Host Sharon Hinton invites her guest, Emmy winner Barbara Barrow-Murray, to talk about the importance of all forms of media made by and featuring people of color, as well as the struggle throughout U.S. history to get said media published.
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On Another Level
[BLANK_AUDIO] >> I have a problem every year around in the payday. Because the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For some reason has been treated as America's civil rights mascot. On this day, you'll have folks who would have never in their life, march with, agree with, voted with, anything, be believed in. One of the biggest biggest in the United States Congress. If you ought to actually send out a dot machine for it. >> The march has begun every day. We rise like the sun is right till the battle is won. >> Good evening and welcome to another edition. We are live on another level. I am the producer and your host Sharon Eaton Hinton. Tonight, two weeks before the election in November, where this country will decide who is going to be in the most powerful position. And two weeks also away from the Boston Media Producers Group. Media, networking, form, and community conversation. I will be talking to the vice president of the Boston Media Producers Group, Barbara Barry Murray. She and I will be talking about the event, the importance of the freedom of speech, the importance of the freedom of the press, and the presence of the media. And importance to the community and community conversation. Stay with us. You're here on another level. >> Welcome back to Heimler's History. Now, we've been going through unit three of the AP government curriculum. And in this video, it's time to talk about the First Amendment's protection of the freedom of the press. So if you're ready to get them brain cows milled with a high bar for prior restraint, let's get to it. So in this video, here's what we're trying to do. Explain the extent to which the Supreme Court's interpretation of the First Amendment reflects a commitment to individual liberty. So along with the other protections of the First Amendment, the freedom of the press is one of the keystones to a free society. In fact, those are old friend anti-federalist George Mason, who said, "The freedom of the press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty and can never be restrained but by despotic government." Mr. Mason was absolutely correct on this count. In a society in which the power to govern is in the hands of we the people, we must have a free press in order to report to us what our elected government officials are doing so that we can keep them accountable if they end up making a turd sandwich out of our political will. Even so, just like every other liberty we have considered, the right to a free press is not absolute, and this liberty must be bounced with other liberties. For example, we must balance the right to a free press with the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial, which may necessitate keeping certain details out of the press, or, more to the point for this video, when does the concern for national security necessitate the silencing of the press? That last concern has a term for it that you should know, and it's called prior restraint, and the definition is all bound up in the term itself. If a government is going to exercise prior restraint over the press, that means it seeks to restrain a story prior to its publication, and when you hear that, it sounds just like what George Mason warned us about. If the government can restrain the press in that way, then the people are left in the darkest to what their government is up to. Which is why the standards for prior restraint has been set very high by the Supreme Court. Now, as an example of that, let's talk about one of your required cases, New York Times, via the United States, in 1971. So if you know your dates for US history, you'll know that this is right in the midst of the Vietnam War, and this war was to put it mildly contentious on the home front. Well, as it turned out, a big stack of classified documents known as the Pentagon Papers were leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post, and those papers demonstrated pretty clearly that the president had lied both to the people and Congress about the war. So President Richard Nixon decided to invoke prior restraint on the publication of these papers on account of the protection of our national security. Well, the court ruled that the freedom of the press was more important in this case than Nixon's vague claim about national security. Like at the end of the day, Nixon really wasn't concerned about national security. He was actually concerned about how the Pentagon Papers would tarnish his and Lyndon Johnson's reputation. So in this case, the court established a heavy presumption against prior restraint. In other words, if the government is going to censor the press, it has to be incredibly clear that a real and imminent threat is being prevented, and in most free press cases that come before the Supreme Court, that high bar is never cleared. Okay, that's what you need to know about unit three, topic four. You can click right here to grab a view packet if you want help getting an A in your class and a five on your exam in May, and I will enact no prior restraint to clicking that subscribe button if you want to send me the message to keep making these videos. Heimler out. So this is James Risen. You may know him as the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times. Long before anybody knew Edward Snowden's name, Risen wrote a book in which he famously exposed that the NSA was illegally wiretapping the phone calls of Americans. But it's another chapter in that book that may have an even more lasting impact. In it, he describes a catastrophic U.S. intelligence operation in which the CIA quite literally