If you believed the speakers at the Media Reform Conference this weekend, you would have discovered that our media are dominated by conservatives, and that alternative viewpoints (here referred to simply as “the truth”) never get heard or printed.

It’s an alternative America (the other of John Edwards’ “two Americas,” perhaps) wherein the only news media available are the Fox News Channel, conservative talk radio, and right-wing blogs, while all the other major outlets cater only to the whims of big business and are somehow beholden to the White House and its neo-conservative cabal. With this scenario firmly in place, the American public is spoon-fed lies and led into the wars of blood-thirsty tyrants — the dictators of a democracy gone bad. Meanwhile, as their mantra goes, unemployment is rising, our free market economy is a conspiracy to keep the poor man down, and nobody has any access to healthcare. Oh, and God forbid you’re black, gay or female — in which case you have no rights, no voice, and no vote, whatsoever.

Fighting against these sinister forces of neo-slavery, a band of 3,000 converged in Memphis. They are the few, the proud, the “nut-roots.” These brave souls risked life and limb by meeting together in public, in broad daylight, in a red state like Tennessee. At any moment, conservative shock troops might have stormed through the doors to arrest everyone on site.

With tremendous courage they assembled a crack team of actors, pundits, celebrities, socialists, Leftist think tank activists and media critics to combat the problems of media bias and journalistic malpractice: Danny Glover, Phil Donahue, Bill Moyers, David Brock, Jesse Jackson, Jane Fonda, Geena Davis, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, just to name a few.

In short, they were just the right people for the task at hand, the perfect team to reform media. How better to illustrate the complete liberal voicelessness in media than to invite an obscure figure such as Jesse Jackson, someone who is rarely seen or heard on television? And who best to explain the conservative stranglehold on media than Bill Moyers, whose long career of taxpayer funded public tele-journalism can only represent the exception to the rule?

Free Press, the group behind the conference, put its grievances on the table: our media are too conservative, too consolidated, too private, too profitable, too white, and too free.

Its proposed solutions were just as clear. Rephrased for brevity, they include:

1. More government funding for public stations like NPR and PBS
2. More government funding for other media
3. More government intervention in the media business
4. More government-enforced racial quotas
5. More government oversight of media
6. More government involvement at the local level
7. More government-enforced giveaways to political candidates
8. More government funding for community broadcasts
9. More government intervention on an international scale
10. More government oversight of the internet

And so, with any luck, the conference would accomplish one thing: media would stop being a whore to big business and would start being a whore to big government, instead.

Of course, to do so, they would first need to break through the news media filter, and somehow bypass the big business conservatives who run the show. In Memphis, the results were mixed, as expected. While the Memphis Flyer, an alternative newsweekly, had given the conference prominent ad space for the last couple months, as well as a cover story the week of the conference, plus a handful of front-page website updates, the coverage at the major daily was a bit lacking; The Commercial Appeal ran only 13 or so stories over four days, in addition to a column by the editor in chief, a staff editorial, a video spot on AppealTV, and coverage by the staff blogs. Other than that, and up-to-the-minute coverage on talk radio and the daily TV broadcasts, the conference was hardly covered at all.

See Part 2