Report from Santa Fe; Juan Gonzalez

The National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Tau's New Mexico. Hello, I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is Juan Gonzales. Thank you for joining us. My pleasure to be here with you. Well, I wanted people to hear your voice because you were the co-host of Democracy Now with Amy Goodman and I don't think there's anyone in the state who hasn't listened to your voice. Now, we're hoping that they're going to read your books because you have written this, this is, this is a fabulous book.

It's called News for All the People, The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. This is a masterpiece. You have done wonders. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. So certainly coming from you who's so knowledgeable about the press in the media in America. Well, it just reveals a whole hidden aspect. It's long, it's immaculately, impeccably footnoted. And it's also incredibly readable. You tell some of the stories that are really patronous and I kept thinking, oh my goodness, I didn't know that. I didn't know that. You trace the origin and spread of the news in America throughout American history. And you have this wonderful thread of whether the news is centralized or decentralized in local and how that fills the needs of the democracy. The other thread through here, obviously from the name, is race and the American media. And it is absolutely mind blowing. I don't know where to start, but I'm going to start with the news media and where it started when it started and the technical revolutions that have come through it.

First of all, the most, I read that the first printing press in the new world was in Mexico city. Yes. And long before there was a printing press here in the United States and in Mexico, they started publishing. In the late 1600s and early 1700s was called Ojas volantes or flyers of their provided information to the population as early as the 1600s over an earthquake in Guatemala was one of the first of these Ojas sueltas. But then the press, the actual newspapers in Mexico city, came shortly after the first a newspaper in North America, which was public occurrences in 1690. So there's been a long tradition, press tradition of Latin America that sort of moved northward into the south, what is now the southern areas of the United States who are formally part of Mexico.

And so you really have two newspaper or printing traditions in the United States, one that came south from Mexico and one that came west from England and into the Massachusetts colony and then spread throughout the rest of the nation. But there was a gap of a hundred years between the Mexico printing press and the Harvard printing press. Yes, there was and that tradition among the Spanish speakers who were involved in printing and publishing led to actually a much greater press in the southwest than people are aware of. For instance, most people do not know that there were 25 Spanish language newspapers in the city of New Orleans before the Civil War, including a daily patria that was publishing for several years in New Orleans, that there were maybe perhaps as many as 100 Spanish language papers throughout what is now the territory of the United States before the Civil War.

So there is a long trajectory of the Spanish language press not being a new press in this country, but being another stream of the American press. Well, one of the things I'd like to look at first is you say that each new technology brings a sort of revolution because then you've got to deal with the old technology and you outline five of them. The postal system, telegraph, radio, cable TV, and internet, and that covers our entire history of America. Can you briefly go through those and show how one was a threat to the system set up by the old one? Well, what I tried to do in this book myself and my co-author, Joseph Torres, is we were trying to make sense of our media system because we all know that the American people for the most part are highly dissatisfied with the news media, the public confidence in news media is at an all-time low, according to the most recent Gallup polls. There is a sense among all sectors of the population at the news media enough of filling their responsibility to the public, but it's especially true among people of color.

They feel, on an almost daily basis, assaulted, denigrated, demeaned, stereotyped by so many of our media institutions. And that I decided several years ago to try to make sense of how are that our media system get to be where it is today. And people talk about children, the most important moments in a child's life for those first two years that determine their psychological formation. I think it's true of nations and societies as well. The early days of any society or any nation really stamp what kind of a nation or society it will be. So we decided to go back to the very beginning of the press in America and then to try to trace how it had developed. One of the things that we discovered was that technology or two things. One, that the government involvement in determining how our media system will develop has been far greater than anyone realizes.

And two, that the government has usually had to respond to advances in technology in mass communications, that every time a new technology comes on the scene, it disrupts the existing order of the media and forces the media system to adjust or die. And then the government steps in with new rules to determine how news and information will flow to the people. So this happened early on when the government established a post office which was our first, really the first internet in America. The means by which newspapers spread throughout our nation was because of the government subsidized the delivery of newspapers in the mail through the post office. Even when the telegraph was developed, because at the moment that the telegraph was developed, information was speeded up. You no longer have to put a newspaper on a stage coach or on a train to go hundreds of miles to get the news at the next town. Now the telegraph wires allowed people to get the information instantly so that the telegraph destabilized the old world of newspapers and the government once again had to step in