handed over blueprints of a nuclear bomb to Iran. If that sounds crazy, go read it. It's an incredible story. But you know who didn't like that chapter, the U.S. government. For nearly a decade afterwards, Risen was the subject of a U.S. government investigation in which prosecutors demanded that he testify against one of his alleged sources. And along the way, he became the face for the U.S. government's recent pattern of prosecuting whistleblowers and spying on journalists. You see, under the First Amendment, the press has the right to publish secret information in the public interest. But it's impossible to exercise that right if the media can't also gather that news and protect the identities of the brave men and women who get it to them. So when the government came knocking, Risen did what many brave reporters have done before him. He refused and said he'd rather go to jail. So from 2007 to 2015, Risen lived under the specter of going to federal prison. That is until just days before the trial, when a curious thing happened. Suddenly, after years of claiming it was vital to their case, the government dropped their demands to rise and altogether. It turns out, in the age of electronic surveillance, there are very few places reporters and sources can hide. And instead of trying and failing to have Risen testify, they could have his digital trail testify against him instead. So completely in secret and without his consent, prosecutors got Risen's phone records. They got his e-mail records, his financial and banking information, his credit reports, even travel records with a list of flights he had taken. And it was among this information that they used to convict Jeffrey Sterling, Risen's alleged source and CIA whistleblower. Sadly, this is only one case of many. President Obama ran on a promise to protect whistleblowers. And instead, his Justice Department has prosecuted more than all other administrations combined. Now, you can see how this could be a problem, especially because the government considers so much of what it does secret. Since 9/11, virtually every important story about national security has been the result of a whistleblower coming to a journalist. So we risk seeing the press unable to do their job that the First Amendment is supposed to protect because of the government's expanded ability to spy on everyone. But just as technology has allowed the government to circumvent reporters' rights, the press can also use technology to protect their sources even better than before. And they can start from the moment they begin speaking with them, rather than on the witness stand after the fact. Communication software now exists that wasn't available when Risen was writing his book and is much more surveillance resistant than regular emails or phone calls. For example, one such tool is SecureDrop, an open source whistleblower submission system that was originally created by the late internet luminary, Aaron Schwartz, and is now developed at the nonprofit where I work, Freedom of the Press Foundation. Instead of sending an email, you go to a news organization's website, like this one here on The Washington Post. From there, you can upload a document or send information, much like you would on any other contact form. It will then be encrypted and stored on a server that only the news organization has access to. So the government can no longer secretly demand the information, and much of the information they would demand wouldn't be available in the first place. SecureDrop, though, is really only a small part of the puzzle for protecting press freedom in the 21st century. Unfortunately, governments all over the world are constantly developing new spying techniques that put us all at risk. And it's up to us going forward to make sure that it's not just the tech-savvy whistleblowers like Edward Snowden who have an avenue for exposing wrongdoing. It's just as vital that we protect the next veteran's healthcare whistleblower alerting us to overcrowded hospitals or the next environmental worker sounding the alarm about Flint's dirty water or a Wall Street insider warning us of the next financial crisis. After all, these tools weren't just built to help the brave men and women who exposed crimes, but are meant to protect all of our rights under the Constitution. Thank you. Thank you so much, Trevor Trim. You are looking at a flyer here on another level of an event that is happening Saturday, November 2nd, at 1 p.m. at the Roxbury Public Library. It is being put on and presented by the Boston Media Producers Group, and it's called a media networking forum and community conversation, the importance of media and the community. These logos that you see right now are some of the organizations and the media people that will be presenting at this media forum that is giving the opportunity for people that are in television, radio, print, and in social media of all ages to talk about what they do, their jobs, if you have an organization or an event, how you get covered, how you get an op-ed into a newspaper, and then we also have some entrepreneurs. We have one of the owners of the Boston Banner, Andre Stark, and Charles Clemens, who some of you may remember, had Touch FM, who now has Touch TV. He's also a B&M producer. We've got writers and producers and reporters from Channel 2, announcers from iHeartRadio, so we've got people that are actually in the industry. So if you want to come out and find out how you get into the industry, how you get your organization or your event covered, and also meet some of the people that are movers and leaders and shakers in this business come out Saturday, November 2nd at 1 p.m. at the Roxbury Public Library, it's the media networking forum and community conversation being presented by the Boston media producers group, and you can scan that QR code and register. And if you don't register, there