WILLblog

Last week this campus was the site of a conference entitled "Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?" sponsored by the Illinois Initiative for Media Policy Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Quite a line-up: Seymour Hersh, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, Orville Schell, Phil Donahue, Dennis Swanson, and many more great speakers. We decided to capture everything on video, and provide streaming video archives for general edification. All material is made available with Some Rights Reserved under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (full details at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ ). Here we go: Wednesday, May 11th, 2005 9 to 10:30 am Panelists: Seymour Hersh, Danny Goldberg, Linda Foley, Orville Schell Moderator: Ron Yates, Dean, College of Communications, University of Illinois RealVideo archive 10:45 am to 12:15 pm Panelists: Phil Donahue, John Nichols, Naomi Klein Moderator: Professor Bruce Williams RealVideo archive 1:45 to 3:15 pm Panelists: Len Hill, Dennis Swanson, Paul Jay, Roberta Baskin Moderator: Professor Angharad Valdivia RealVideo archive 3:30 to 5 pm Panelists: Amy Goodman, Ben Scott, Bill Fletcher Moderator: Professor Dan Schiller RealVideo archive The quality of the video isn't entirely my fault: lighting issues prevented perfection. The content is there without too many impediments. So if you missed this great conference, you don't have to. And get busy with media reform please.

CBS commentator and Illinois alumnus Bill Geist gave the commencement address today at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. WILL-AM aired the 2 pm ceremony live, and you can get the audio archive right here: streaming RealAudio MP3 download

Here is the video archive from the second part of the conference "Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?" The conference website is here. These video archives are in RealVideo format. If you need a free RealOne player you can get it here without all the ads for subscription services. I may encode these in Quicktime video as well. If you complain to me loudly about the Real format, then ask nicely, maybe I'll find the time somehow. More archives from the panel discussions on May 11th will follow as soon as they're encoded.

Yikes, sorry it took this long, but I finally got the video archive encoded from the Tuesday evening Seymour Hersh presentation at Foellinger Auditorium. Seymour Hersh, I hope you know, won the Pulitzer Prize for his expose of the My Lai Massacre, and also broke the Abu Ghraib story. He kicked off this week's conference entitled "Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?" I'll have the rest of the two-day conference published here and elsewhere as RealVideo and possibly other streaming archives by Sunday evening latest. BTW, the consensus seemed to be that no, a free press cannot survive under present conditions. Film at 11.

Someone at NPR called me yesterday looking for a recording of the Illinois 3 and 1 music, to which Chief Illiniwek does his dance-like halftime routine. Seems they were putting together a story about Marquette University, which announced that it will put 10 possible new nicknames up for a vote. Formerly known as the Warriors, Marquette had changed its nickname to the Golden Eagles following protests from Wisconsin's Indian tribes. Sound familiar? Too bad Illinois "divested" itself of Indian tribes some time ago, or things might be easier to figure out around here. But I digress... So Marquette announced last week that it would change its nickname from the Golden Eagles to just the Gold. And lots of people went "say what??!" Sounds too much like an adjective or something. Meanwhile, we at Illinois have more like an ad hominenem than an adjective for a nickname, mascot, honored symbol, or pick your term. Say what? I'll try to be less obscure about this in the future, but for now here are some interesting pointers concerning our own favorite controversy: University of Illinois President B. Joseph White's letter to the NCAA in response to its questionnaire concerning Native American "mascots, nicknames and logos" (PDF file) The U of I's "self evaluation" concerning same for the NCAA (also PDF) The Honor the Chief Society website The University of Illinois Native American House, which doesn't exactly agree with the Honor the Chief folks The Progressive Resource/Action Cooperative website, which has some alternative suggestions for graduation day activities on the campus of the University of Illinois Finally, WILL's Chief Illiniwek issues page, which has links to streaming archives of WILL interviews and news features, the complete Intake Session from the Judge Garippo Dialogue, the Roger Plummer report, and oskee wow wow, so much

Should public municipalities provide Internet access as a public utility? That's what some cities are doing, like Philadelphia and Seattle, which are in the process of rolling out near-city-wide wireless access grids to connect all citizens with the web. With the Internet becoming an essential channel for information and interaction in the digital age, there could be a strong argument for providing universal access. On the other hand, with so much money at stake in providing Internet access, there's an argument for not undermining the private sector as it competes to provide the best Internet services at competitive prices. Here's a program from NPR's Talk of the Nation which does a nice job of raising some of the issues and arguments. So what do you think?