Post tag: media ownership
Dance/NYC 2015 Symposium: Collaboration, Partnership, Cultural Equity

DanceNYC & Gibney CtrMarlowsphere Blog (#118)

One hundred and seven guest speakers, 26 sessions, 5 meeting spaces—all in one place in one day.

On February 22, 2015,  400+ registrants from various aspects of the dance world—policymakers, advocates, funders, artists, managers, scholars, and audiences, mostly from New York City—gathered for the sixth annual Dance/NYC Symposium held this year at the brand new Gibney Dance Center at 280 Broadway.  The number of participants was impressive given that Dance/NYC, led ably by Executive Director Lane Harwell and his staff, and a host of volunteers, describes the performing art form as having 1,200+ dance makers and companies in the New York City metropolitan area.

The day’s concurrent sessions focused on various aspects of technology, including a hands-on workshop dedicated to “Save Your
Lane Harwell and Gina GibneyVideotapes.” Other tracks included panels on facilities and geographic equity, dance companies and corporate partners, and funding. There was even one panel that dealt with issues of seniors and artists with special needs. Dance/NYC also organized all-day, one-on-one consultations with legal and financial experts.

The track that attracted many attendees (held in the Gibney Dance Center’s theatre space) was the six-sessions that dealt with diversity: “Meet NYC Arts Advocates,” “Dance Education for Every NYC Child,” “Diversity & NYC Cultural Leadership,” and three variations on “Power, Privilege, & Perception.” These six sessions naturally touched on issues that went beyond just aspects of Dance/NYC.

In a mid-afternoon solo talk, Tom Finkelpearl, current New York City Commissioner, Department of Cultural Affairs, started with some pointed statistics. His first slide showed that nationally, minorities represented 35% of the overall population. In New York City, on the other hand, minorities represent 65% of the general population. The question then became: does this latter figure translate into the field of dance (or the arts generally)? The answer is: no.

Kerry McCarthy, Senior Program Officer, Arts and Historical Preservation, with the New York Community Trust, keynoted the several Kerry McCarthy, Senior Program Officer, Arts and Historical Preservation, with the New York Community Trustsessions with the following opening remarks:

We know that despite the excellent work of companies like Ballet Hispanico, we still have a dance diversity pipeline issue. As Dance Theater of Harlem’s Virginia Johnson has said, “Black Swans are still all too rare.” The BFA/MFA/PHD project verified that in a recent counting of the City’s working artists and residents with arts degrees. It found that New York’s art world appears to be 200 percent whiter than the general population. A report from the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy confirmed that just ten percent of arts philanthropy dollars are classified as benefiting marginalized communities.

Later in this same session, two speakers especially—Denise Saunders Thompson, Executive Director of the Washington, D.C.-based International Association of Blacks in Dance, and Carlton Turner, Executive Director of the Atlanta, GA-based Alternate Roots, both pointed out in their own individual ways that the lack of recognition of diversity, especially in terms of funding, is not just a local or regional problem, but that it is a national and perhaps international problem with roots that transcend the early 21st century. It is an issue with deep historical precedent.

In this regard, the much larger issue is “The Global Forces That Are Re-Shaping the Arts.” In my last blog  I posit that there may be a strong relationship among the stagnation of human rights freedoms (on a global basis), media consolidation in the last 30 years or so, and wealth concentration, i.e., the growing disparity between rich and poor/income inequality.

All these forces, together with the negative impacts of various electronic technologies, have re-shaped the arts in the last 30-35 years. For example, it is clear that, in the United States at Panel Discussion at Dance/NYC Symposium 2015least, the number of arts & culture reporters and critics has diminished greatly. The greatly reduced coverage of the arts, including dance, has also had a major, negative impact on the people in the arts world, especially in the pocketbook.

The questions then become: what can be done about “diversity exclusion,” and what can be done about so-called “culture crash” in this context? In other words, there are inexorable forces surrounding the world of artists, and these forces cannot be surmounted in the short-term, but in the long-term perhaps there are steps artists can take to raise the level of their survivability.

Kerry McCarthy answered this question in part in her opening remarks with respect to New York City:

The City Council and the Mayor are taking steps to support a more inclusive arts sector. For example, the Department of Cultural Affairs will survey arts groups to see if the staffs, boards, and visitors reflect the demographics of our minority-majority city. Then, it will outline a plan to help the field better diversify. Meanwhile, the City Council set aside new funds for small immigrant community groups to provide cultural programs, as well as for a Communities of Color Stabilization grant program. It then doubled support of the Coalition of Theaters of Color.

The Mayor also launched the extremely popular Municipal ID that will connect New Yorkers, regardless of immigration status, to new services and benefits—including free admission and discounts worth $2,100 at museums and other arts groups. The biggest step towards cultural equity came when the Mayor allocated $23 million to hire 120 new arts teachers, who, in turn, will help reach the disproportionately affected students of color at schools without art teachers.

And, finally, City Council is advancing legislation to create a cultural plan for the City, one that we expect will be undergirded by the values of equity.

As the City talks more about diversity, it is working towards cultural equity, or a world where all artists and arts groups, not just those representing traditionally dominant European forms, are valued and supported equally. This means that culturally-explicit groups and artists of color that have been historically underfunded and marginalized, whether intentionally or unintentionally, begin to get a larger piece of the pie.

In the interim, the larger question is still: what will happen to the “creative arts,” including dance, going forward in an economy that for the last 30-35 years has increasingly distained major support for those in the creative arts?