is no charge, there's no fee. It's just you spending a couple of hours to exercise your freedom of speech and your right to understand the freedom of the press and possibly become part of the press. And later on in the cable cast, we will tell you how you too can become a producer here at B&M Media. I want to welcome everybody back to a most important show, they're all important shows. My guest is a seven, I think she won seven Emmy Awards, seven, she can correct me, Barbara Barry Murray, Barbara are you there, yes, she's there on Zoom, there she is, you can't hear. So Barbara Barry Murray has received seven Emmy Awards working for WGBH and Save Brother, and she also has a Save Brother radio podcast here at B&M Media. Barbara, welcome. Hi, how are you, I'm glad I can finally hear you, how are you doing? I'm doing very well, you got Billy Holliday behind you, before it was, it was Judy Garland, right? It was, it's on the other side of the room. Okay, so this event that is happening Saturday, November 2nd, at the Roxbury Public Library, the Boston Media Producers Group, which you and I are in the leadership, when the Executive Board, I'm the President, you're the Vice President, we wanted to give people an opportunity to actually call in, and let's see what the number is, to call in if they want more information, or to talk about the importance of the freedom of the press. The weekend that we're doing this event is the weekend right before elections, elections are Tuesday, that following Tuesday, where the country will select who is going to be the next President and Vice President of the, I'd like to say United States of America, although, you know, sometimes it doesn't look like we're so united around being American. You have been in the press for a long period of time, in various capacities as a producer, and also as management. How do you see the importance of this event, and also the discussion about freedom of the press, and the media, the importance of the media in the community, particularly in communities of color? Well, I have a couple of perspectives, one is based on my last 20 years at BNN. BNN is a community studio, and Boston neighborhood network, and I think that one of the things that they must do better is to reach out to the community, and make the community available to everything that we have going on in there, and that's not what's going on. I wanted this idea to be developed that we're doing on November 2nd, to be developed, to speak to the very fact that we, as a community, do not have access to the information that needs to happen coming to the community, we don't have access to the equipment that we need. Now, recently, they just upgraded some of the equipment, which I'm happy to hear, based on our encouragement. So I think that we need to make sure that community TV is doing what it's supposed to do. It was developed to service the community, was developed to inform the community, and it has not been doing a great job, and I think that we need to look at this and see what we can do to make it better. That's one of my thoughts. My other thought is that Boston's Black reporters and producers have been available since 1968, and many of the people that sit on these panels go back almost that far. I probably am the most veteran I came to broadcast in 1972, Sarah and Cheryl, who just lost, preceded me, and she started in 1968 with Tim Boyd. I think that the community will have a great opportunity to see some of these veterans, as well as the newbies, if they come to this event. It's very important that they do that. You get to meet them, you get to talk with them, you get to be informed by them. You can have a one-on-one conversation, you can have a group conversation looking forward to the public coming and joining us. And it's not just for Black people either. It's for Black folks and it's for anybody who wants to see how we see ourselves and our history. You look through our eyes, if you come there and you'll be able to figure that out. I would like to invite everybody to come. It also addresses people of color, brown, yellow, red people of color who are addressing some of the needs of the community. So those are the things that I think are important. Now when we talk about, I mean, say Brother, you were a producer, say Brother, GBH, was groundbreaking and the community, say Brother would not have existed if there was not a community cry to have that kind of coverage. And recently, Basic Black, which was sort of the same program with a name change, right, was pushed off the air, was canceled. What's the importance of having representation of people of color and the issues that affect communities of color, on major media, on television? Well, it's critical. In order for us to understand what's going on in our community and how we impact the larger community, we need to have an opportunity to see exactly what, see exactly what kind of history is being developed. We won't see that without programming of color, programming produced by foreign people of color. We won't see it because the only thing that you see on the major networks would be the crime, anything that's crime-ridden, anything that happens in any of the communities. I don't care whether it's Roxwood or Justin Madabian to make a plane downtown Boston. I don't care where it is. The only thing you're going to hear are stories about what black folks have done to other black folks or other people in the community. And I think that we need to hear more than that. We need to hear the positive impact that we're making on the community. We need to hear what kinds of things we care about in these communities. And we won't hear it unless we put it up ourselves because it's just not there. I mean, unless you have a basic black or, say, brother or city line or... El Mundo, we invited El Mundo too, so this. So El Mundo is the Spanish newspaper, QuencoVision is