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Musicians Lobby Against Ownership Rules
11/11/2003 1:53 PM, AP
Sharon Theimer
Musicians worried that new media ownership rules will make it harder to get airtime are taking the fight from the Capitol to their own turf, embarking on a grass-roots music tour to lobby for legislation to undo the changes.
The "Tell Us the Truth Tour" with Billy Bragg , Steve Earle , Lester Chambers and others is a twist on a long tradition of protest music in the United States.
Bragg acknowledged that media consolidation is an unusually complex topic to take on through song. The British folk-rock artist said he wasn't sure whether he would — or could — work "Federal Communications Commission " into any of his lyrics but said he has other ways to get the point across. He said several songs are about free speech, for example.
"Entertainment's the most important thing. These gigs will be entertaining, I promise you," Bragg said. "The most we can do is offer the audience a different perspective and make people understand that music doesn't just come out of the radio."
While the tour is meant to inspire grass-roots activism, some well-known Washington players also are involved.
The tour, which also addresses trade issues, is sponsored in part by the AFL-CIO and Common Cause. Both are pressing Congress to undo the FCC rules, which eliminated decades-old ownership restrictions on radio and television stations and newspapers.
Several major media companies pushed for the change, arguing the old rules predated the growth of cable, satellite broadcasting and the Internet and harmed their ability to compete.
Several AFL-CIO affiliates, such as the Communication Workers of America and the Screen Actors Guild , are affected by the rules, said Joe Uehlein, the AFL-CIO's director of strategic communications. As the media industry consolidates, jobs are lost, he said.
Uehlein refused to say how much the union was paying as a tour sponsor.
"We view it as a way to communicate our message through nontraditional means," he said. "Music has always been central to our movement."
The tour started Friday in Madison, Wis., as part of a national conference on media reform and ends Nov. 24 in Washington after stops in Chicago, Indianapolis, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., Miami and other cities.
It's unclear what the public's appetite is for music with a message. Though the United States has a long history of protest music, entertainers who have blended politics with performances have had mixed receptions over the years.
Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" was written as a protest song, Bragg noted, and wound up becoming a classic. Guthrie composed it as an alternative to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" to make the point that the country belonged to the poor as well as the rich.
Popular music was entwined with Vietnam War protests in the 1960s and '70s. A range of musicians including Michael Jackson , Lionel Richie , Bob Dylan , Tina Turner , Bruce Springsteen , Willie Nelson , Billy Joel and Bette Midler came together to record "We Are the World" in 1985 and raised millions of dollars for hunger relief in Africa.
On the other hand, Bragg said his songs about the Iran-Contra scandal and Nicaragua in the 1980s got little attention.
More recently, the Dixie Chicks were thrown off several country music stations, including chain-owned outlets, for criticizing President Bush because of the war in Iraq . Last April, dozens of fans booed and walked out of a Pearl Jam concert in Denver after lead singer Eddie Vedder slammed the war and Bush, impaling a mask of Bush on a microphone stand.
Rachel Einwohner, a Purdue University sociology professor and expert on protests, said the music itself is just one factor in how it's received.
"We Are the World," for example, was about an uncontroversial topic and drew frequent airplay and other support by heavyweights in the music industry, she said.
"It's the music plus who's doing the singing and what kind of backing do they have, and what broader environment are they in, and what cause are they fighting for," Einwohner said.
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On the Net:
Tell Us the Truth Tour: http://www.tellusthetruth.org/
National Association of Broadcasters: http://www.nab.org/
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