If you have any questions or comments about this or any other of my blogs, please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
March 2, 2015

© Eugene Marlow 2015

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The Stagnation of Human Rights Freedoms, Media Ownership, and Concentration of Wealth

Marlowsphere Blog (#117)

Freedom House—an organization founded in 1941 by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and attorney Wendell Willkie—has published its latest report on “Freedom in the World 2015.”  It is not a pretty picture.

Freedom House's "Freedom in World 2015" map

While the second half of the 20th century witnessed the growth of freedom in the world, in the late 20th century (starting in 1995) until now, human rights freedoms, country by country, has declined on a global basis. The kind view is that the growth of freedom has at least stagnated. To quote from the report:

More aggressive tactics by authoritarian regimes and an upsurge in terrorist attacks contributed to a disturbing decline in global freedom in 2014. Freedom in the World 2015 found an overall drop in freedom for the ninth consecutive year.

Nearly twice as many countries suffered declines as registered gains—61 to 33—and the number of countries with improvements hit its lowest point since the nine-year erosion began. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a rollback of democratic gains by Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s intensified campaign against press freedom and civil society, and further centralization of authority in China were evidence of a growing disdain for democratic standards that was found in nearly all regions of the world.

The worst regions of the world with respect to lack of freedom are Northern Africa and the Middle East.

The decline (or stagnation) in human rights freedoms reported by Freedom House parallels the ranking of world countries with respect to journalistic freedom of the press. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF) “World Press Freedom Index 2015″:

Two-thirds of the 180 countries surveyed for the 2015 World Press Freedom Index performed less well than in the previous year,” the France-based watchdog said. RSF attributed the decline largely to attacks on media as global conflicts proliferated throughout 2014. This includes not only repressive regimes, but also non-state groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State, which “used fear and reprisals to silence journalists”.

Iran, China, Syria and North Korea were among the places ranked as having the worst levels of press freedom. China came in 176th, one step down from last year.

. . . .Around the world, France ranked 38th (up one place) the U.S. 49th (down three places) and Russia 152nd (down four).

Freedom of the Press World Wide 2014

This blog has already pointed to the issue of the relationship between lack of literacy (or to put it another way, levels of illiteracy) and violence. The general conclusion is that where there’s significant levels of illiteracy (such as in Pakistan), there’s significant levels of violence, especially against girls and women. Further, where’s there’s significant levels of illiteracy (such as in Egypt), there’s significant lack of human rights freedoms.

But there’s another relationship that bears mentioning, and that is the relationship among levels of human rights freedoms (or the lack thereof), media ownership, and distribution of wealth.

What is the relationship between Human Rights Freedoms, Media Consolidation & Wealth Concentration on a global basis?The question is this: is there a relationship—that has evolved over the last 30-35 years—among the very real stagnation of growth of human rights freedoms in the world, the very real consolidation of media ownership on a global basis, and the very real high levels of wealth concentration on a global basis?

To provide some detail, in the last 30-35 years corporate ownership of media assets—print and electronic—has shrunk from about 80 companies to a mere handful. Depending on one’s definition, the major players in the media ownership industry range from a mere six to (perhaps) 12. The major players are such companies as: Disney, Bertelsman, Sony, COMCAST, News Corp., Time-Warner, CBS, et al.

During this same time period, the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and the middle class has stagnated. A recent report pointed out that 80 people in the world had as much combined wealth as 3 ½ billion people on the planet. With respect to the latter group, the reference is to the poorest people on planet Earth.

Granted, the 20th century has seen staggering rates of transportation, information, and communications technological innovation, literacy rates globally have risen significantly (according to UNESCO), healthcare has improved for more and more people globally, and in some parts of the world (China, for example, which is an irony), the middle class has grown dramatically, i.e., since Mao’s demise in 1976 several hundred million people have been brought out of poverty into the middle class.

Yet, in the same time period, the level of terrorism on a global scale has increased, fewer and fewer companies own more and more media assets, fewer and fewer people own more and more real and financial assets, and the growth of human rights freedoms has stagnated.

There was a time when the Internet was viewed as the technology that “would level the playing field for small vs. large companies.” To a degree this is true, but the fact of the matter is that large companies still own major portions of the playing field. The financial crisis of 2008-2009 in the United States—that had global repercussions—shuttered one major financial institution, Lehman Brothers, and a host of much smaller firms, not to mention the thousands of individuals who lost their homes; but the rest—those that were too big to fail—were saved by the tax payer!

It would be naïve to conclude that only financial institutions are the ones to point to for our current spate of global financial and geo-political problems. There are other reasons. One is the deeply imbedded clinging to outmoded beliefs and extreme religious concepts in certain parts of the world among certain communities. These communities are angered by the accelerating cultural changes brought on by technology and are reacting violently.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S.KhunAnother reason is the disruption of technology to cultural mores and norms in certain parts of the world. In general, people don’t like change. They want stability. Regardless, technological innovation brings about disruption to cultural mores and norms. In turn, external change challenges a culture’s world perspective. It’s hard to make the adjustment or give up perceptions that don’t work anymore. A good read on this subject is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Khun.   The concepts in this book can be applied to the individual, the family, the larger community, and the country.

The question then becomes: does the inexorable march of technological innovation create  opportunities for a few to grab wealth and political power to the detriment of the rest of the populace? Is there, indeed, a close (perhaps, inevitable) relationship among the stagnation of growth of human rights freedoms, media consolidation, and wealth concentration among a few in the last 30-35 years?

It cannot be mere coincidence.

If you have any questions or comments about this or any other of my blogs, please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
February 16, 2015

© Eugene Marlow 2015

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