the Spanish video cable, independent cable newspeople. We put out and have been accepted the Boston Globe. There's a bunch of community newspapers, Banner is going to be there. We've got people from different colors and races and ethnicities, our Heart Radio WBCA, which is the radio station here, 102.9 FM at BNN Media, also Boston Praise Radio, Touch FM. I'm trying to think, we've got so many people that are coming in, Julian Mejia, a lot of people don't know, at large City Council, Julian Mejia used to be on MTV. She's going to be there. Also one of the main speaker at the beginning of the program is District 7 City Council, Daniel Fernandez Anderson, talking about the importance of the issues that are in District 7 and what gets covered, the importance of the media, being able to inform the electorate, inform the community about what's important. We've also got Java with the Jimmy, we've got young people that actually have their own social media channels, big city radio, we've, you know, I'm on the top of my head. Yeah, I'm looking at it, and I'm looking at the other one, Channel 5, yes we have people from Channel 5, we also have a sister from WGBH Radio, and then we've got Linda Chen, who's also from Cambridge Community Access Television, so we have some people that are access community television and broadcast, as well as some of the colleges, Massasoid Community College, one of the faculty, one of the heads of the media arts department in Massasoid Community College, is going to come in and say this is what it takes, this is what gets offered if you want to go into the business, so there's opportunities for people to network and talk about what it's like to be in the business, to get into the business, what the current climate of media is, right now most people don't realize that the media in the United States of America is owned by six corporations, six, six. So when you think you're looking at BET, it's really Viacom, and Viacom is not black, they own black media, I was just having a discussion with a friend of mine, when you talk about print media, there are approximately 200 newspapers, black newspapers across the country, but when you look at what is it, 360 million people, you've got 200 newspapers, and you only have one in Boston, the Boston banner, and we found out through our research that there's African American, the African American point of view, that's in Western Massachusetts that's been invited to come out. So there are people who recognize the importance of the media, and they're on different varying levels, whether it's radio, television, print, or social media, we have a bunch of young people that are coming in to talk about social media, and they have their own separate channels, Java with Jimmy, and some other young people that are coming in, I mean, we have flyers that are up, we're asking people to scan the code and to register, and to come out and spend, you know, two hours to find out what is going on, the issues that are going on, how they get covered, how you can influence that, how if you have an opinion, you've got an organization, and you want to do an op-ed, so opinion editorial pieces, what they call an op-ed. You don't necessarily have to be an organization, a nonprofit, or a political activist, but you need to know what it takes to actually be a writer. So we have some writers that have actually been published in the Boston Business Journal, the New York Times, I think by this time that we have the event, he will have been published in the New York Times and several other different newspapers, so we have people who are actually writers and columnists and contributors to these newspapers as well, so I think it's a well worth event to come out to, of course, I'm part of the media, and I understand the importance of that. You are actually watching media that was B&N media, that was part of Boston Community Access and Programming Foundation initially, that was fought for by the communities of color in the very beginning, and it was Mayor White, I think, that's how long ago, along with cable vision of Boston Brookline, that had to come together and say, if you're the cable company and you want to come in here and people are paying for cable, there should be a community benefit. If we're paying our franchise fees, then there should be something that gets given back to the community, and that was the inception in the beginning of the Boston Community and Access and Programming Foundation and B&N Media, which is what B&N TV and then B&N Media is now because it's now a radio station and a TV station, don't go anywhere, I'm coming back with my guest, Barbara Murray, Emmy Award winning, Barbara Murray, and here's a piece that I want you to look at talking about the freedom of speech, you're on another level. Freedom of speech The founding fathers named the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the first of which guarantees some of the most fundamental freedoms of our country, including freedoms of press, protest, religion, assembly, and last but certainly not least, freedom of speech. The definition of free speech and its limits, such as censorship and hate speech, have been debated since the initial adoption of the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is considered a fundamental building block of liberty, allowing citizens to express their ideas and bring about the change that reflects the needs of the people. It also gives a voice to sometimes conflicting or dissenting opinions, which is believed to inspire the healthy debate that moves society forward. When drafting the First Amendment, James Madison and his colleagues drew from many of the great thinkers of the day. One of the most influential works in colonial America at the time was a collection of essays known as Cato's letters. The writers were two British men, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, who