and rewrite the rules. Even along comes radio in the early 20th century thousands of amateur radio operators taking to the air, signals interfering with each other, a rich diversity of possibility, but the government then stemming to step in to bring order to the air waves through what was called then the Federal Radio Act of 1927 and the Federal Communications Act. So once again the government stepped in to manage a technology. But when they did so, they gave all the best frequencies in all the cities to the newly developing networks, the NBC and the CBS networks and later the ABC network. And so the powerful corporate networks established control over radio, which was originally very decentralized and diverse. So once again a new technology developed so later on, the television was itself an extension of radio, the same network that controlled radio control television. But then comes cable and cable once again destabilizes the existing media order with hundreds

of local cable companies developing cities throughout the United States with their own cable systems, local governments exacting concessions when the cable operators were using the public rights of way, the birth of public access, the birth of met swarm minority programming. But after a few years or after a few decades, the government relaxes restrictions and all the little cable companies started getting bought up by the big companies until today two cable companies, Comcast and Simon Warner control about half of all of the cable viewership in the United States. So you've had a recentralization of our cable system, which didn't exist early on. But now what happened has happened in recent years, the last couple of decades, is that the internet, a new communications technology, has once again destabilized the existing order, created hundreds of thousands of people who were taking to the internet to tell their

own stories. And now there is an ongoing debate in Congress over how the internet developed in the future with the major telecom companies and cable companies seeking to control those pipes. So what you see is the development of our information system from the post office to the telegraph to radio to cable to the internet. The same process occurs. The people, one information, a new technology liberates them to begin to experiment. The government steps in with new rules, the powerful and the business interests attempt to seize control with new technology and centralize the information flow. But just when they do it, a new technology upsets it all over again and the battle continues. So we began to understand the theory. It made sense. When we finally got it together, now we see it makes sense. This is why we've had so much of a problem because the public has not understood the critical role that the government plays in media policy, has not understood the critical role technology plays in media policy, and that when the public understands these things, we can get involved

as advocates to try to reform the system and assure a more democratic and accountable media system. So you even point out that Morse of Morse code and the telegraph wanted to give his technology to the government? Yes. Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, but it was the government that subsidized his building of the first telegraph line. And then after that line was built, Morse was convinced that this was such a powerful communications tool that he did not want to keep it. He wanted the government to buy his patent and the government to run the telegraph just as it had run the post office. But the corporate forces in America felt that this instant disability to instantaneously communicate was so powerful that they prefer to have it in the hands of the market so that what happened in the United States was that our telegraph system developed with very high rates.

And with the first industrial monopoly in the history of the United States was the Western Union company. The company that eventually ended up controlling all of the telegraph operations in the United States. Western Union became the first industrial monopoly in America. It was a communications monopoly because it was able to charge very high rates so that therefore the public in America generally did not use telegrams. It was too expensive. Only the business people, the speculators, Wall Street, they used the telegraph because they wanted to get their information about deals in the markets, about buying of land. So the telegraph became a communications tool of the wealthy in the United States, which it was not in other parts of the world in England and France and Canada and other places. The telegraph was government-owned just as it was just as the post office was. The rates were cheaper and it was more of a communications tool for the entire population. So it is crucial for us to understand how we got where we are in terms of the media.

And now let's look at where that display of the technology and the revolutions back and forth, how that intersects with race because you point out that wherever the media is decentralized and localized, people of color have a voice. Yes. And wherever it is extremely centralized, people of color, women, marginalized groups are shunted to the side and cannot have access, cannot be heard by others in their communities. And so what we began to realize at the same time as we went back to the early history of the country to understand the development of the system, we also went back to the early history of the country to read the content of the news and what we were stunned at is that even though there were no African Americans or Latinos or Native Americans in the early press writing, there were very much a subject of the press. The first newspaper in the United States, actually in the colonial period, was public occurrences

in the Massachusetts colony in 1690, the bulk of the content of that newspaper, five articles in a three sheet paper, was intelligence to the settlers of the Massachusetts colony about what the quote, savage Indians or the skulking savages were up to. It was an intelligence sheet to the settlers to keep them informed about how they could keep the Native peoples under control and throughout the colonial period, a major portion of the content of newspapers was information to the settlers about Native Americans. Another big portion of the content was about information to the white settlers about the slaves among them, about the potential for slave insurrections, about incidents of violence by individual slaves against their masters about the perceived threats of free blacks in the northern colonies.

