Hot Type, for the week of November 15, 2002 -- continued "Chris, you're a bore," said Casten. "May I give you Richard -- " "Liane, you're a sellout," said Geovanis. Jhally decided to step in. "May I just say one thing? This is not about not wanting debate," he said. "I think the more debate the better. But the question is about this conference -- " "Thank you," said Geovanis. " -- about what the meaning of this conference is. Why, on this issue, is it the only thing on which there has to be balance? There are differences between public events and the events of progressives who want to further the analysis and want to further the strategy. If you allow that to become what it has become now, then we're not doing any favors for ourselves. It's not about not having debate. It's about what the purpose of this conference is." Applause. Baehr got up to speak, and Jhally walked out, along with a minority of the audience. "If you talk we don't have to listen," someone shouted. "No, you don't," Casten agreed. "You can close your mind. I urge everyone to close your mind." Far less analytical than Jhally had been, Baehr began to recite facts and history that favored Israel yet in his view had gone unreported or been misrepresented. He paused for a sip of water, and Geovanis shouted, "How much more disinformation do we have to listen to before we can ask questions?" "Call security," said Casten. Baehr went on with his talk. Jhally held court briefly outside the conference room, then left for the airport. Geovanis held court outside the conference room until Loyola security called her aside and told her to get off campus. Stopping to light a cigarette, Geovanis was taken into custody by security and turned over to the Chicago police. She was charged with criminal trespass, a misdemeanor, and spent a few hours in the women's lockup at Belmont and Western before the police released her on her own recognizance. Did Casten cave? Was Baehr no better than a propagandist? Was Jhally just in a snit? Is Geovanis -- to quote CMW's James Sandrolini -- "the saboteur par excellence of the local scene"? Go on-line and you'll find all the key figures assailed and defended in turn. Unfortunately for CMW, this argument hasn't been waged on its own Web site but rather at chicago.indymedia.org, the open forum Geovanis is connected with. Casten's response to the tumult was to dash off a "mission statement" asserting CMW's first principles and distribute it to board members. "Our true cause," she declared, "are the stories not told, the public lies, the easy public relations that seduces, the trivial that substitutes for substance and the diversions away from hard reality. In this vein, we feel very confident that in bringing both Sut Jhally and Richard Baehr together on the same podium we were loyal to furthering of our clearly stated mission." To Jhally the conference was an example of propaganda in action. To Casten it demonstrated the theories of another of the day's speakers: "Canadian professor John McMurtry spoke of a public mind set which becomes so ingrained, so deeply imbedded into our collective psyches that no reason, no logic, no facts can persuade otherwise," she wrote. "We see in this mini drama powerful trends: a micro symbol of the radical fury on both sides of the Middle East story, and a glimpse of what is happening across this country. Radical, fireball emotions are dictating and pressuring policy with growing intolerance for any point of view but `ours.' The cancer is spreading throughout society. . . . The Middle East has cast a long shadow; it has the power to polarize us all." Casten came back to a point she'd started to make at the conference. "When I was a student in high school, college and then graduate school," she wrote, "I was taught how important it is to know the other point of view even better than to know my own. . . . Unless there is respect and openness to reasoned analysis, John Ashcroft and his intolerance of dissent, his closing down the American mind will have won. America becomes ripe for fascism." And she concluded, "We will not be hijacked by any ideology no matter how `right' the believers feel they are. We are open to dialogue, to debate, to education, to sharing information and to growth. I and CMW's board are committed to nothing less." But Sandrolini resigned from the board the day after the conference, and other board members also complained that Casten had slipped Baehr onto the program behind their backs. Last Sunday ten media activists met at the Indymedia offices on Diversey to form a new organization, the Chicago Progressive Media Working Group. Geovanis was one of the ten. Six of the others were from CMW. Sandrolini stayed away because he knows he can't work with Geovanis, even though he's probably closer to her philosophically than he is to Casten. Mitchell Szczepanczyk, a CMW Web master also active with Indymedia, is an organizer. He complains that CMW isn't active enough. "CPMWP's first project," he says, "would be monitoring the Chicago media's -- say, the Tribune and NBC -- Chicago coverage." There's an urgency to this assignment, he says, since the FCC is now considering whether to eliminate the few remaining regulations that set limits on the number of media a single owner can operate in a given area. If you accept the argument for deregulation, you believe that consumers enjoy too many media choices these days for deregulation to imperil the flow of information. Media activists think that argument's bogus and want to prove it. To give you an idea of the kind of media concentration that appalls them, consider a presentation by Tribune Company officials at a Salomon Smith Barney conference early last year. They boasted that their company reached 80 percent of America's households, owned the biggest newspapers in metropolitan Chicago and Los Angeles and the second biggest in New York, and was the only media company with newspapers, TV stations, and interactive sites in all three markets. It owned TV stations in 10 of the top 12 markets, and thanks to "loosened FCC regulations," already owned two stations in Seattle and New Orleans and was "aggressively looking for more opportunities to double up." Pat Mullen, today the president of Tribune Television, explained that the company was "using our cross-media assets to cross-promote our properties. . . . Using our successful Chicago model, now that Newsday is part of the family, ads promoting WPIX programming frequently appear in the paper. This enables WPIX to reach the upscale demos of Nassau and Suffolk counties at no cash cost. But the cross-promotion works the other way as well -- Newsday stories and reporters are prominently mentioned during WPIX newscasts. We are seeing similar successes in Los Angeles and Hartford as well." Says Casten of that, "It scares the hell out of me." Israel divides media progressives. The Tribune's kind of aggrandizement is the common enemy. News Bites • To publicize its conference "Propaganda: War, Terror and the U.S. Empire," Chicago Media Watch asked WBEZ if it could spend $90 to buy an underwriting announcement. But WBEZ, as I wrote on October 25, forbids announcements that "contain language advocating political, religious or social causes." "They wanted to kind of paraphrase the title," says Liane Casten. "They wanted to take out the `U.S. Empire.'" So the announcement didn't run. Casten discussed the matter directly with general manager Torey Malatia, and she says his "amazing" explanation of WBEZ policy wandered from CMW to the Ku Klux Klan and back. "When he was finished, he said, `Now you understand.' I said, `I'm sorry, but I don't get it.' He said, `Liane, you're so very bright.' I said, `I might be, but I don't get it.'" • Good play: It was almost impossible for Monday's sports sections to coherently describe the weird sequence of plays and coaching and officiating blunders that gave the New England Patriots their last-minute victory over the Bears. So the Tribune came up with a helpful visual aid -- a diagram of a gridiron with numbered footballs on it. These footballs showed where each play in the winning drive started, and they were keyed to a series of short paragraphs below the diagram that described what happened. Bad execution: The plays were described in the wrong order. Send tips, tirades, and comments to hottype@chicagoreader.com Copyright © 2002 Chicago Reader, Inc. All rights reserved.