wrote under the pseudonym Cato. Cato was one of Julius Caesar's chief opponents in the Roman Senate, known for his incorruptibility and defense of the Republic. They published 144 essays promoting liberty and criticizing the overreach of the English crown. In one essay, they wrote, "Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty. They prosper and die together." This idea and others from the letters inspired much of the constitution and bill of rights. From Madison's own notes, we know that he intended freedom of speech to be a natural right, not something granted by the government. Of course, free speech is not an unlimited right. And because the First Amendment doesn't establish what those limits are, we've spent centuries debating what is and what isn't free speech, a debate allowed by our right to free speech. The recent history of free speech can be traced through a long and winding path of landmark supreme court cases, so just strap in for a minute. Prior to World War I, the Supreme Court had virtually never ruled on cases on the freedom of speech and had done little to protect dissenting voices. Then, in 1919, the Court decided in shank the United States that the government was allowed to limit speech that would create a clear and present danger. In 1942, again in a time of war, the Court limited protection for fighting warrants, speech that can provoke harm to another, in the case of Chablinsky v. New Hampshire. The year after, however, in West Virginia v. Barnett, the Court determined that making students recite the Pledge of Allegiance violated their free speech rights. In 1989, flag burning was ruled as protected free speech in Texas v. Johnson, as was cross burning in 2003's Virginia v. Black, unless it's being done to intimidate. So, yes, free speech is certainly not a simple issue, but it's one worth debating over, as it remains the cornerstone of American democracy. Interested in becoming a radio DJ or Boston Neighborhood Network's 102.9 FM is offering in force of radio production that can get you started. For more information, please head over to bnnmedia.org/services/workshops. And we're back here on another level. Again, you have another look at the flyer for the Boston Media Producers Group's presentation of the media networking forum and community conversation Saturday, the importance of media and the community Saturday, November 2nd at 1 p.m. at the Roxbury Public Library. We're back with Barbara Barry Murray and Barbara, we have a couple of phone calls that we want to get to. And can we take the first phone call or tell us your first name and where you're calling from and your comments or question, please? Good evening, Sharon. Good evening. Good evening. This is the Lane Hall Corbett, one of the producers, a long-time producer at B&M, and also I produce an art and culture, a new publication. My comment and/or question to you is this. Do you find that culture is important when it comes to media? Do we need to be more culturally inclined? We as producers or we as the public? We as producers, we as writers, do we need to be more culturally inclined? That's a good question. I'm going to throw it to Barbara. Thank you so much, Elaine. I'm going to throw it to Barbara first and then I'll chime in with my comments. So Barbara, do you think producers need to be more culturally inclined, culturally competent, culturally inclined when producing and when producing, whatever you're producing? Do you think so? I think that it makes a difference. I think that if you really want to know, like I said earlier, if you really want to know how black people think, how brown people think, you need to hear it from us. You need to see it through our eyes and you can't do that if you're not getting it from us. So you need to give us an opportunity to speak to you as viewers and as listeners so that you can hear our perspective. Our perspective is reflective of us as a people and that is reflecting our culture and if you are not of our culture and you want to understand what it is that we think, then you need to listen and pay attention to what we have to say. So yes, Elaine, I think so. So also, the other question, so I'll respond to that and the other question is you can have other people be culturally competent about other cultures. However, it is more powerful when you're hearing from the person. You're hearing from that culture, you're hearing from their perspective. And there are, I'll take, for example, Boston Public Schools has over 135 languages in Boston Public Schools. We don't have teachers that speak all those languages, but we have those cultures and languages reflected, right, from I think it's 78 countries and 135 languages. I may have the numbers wrong, but if you are not here and within those, if you just take Spanish, depending on where the person is from, it's Spanish, it's the language, but they could be from Dominican Republic. They could be from Cuba, they could be from Honduras, they could be from Spain, they could be from Mexico. I mean, there's all these other countries and they're speaking Spanish, but it's different inflections as different cultures. And you will get that when you are talking to someone who is familiar with or from there. And when you don't have that reflected, there's an argument that can be made where there will end up being more misunderstandings, more miscommunication, and it may manifest into hatred, it may manifest in policy where that particular cultural language is not considered in legislation considered when decisions are being made about education, where the money goes, where money does not go. And so I think it's very important in considering the majority of people now get their news, not from newspapers, but they get their news from social media. If you don't have the various people who are consuming it reflected, then you may get a warped perspective. So