So basically, race was a major topic of the press in America from its inception and the creation of a white racial narrative that these others were threats to white society and to the development of our nation and it has continued to this day in, it's gotten a little better in recent decades, but the problem remains of this narrative that the, if they say journalism is the first draft of history, then the historians who look to those newspapers had a vision of America where people of color, especially early on Native Americans and Africans and then later on, once the Southwest was conquered after the Mexican-American war, the Mexican peoples who were still on that territory as well were seen as this other, this threat to American society. So you see this overall pattern of always demonizing the other, also while taking everything

they had. About the Native Americans though, I was surprised, you know, my ignorance, of course, to see that Ben Franklin is a person who had stepped up and tried to defend what was being done psychologically and really had a literal massacre. Tell us about that. Yes, well there were always heroic white journalists and writers who stood against this kind of one-sided narrative and one of the, to me it was also surprising that Ben Franklin was a genuine hero of the press in America, not just in terms of independence and his views on a variety of issues of his day, but also on treatment of Native Americans in the Pennsylvania colony so that after a major massacre of Native Americans by his fellow colonists, Ben Franklin became irate that the only two newspapers in the Pennsylvania colony, in Philadelphia, were not reporting what had happened. One of those papers had been a paper that he had started, but he had since sold to someone

else. Well Ben Franklin decided to break the news blackout on the Philadelphia papers by issuing a pamphlet which exposed the horrific slaughter of Native Americans in the colony and condemned the way that some of his fellow colonists were treating the Native tribes with independence of the Pennsylvania colony. Thomas Payne, another hero of the American press who condemned his fellow writers and journalists over the fact that they were advocating liberty from the British, but we're still holding slaves themselves there, and so there are many examples that we point out, not just of the African American Latino heroes, but of the white journalists who stood against the majority view in those days. Well here you are in New Mexico and where we have, we're a minority majority state, so we have a very large Hispanic and Native American population. What guidance would you offer for New Mexicans to look at this history? Well, New Mexico has a rich history of the press of people of color, it going back to 1835,

one of the first newspapers in New Mexico at Carapusculo de la Libertad, but the Don of Liberty, the Don of Liberty by Padre Martinez, and then went on in the late 19th century to have a raft of so many newspapers, so many Spanish-language newspapers in New Mexico that in 1891, En Juan de Quesalazar, the editor of La Vosta del Pueblo in Las Vegas, New Mexico, established the Hispanic American Press Association, with the coalition of all of the Spanish-language publishers and editors here in New Mexico, and Caros Padilla, who edited Mosquito and Mora, and later on published the first literary journal, a revista ilustrada in New Mexico and in El Paso, and so there were many, many examples here in New Mexico of editors who attempted

to tell a different story in their publications, to talk about the Mejicano community, which was such a large portion of the state for so long. In fact, Enrique Salazar's partner in that newspaper La Vosta del Pueblo was Néstor Montoya, who later ran for Congress, it was elected to Congress in around 1920, so that this is the Spanish-language press in New Mexico, is part of the fabric of New Mexico. It has made an enormous contribution to this state and to freedom of the press in America, but most of these folks are unknown today, and so we are trying to resurrect some of that history, to tell the individual stories of these heroes that have been forgotten, to say, hey, these are heroes of the American press, just as Joseph Pulitzer, Harris Greeley,

just as EW Scripps, or just as Hurst, who are the commonly well-known titans of journalism in America during the 19th century, these two are heroes, and some of them risked much more than Hurst or Pulitzer ever did, in terms of the threats against them, in terms of people trying to shut down their presses, in terms of hostility. I love the story of Halvita Idad, who was the editor of Lacronica in Laredo, Texas, in the early 20th century, and she was constantly writing in her newspaper about the lynching of Mexicans in South Texas, and about the inferior schools that the Mexican children were relegated to, about the inability of Mexicans to exercise their right to vote, and one day, 1914 Texas Rangers right into Laredo to shut down her newspaper, and Halvita Idad stands in the doorway

