In recent days, there has been widespread word on the passing of a well-known champion of public media and news in the public trust, that of Bill Moyers. (Sidebar: I once briefly interacted with Bill Moyers at the 2005 National Conference for Media Reform in St. Louis. We said hi to each other in a vacant hallway, right before he gave a fantastic and inspiring speech where he name-checked progressive media outlets like Z Magazine and In These Times.)

The passing of Bill Moyers has understandably gotten a lot of attention, but there has been much less attention to another champion of public media, that of longtime CMA member and media activist Scott Sanders, who passed away in March 2024. As it happens, to the extent I can determine, there has been no obituary for Scott (if anyone reading this knows otherwise, please let me know). There has been a single mention about his passing on Facebook, and the first and perhaps only public pronouncement about his death might well be a letter published in the Chicago Sun-Times that I wrote in April 2025. I'll get into why there has been little attention about Scott in a moment. This essay may well be the first obituary about his passing.

Scott himself summarized his own activist career in a paragraph he wrote (and published on the Chicago Media Action website), as follows:

"Scott Sanders, a 2011 winner of the Nelson Algren Committee award, has co-founded a number of media activist organizations, including Chicago Media Action, and led efforts to constitute public community media centers with member-elected boards and to increase diversity on non-elected public media boards. He also led campaigns resulting in the only FCC fine of a major public TV station concerning commercialism. He is a video documentarian and a periodicals and technology librarian. Scott has produced social science research for MMTC (the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council), MAP (the Media Access Project), and the University of Chicago, and the Trustee research in the study 'Chicago Tonight: Elites, Affluence and Advertising'. He is the author or co-author of articles for Truthout, Counterpunch, Z Magazine, FAIR’s Extra!, and a number of daily newspapers."

Scott must have attended the infamous Chicago Media Watch conference at Loyola University in 2002. I don't recall him at that conference -- we hadn't yet met -- but I certainly recall him attending the meeting at Chicago Indymedia's conference room eight days later that launched what would become Chicago Media Action. Scott would attend every meeting for Chicago Media Action that I attended in the eleven years I was most active with the group -- I cannot recall a meeting he missed; we even held a handful of meetings at his own apartment. He was also the second-most active contributor to the Chicago Media Action website all-time, with 93 posts to his credit.

He detailed his considerable activist career in a page on Blogspot, which in retrospect turned out to be a peculiar but effective action. Blogspot is blogging software, but Scott didn't use Blogspot to make a blog -- he instead used it to create a very long one-page reference detailing his activist career. It was and is effective because the page is still online, as is Scott's YouTube channel; there's another copy of his activist resume living as a PDF as is his profile on LinkedIn.

Scott was long involved in his activist career in making grassroots media, particularly film and television production, in addition to his considerable work in writing and research. He was deeply involved in media policy, having long working on public broadcasting (as exemplified by his work with the Coalition for Democracy in Public Television and with the Chicago chapter of Citizens for Independent Public Broadcasting) and public access television (in both Chicago and Evanston). He was Chicago Media Action long before the group with that name was founded.

As Scott mentioned in his abridged biography above, his day job was as a librarian; he was able to make available activist material (like the CMA study of WTTW) included in the library where we worked. He lost his job for reasons I admit I don't recall, and after some time he got another job working with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Scott was involved in well-nigh every initiative that Chicago Media Action took on -- from media concentration to net neutrality in addition to his work on public broadcasting and public-access television, and even a few initiatives that I wasn't involved in, as his list above reflects. Scott was still active after Chicago Media Action's effective suspension in 2013, and in his later years was particularly focused on two initiatives: efforts to democratize and unionize CAN TV, and efforts to re-establish Chicago PBS affiliate WYCC and rescue it from dissolution. I even helped Scott with work on the website for the WYCC project. It's a shame that both efforts didn't end as well as we hoped. CAN TV is still around though it may well be going in a much less democratic route, while WYCC went defunct in 2022.

There was more to Scott than media activism. During the 2003 protest at Tribune Tower in downtown Chicago immediately after the court victory over the FCC's media ownership rules, Scott said that he saw the actor Malcolm McDowell walking down Michigan Avenue, and said that Malcolm McDowell had apparently espied our rally. Scott told me he had lived for a time in Los Angeles, and had some skill in recognizing celebrities. He also had an uncanny knack to visit/interrupt me during some championship moments in Chicago sports. No kidding: He visited me in person at the very moment of the final out of the 2005 World Series won by the Chicago White Sox, and at the very moment of the winning overtime goal in Game Six of the 2010 Stanley Cup Final won by the Chicago Blackhawks.

Scott seemingly knew everyone; he maintained contact with a great many people and was able to use those connections to build coalition and initiatives. Which comes as an irony that Scott's final days were seemingly...lonely. I don't think Scott ever married and he mentioned no family; the only time I can recall in the twenty-plus years I knew him of any family connections was when he sent an email notification of his father's passing. The last phone call conversation I had with him in February 2024 was when I called him to notify him of the passing of CMA founder Chris Geovanis. That would have been about a month before his own passing on March 12, 2024, at age 65.

Scott's dedication to the cause of better media, in the face of overwhelming odds, should be an inspiration to us all.

Scott Sanders, presente!

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