This month -- July 2024 -- marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Chicago Media Action's study of Chicago's main PBS affiliate -- WTTW. (Sidebar: WTTW is an abbreviation for "Window To The World", or as the old Chicago activist joke has it, "Winnetka Talks To Wilmette", referring to two well-heeled north-shore Chicago suburbs.)

A bit of background: A number of CMA members were involved before CMA's formation in campaigns and organizations to improve public broadcasting, to put the "public" back in public broadcasting. That is, since the 1930s, commercialism has been the heart and soul of American broadcasting, radio and television, over the entreaties of organized groups and efforts to provide a strong nonprofit and noncommercial media sector. In the late 1960s, that changed somewhat with the Public Broadcasting Act which formalized large-scale public broadcasting, PBS and NPR. However, both were denied opportunities for independent funding resources and were given perpetual second-banana status in the minds of American viewers.

That is a shame, since the potential of public broadcasting is and has been to empower people and to challenge conventional dogma. This long-dwindled potential came to a head in 2002 and 2003, during which time Americans generally and Chicagoans in particularly were fed a buffet of media lies encouraging the support of the dubious War in Iraq.

WTTW was the flashpoint of efforts early in CMA's history. In 2002 and 2003, CMA pushed for the revival of a documentary-and-public-forum series which WTTW had previously held. As mentioned on the CMA website: "The main issue was to bring to greater public attention 'alternative' perspectives on the then-impending War in Iraq. A series of back-and-forth negotiations between culminated in March 2003 with a pair of person-to-person meetings between CMA and WTTW staff, including one meeting in which more than 35 activists met at WTTW studios in March 2003. Despite this, WTTW dropped the ball on the proposal, delaying the proposal until after the war's launch, and then finally declining the proposal, as they deemed the war no longer a 'raging' issue."

Another salvo came after CMA spent a year researching and writing a report, executive summary, and appendix on WTTW's flgship nightly TV show, Chicago Tonight. The report, "Chicago Tonight: Elites, Affluence and Advertising", written by CMA member James Owens, was scathing, documenting the show as being overwhelmingly white, overhwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly devoid of news content, emphasizing entertainment and sports.

The report made a splash, getting covered in other Chicago media and in our own outreach; I had occasion to be interviewed about the study and CMA led a panel on media, which featured the study, at the 2005 National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis.

James Owens confronted WTTW-CEO Dan Schmidt at a public event where Schmidt was a panelist about the study; Schmidt's reported evidence-free response was that the CMA study was "cherry-picked". More than a year after the study's release, it continued to have staying power: Dan Schmidt was publicly confronted again about the study on Eight Forty-Eight, a radio program on Chicago's main NPR affiliate, WBEZ.

And today? Chicago Tonight still airs nightly on WTTW, and you can now watch episodes of the show online. To their credit, Chicago Tonight has prioritized coverage of communities of color, with half-hour weekly shows for Black Voices and Latino Voices. And also to their credit, Chicago Tonight has featured the voices of Chicago area activists, such as Hatem Abudayyeh of the Arab-American Action Network and scholar Keeyanga-Yamhatta Taylor (who lived and worked in Chicago for many years and has returned to teach at Northwestern University). I don't know if CMA's work can take any credit for this apparent improvement in diversity of coverage, but I hope it helped some.

Dan Schmidt retired from WTTW in 2017, and James Owens is still working on media criticism efforts that deserve some elaboration. James left Chicago and went on to earn a PhD from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He still lives in Massachusetts, has started his own newsletter on Substack, and has taken on a new challenge. James is focusing his attention on The Roundtable, a daily news program on WAMC radio, a local affiliate of National Public Radio based out of Albany, New York, with a broadcast footprint across much of New England.

James' analysis shows that The Roundtable is plagued by an excess of white, establishment voices in its commentary and in its leadership, and focused in particular on its coverage of Palestine and the pro-Palestine student movement protests of 2024. What's more, James has built a repository of software intended to digest in copies of radio and media transcripts along with various aggregation and natural-language-processing tools for at-scale compurerized media analysis. James was kind enough to share with me a copy of his repository and I have to say that I was giddy at seeing this, since my paid career has been in software and I spent a decade working with the programming language (Python) that James used for writing his code suite. It has tremendous potential and I look forward to its further development and use. (It's quite possible that I myself might get involved in some of that analysis/computer-code-crafting.)

It's an interesting bookend, with media analysis efforts of (somewhat) public media marking twenty years since our 2004 CMA report on WTTW (and indeed media analysis was the original raison d'etre of CMA). Much has changed in the intervening twenty years, and so much unfortunately hasn't, but the commitment to improve our media (as much as they have changed in the past two decades) remains steadfast. Here's to continued excellent work, with the aim to improve our media and in so doing improve our society, in Chicago and beyond.

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