that's a piece I want to say. So thank you. And I think we have another phone caller that was waiting on the line. So give us your name and where you're calling from and your comment or your question, please. Anything I'm calling for, I have a question, and my question is, what part will AI play in media because no, I'm not scared of technology, I'm not saying that we place human, I'm just asking, what part will AI play in the new media? In the new mediums of what, radio, radio, TV, and all the media itself or just where? Or do you bother? So yeah, if you recall, thank you for your comment and your question. If you recall earlier in this year and the end of last year, there was a strike by actors and by writers who did not want to be replaced or displaced by AI, either generating images of the actors and the actors not being compensated or generating content and creative content and displacing or replacing writers. There's also a controversy when it comes to education. A lot of the colleges, universities, and schools, public, private, and charter are grappling with policies on AI and chat GBT and all these other softwares that can create program proposals that write papers and being able to detect it. Now right now the technology is such that it can be used as a tool for research and for writing, especially if you're doing grants or something like that. But when it comes down to actually replacing your creative energies, it's plagiarism. I think it's dumbing people down and it's plagiarism. And there are other policies that are in colleges and universities that are saying you can only use it as a tool to do this, but it can't replace you and your voice because at that point it's not genuinely you. And so I think AI has a lot of, it's not going anywhere, first off. And one of the founders and the generators of AI or creators and inventors of AI is saying we need to slow down. Because of the rate that AI is teaching itself how to learn and the rate that it can consume human knowledge, so there's an old saying with computers garbage in and garbage out. So what is being said into AI if it is not culturally competent and all inclusive is evidence of surveillance equipment. At one point AI was facial recognition software was identifying people of color particularly dark skinned people as criminals and it was being used at airports. And I'm not sure that's totally been rectified. And then you have AI that can be used to replace people. I'm one of those people that when I go into a supermarket I specifically go to a person. Yes, I could go into self check out. But I know that people need to have jobs to be able to pay for their bills. And so there is a warning, a red flag warning that's going out now by some of the creators and inventors of AI that is saying that we need to slow down and figure out what we're getting into because technically and also there was a strike, a proposed strike from using technology to replace Longshoreman and replace jobs that people have. It's happened on the West Coast. My brother is a retired Longshoreman. And so he's telling me how computers and robots have replaced a lot of what used to be people's jobs. Robots don't need to take sick leave or vacations or lunches or anything like personal time or anything like that. So for the corporations it is increasingly profitable, but it's displacing people. So AI is not going anywhere. We've got to figure out what it is. And I know in the business that I have seen and I've worked in television, radio, film, music. I've seen computers and one hand it's very convenient and it's more efficient. On the other hand it's actually replacing people in their jobs. So I think we need to think about with caution. Barbara, do you have any comments about that? Well, I've been thinking. I think that AI is something that is helpful but dangerous at the same time. We need to be very careful in terms of what it's going to be allowed to do. I can see it replacing jobs. I can see it also being helpful with people's jobs. But I'm concerned. I'm concerned that robots tend to take over themselves. You know, like you said earlier, it will take on human interests. It will develop faster than you can feed it. So it can really take advantage of the fact that it is not, in fact, human, that it can really double back and learn what we've given it plus double down on what it is that is being given. I think that AI is concerning to me but I know it can be helpful also. Thank you for that phone call. I didn't know if we did lose that phone call if we have another phone call. Oh, it's by. He's by. Thank you so much for the phone callers. We still will take phone calls for another 10 minutes. When you talk about the community media, I remember Ida B. Wells and the newspaper that started publishing lynchings. I also remember that when television was black and white and we didn't have a gazillion channels, there was only, and it didn't stay on forever. Now I'm going old school now. There were three channels and it went off right before midnight and to get a test pattern. So you'd see the flag waving and da, da, da, da, da, da, it would go off. We didn't stay on all the time and there were only two shows that were in color. It was Bonanza and Wonderful World of Disney. Now you see all of the Schmorgers board of everything. I also know that some of the programs would have been censored because I consider, and I'm not going to name them, they're soft porn. I mean, some of them, not soft porn, they're hard porn. Like you didn't, when I love Lucy and they were married and her husband Desi Arnaz were doing, I love Lucy, they had separate beds, they always had the pajamas on, and when they taped it, they always had to have a foot. You didn't see it, but they always had to have one foot on the floor. There was incredible censorship in terms of morality clauses and stuff like that. Now it just seems like