reading them the Constitution, telling them they can't touch her press, luckily those of you who have been in South Texas know that there's a lot of Mexicans in South Texas, about 90% of Laredo, and so the entire community turned out the Texas Rangers were scared off, they had to back off, but then later that night they returned and they destroyed Havita Idad's press, so that these are the kinds of pitfalls and obstacles that journalists of color had to confront in order to do what the Constitution says we have a right to do, which is exercise the right of a free press. Well, I want to point out that one of your efforts, you're the former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and you started something called the Parity Project, which was that as the percentage of Hispanics increased in the population, the percentage of Hispanics on newspaper boards as journalists was not increasing, and so tell me about your

efforts to increase the number of Hispanic journalists. Well, I spent several years as an H.J. president trying to convince the media companies to work in a cooperative relationship with their communities to change the content of the coverage, to be more balanced and fair in their coverage, and also to open up their newsrooms. And we had amazing success for a while with newspapers like The Rocky Mountain News in Colorado and of a ride to the Ventura County Star in California, with a variety of the Naples Daily News in Florida, where the publishers and editors and the radio station owners agreed to sit down with the local community to hear their concerns, to set goals for increasing a hiring. And they did. Unfortunately, what's happened because of this revolution in this latest stage of our

media system, today, newspapers and television stations and radio stations are doing nothing but laying people off, not forget about hiring people. All they're doing is laying people off as their model of advertiser-driven journalism, sponsor journalism is collapsing before their very eyes, and the result is that the opportunities for people of color have dropped dramatically, as jobs have dropped dramatically. So those gains that we made a few years ago have already been lost, and what we're facing right now is that really, the saving grace right now, journalism in America, is independent media, is alternative media, like democracy now, like a citizen journalist who are taking to digital media, because the old media system isn't disarray. And as I said before, there's suspect by so many in the population. Unfortunately, they still provide the bulk of the news and information that most Americans receive, so you have this contradiction that we have more media in this country than

any people in the history of the world, yet the American public so remarkably misinformed and disinformed about the events that are occurring in the world around them. And so that, but that is the problem of a commercial media system that got so divorced from the public that now people are turning away from it and hoping that the internet will provide and alternative media will provide a new beginning for journalism in America. Problem is that this new media still hasn't come up with a model to sustain journalists with living jobs at decent wages to be able to follow, pursue a career in journalism. So, but that's okay. That's the way it was with early radio, that there were all the amateurs who started operating ham radio stations had no idea how they were going to make a living at the beginning. It took a while for the system to mature and to develop. So I think that the citizen bloggers and citizen journalists of today, many of them will be

the media, the media moguls and the media forces of the future, but it will take a while yet. Well, that's where I wanted to end up with where we are now. And you have wonderful advice for journalists, but what are your advice to the citizens who are consumers of news and journalism? What new means of perception are they going to need to cultivate in the new media? Well, I think the main thing to understand is that the media system did not develop as a result of a free market and it developed out of political decisions made by our leaders about how news and information flows in a democracy. Once you understand that there is free will in this, it is not all preordained. Decisions are made at particular times. Right now there are key decisions that have to be made about our media system. One is the future of net neutrality.

Well, well, the internet, which has always been nondiscriminatory in that anyone that if you have a website and you try to communicate to the rest of the world, people will be able to download your material at the same speed as a download material from CNN or from the Albuquerque Journal or from a CBS about the cable companies and the phone companies and the those companies that today control the pipes of the internet through which everyone gets their content, want to be able to monetize it and to charge more to those who can pay to speed up their content and to those who cannot pay more to slow down their content. In essence, replicating the same inequities that existed in old media in the new media. There is the other issue of the future of public access. Global television is a gold mine today and the problem is that the cable companies don't

want to continue investing in public access and providing the kinds of support to citizen journalism that occurs on public access and of course the final issue is surveillance. So what degree will the government spy on you and control you on the internet or will there be limits that the public will demand on the ability to surveil the producers of media? And the time police are telling us that we are out of time, but how wonderful to hear it from one of our finest journalists. Our guest today is Juan González. He's the co-host of Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. He's the co-author of this marvelous book news for all the people, the epic story of race and the American media. This is a classic. This is well done. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me here. And I'm Lorraine Mills. I want to thank your audience for being with us today on Report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week.

Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by Grant Strong, the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by Grant from the Healy Foundation, Tau's New Mexico. Thank you for joining us today on Report from Santa Fe.

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