for anybody who is skeptical of the profit-centred agenda of the big media and wants to see their news & views presented in a fair manner that promotes broad-based democratic debate and action.