stuff is out the door. Although there are organizations that are trying to get some guidelines when it comes to children and when it comes to violence and sexual content, that happened because an activist group actually said, you know, on music, actually the music part with the labels came about as iced tea when he was, would he have F the police or whatever it was? He had a, or a kilocops or whatever it was, but he had a particular rap song, and one of the vice president's wives was she had a whole campaign around morality, and so you started getting labels on records. Now we have everything labeled when you go to the movies, when you go to see stuff in social media, you go to television, they'll tell you, it's got violence. Some of the movies from other foreign countries will have warning signals that said smoking quills, smoking causes cancer. So now you have all these different warnings, and then there was an incident, there was a ruling, a policy ruling, when you would go out to, some of you would remember drive-ins and drive-in movies, and so in film, there's 24 frames per second, right? And in the frame, they would have, and I'm saying the producers of the film and marketers would put in a frame that said, "Eat popcorn," or "You're hungry." And you would be in the movies thinking, "I want to get some popcorn, ooh, I'm thirsty," not realizing that your optic nerve, your optic senses have picked up this message subconsciously, because as you are a human being, as you're processing what you're seeing and what you're looking at, you're actually receiving messages. That is supposed to be illegal, but people are still doing it, because they get away with it. You don't necessarily see it. And then there's a book called Media Sexploitation, and another book called Subliminal Seduction. And I read this years ago, they talked about what marketing and even cartoons that seem to be, relatively benign and innocent, Disney cartoons, and overlaid in the writing or in the design of the cartoons, and a lot of ads, cigarette ads, liquor ads, a lot of different advertisements would have subliminally these words or messages put in there that would program your brain without you even knowing about it. Subliminal seduction and media sexploitation, it's an old book, but it still applies. And when you look at the power of the media, the power of television, the power. And I don't want to give Orange Man any credit, but he knows how to use the media, and he's not the first one. Hitler was very effective in how to use his voice and how to move crowds. If you've ever seen a war moving, they've got the music. If you're talking about, you know, Jaws, this music that comes into there, if you had Jaws with another, you know, and I've seen this demo, we won't play it tonight, had different music other than that, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Music is very powerful, and your body processes that in different frequencies, some you can hear and some you can hear that actually affect your emotions and actually affect your psychology. So when we have this forum, we're not, we actually are not presenting music and film and, you know, plays and stuff like that and authors. We may do that at another time, but we felt, and when I say we, the Boston Media Producers Group felt that it was important to have these conversations about the power of media and how we influence it and how we interpret it and how we can become a part of it if we want to. During the break, we played how you can become a producer here, either on radio at WBCA or on cable, be in media and become not just a consumer, but actually a producer and bring your voice. We have shows that talk about everything. Some of the people, one of the people that's in the room now, Ike Benjamin, has a show in the word. And so he talks about the word, if you're a Christian, the word, the word of the Bible. So we have religious programs, we have cultural programs, we have educational programs, extra help. Years ago, at its first inception, I was the production supervisor to extra help, which is a homework help program. Kids could call up and get help with elementary, middle school and high school subjects and in languages. We had French and Spanish at the time. And so, and it's still going on in one of the B&N channels. So in Studio B. So way before COVID, way before People in College started using hybrid learning, where you're using television and live interactive television, we were doing that at Cable Vision of Boston, Brooklyn. We were also doing it in colleges, and so when the pandemic happened, and all of Boston Public Schools had to go remote, there were already college professors that were doing that kind of stuff. So technology demands innovation, and demands adaptation as we're talking about AI. And we've got about 10 minutes left. Barbara, tell me about what you see the impact of Say Brother was, because I think at that time, that was, it was Say Brother, and I think there was Tonya Hart had a program too. Was that around the same time? No, not yet. That was Tony, Tony, Tony was in New York, Tony Brown's journal, Tony Brown's journal. That's great. And so he came immediately after New Yorkers will say the game at the same time. So no, no, I guess it depends upon where you come from. It was either '68 or a few minutes into '68, actually, Say Brother started in October 1968. Now, I don't know if Tony Brown's journal started then or a little bit before then or a little bit after. I'm not sure. But they came out at the same time, and they had quite a bit of popularity, and addressed African Americans specifically, and we were able to learn quite a bit from one another. They both had, both shows had black teams. As I said earlier, Jim Boyd and Sarah Anshaw were the on-camera people for Say Brother back in 1968, in fact, Jim Boyd, as I recall, was one of the producers. And then we went from there to, we continue to say, "Brother, it went on for a long time." Basic back then come up to, I guess, 20 years ago, I guess. Tony Brown's journal. I just googled it, it was 1978. Was it? Yep. Ten years later. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, I remember meeting Tony at a television and producers conference in New York City, and he was quite an interesting fellow. He was an educator, and he was able to really educate his viewers. He had a live audience usually, and they had live phones, and they called in, and they asked questions live. He had some very entertaining and illustrious guests. I love watching that show. I didn't feel like 10 years after, but I guess it was. And so, talk to me about the struggle to keep, say, "Brother on the air," because there was an outcry from the community to have, say, "Brother," and then there was, we got about five minutes, and there was a struggle to keep it on the air, and that was very politically. Yeah. You can't tell it in five minutes, but what I can do is give you a couple of kernels, and that is they wanted to take the producer at that point wanted to go and produce a program in New Bedford, and it was quite a political outcry in New Bedford about racism. And at that point, everybody that was in line with the producer of, say, "Brother," at that point, was for putting this whole story on the air. They did put it on the air. They kept it from rolling over into going completely off. They created the Save Brother community committee who worked to keep that show on the air, and that was a long and arduous fight, but it was one that really brought the community together and made a difference in terms of who was going to be able to see Black programming. Now, what it was to say, for those people that don't know, what was the programming? What did the programming of Save Brother consist of? Oh, as its motto said, it was by and about the Black community, which meant everything. You could have the political perspective of what's going on. You could have who was laid off from work, how black folks would lose their jobs, how they could get them back, what the education was like. We had, Judge Garrity at the time, was a true advocate of desegregation, and he had a program. You produced a series called the Desegregation Act. I'm forgetting the names of everything right now because I'm not expecting to do this. Save Brother was a program that had to fight to keep its existence for a very long time, and it did that and it won that because of the community committee that was a body of people, black community leaders who helped make that happen. Unfortunately, when certain people left the team, they didn't have the same connection. The replacement did not have the same connection with the community committee, and they replaced the name of the show. One of my mentors told me, "When you change the name, you change the history." When they changed the name of Save Brother to Basic Black, they changed the history. That is something that we need to remember as we move forward. Thank you so much. Do you want to give last comments about this upcoming media networking forum on Saturday, November 2nd? I am so excited about this thing. This will bring a lot of my old friends together along with meeting some new friends. I think that it's going to be very exciting. I look forward to us getting together in one room. It's going to be something that you don't want to miss. Please come. It's only two hours in Roxbury, in the Roxbury Library, down the Nubian Square. Please come. If you can't get there at all, try to make it. We're going to try to do some kind of hybrid programming, but we're not sure that we can do it. I'm not sure they're set up for that, but we'll do it the best we can, but try to get there. That's what we're looking forward to. We're looking to have the bodies all in the room and to get to talk to one another. We want to know what you want. We want to know what you need to know. We want to know what we've not been giving you. We want to know what we can do for the future. And how we can make it better. Thank you so much, my dear friend and the Vice President of the Boston Media Producers Group. You've been here with us, hopefully on another level. Also stay tuned to any other program that's here on Boston Media Programming and continue to support us here at BNN Media and tune into Black Teachers Matter Radio Podcast with your host Sharon Eaton Hinton. Take care of yourself, God bless, and hope to see you November 2nd at 1 p.m. for the media, networking forum, and community conversation. Thank you, too. Bye-bye. I have a problem every year around MLK Day because Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for some reason has been treated as America's civil rights mascot. On this day you'll have folks who would have never in their life marched with, agreed with, voted with anything he believed in. One of the biggest, biggest in the United States Congress, E.M. You ought to actually send out a Dr. King. The march has begun, every day we rise like the sun is right till the battle is won. Can you hear the footsteps listen 'cause we're coming like a gang on the streets, so you better start running. It's time for some action now. Historical progression generated march in succession through 400 years. Heat, blood, sweat, and tears and counting. The resistance is mounting. One of the greatest in the world is counting. One of the greatest in the world is counting. One of the greatest in the world is counting. One of the greatest in the world is counting. One of the greatest in the world is counting. One of the greatest in the world is counting. One of the greatest in the world is counting. One of the greatest in the world is counting. One of the greatest in the world is counting. One of the greatest in the world is counting. One of the greatest in the world is counting.