It’s a Big Media Week here in Minneapolis. 

Tomorrow, Thursday, is the ACME Teach-In. Josh Golin (CCFC) will be presenting Using Big Media’s Exploitation of Children to Motivate Parents and Others Toward Media Reform (more here). 

The National Conference for Media Reform starts Friday. I’m a conference volunteer (work eight hours, get in free!). While I had fantasies that my volunteer assignment would be to keep Dan Rather supplied with bourbons-straight-up, I’ve been asked to be a regular old room monitor. Just like fourth grade. Good news: I learned at the volunteer training last night that there will be at least one table in the exhibit area where attendees can drop their own literature. What a way to get our name in front of 3,000 people!

Here’s an Interview with Free Press’s Josh Silver via Minnesota Monitor.

Friday night is the opening for Project Girl: A Multimedia Exhibition and Guide to Un-Mediafying Your Life at Intermedia Arts. Lyn Mikel Brown will be speaking.

Sunday night is the Anne Elizabeth Moore reading at Arise! Bookstore. Is it enough to know that Pamela Anderson has read Unmarketable? No? Then if you need to become more familiar with Anne Elizabeth Moore, read Rob Walker’s interview with Anne Elizabeth Moore. Or read Anne Elizabeth Moore’s interview with Rob Walker. (Note to self: keep short name.)

Hello to anyone who has come to Parents for Ethical Marketing and the Corporate Babysitter through one of these events!

And why does all this media reform matter to those of us concerned with marketing to children?

Television broadcasters are supposed to serve the public interest — that’s why they have free use of the airwaves. But since media companies were allowed to consolidate, children’s educational programming has decreased — dramatically. That’s one reason why Parents for Ethical Marketing is taking a stand against media consolidation. (Big Media, Little Kids 2: Examining the Influence of Duopolies on Children’s Television Programming)

Right now phone and cable companies would like to be able to control what you — and your kids — see and do on the internet. If corporations decide what web content to provide, would children still have access to the advertising-free educational sites like Starfall? Would you be able to read blogs critical of corporate power (like this one)? Probably not as easily. That’s why Parents for Ethical Marketing supports net neutrality.

Do I even have to mention what mainstream media is doing to kids?

Media reform means more voices, more options, more ideas, more knowledge — creating informed, healthy kids who become informed, healthy adults.

Photo courtesy woodleywonderworks

Everyone probably knows that the National Conference on Media Reform (Robert McChesney! Dan Rather! Amy Goodman! Bill Moyers! Naomi Klein!) will be held here in Minneapolis June 6-8.

But, did you know that the day before, on June 5, Minneapolis is also host to the Action Coalition for Media Education Summit? Media Education 2.0: A One-Day Teach-In is designed to sharpen media education and technological skills to help turn citizens into media reform activists.

Of special interest is Using Big Media’s Exploitation of Children to Motivate Parents and Others Toward Media Reform with Josh Golin, associate director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood:

A media system designed to serve advertiser’s interests and not the public interest is bad for everyone, but it takes a particularly hard toll on children. Corporate marketing is a factor in many of the key problems facing children today, including childhood obesity, eating disorders, youth violence, precocious irresponsible sexuality, rampant materialism, and the erosion of children’s creative play.

In this workshop, we’ll examine how a combination of deregulation and new technologies has given corporations unfettered access to children and the latest techniques used by marketers to make an end-run around parents to sell children on anything and everything. We’ll then explore ways of mobilizing parents, not only to fight back against their children’s corporate abusers, but to become activists for policy change and media reform.

Program and registration information.

And then the following evening, June 6, is the opening night reception for Project Girl: A Multimedia Exhibition and Guide to Un-Mediafying Your Life presented by Intermedia Arts. Project Girl is a national touring visual arts exhibition and series of hands-on art-based workshops designed to defend adolescent girls from the harmful effects of media messages. The project co-creators, Kelly Parks Snider and Jane Bartell, will attend and Lyn Mikel Brown, author of Packaging Girlhood and co-creator of Hardy Girls Healthy Women, will speak.

Intermedia Arts may also be able to offer summer workshops for girls featuring the Project Girl media literacy curriculum, and media literacy curriculum training may be available for educators, parents, artists, activists, policy makers, and others if the program is adequately funded.

It would be a great opportunity for those who work with girls and need “to become better equipped to deal with the significant challenges resulting from the transformation of children into America’s number one marketing demographic.” Please consider donating to Project Girl.

Yesterday I attended the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits Technology and Communications Conference. It’s the first time I’ve been out of my jammies, off my sofa, and among real people before 1:00 p.m. in more than a year. My greatest concerns were a) whether or not I’d be able to speak coherent English sentences, and b) if real people out in the real world were still wearing pants — or had some other trendy trend taken over business casual?

I gotta get out more.

Beth Kanter was the keynote speaker. I saw her sticker-covered laptop with my own eyes and heard how she won America’s Giving Challenge. She was inspirational and grounded. And she swore like a sailor.

I also met Aaron Landry, who was talking about Web 2.0. terminology. Aaron was one of the first bloggers I read when I started out a year and a half ago. I was delighted when he used this blog (Corporate Babysitter) to illustrate what an RSS reader is, and since he was so kind to me, I will abandon my original plan to review his presentation as if it were a pizza place.* He was terrific.

Next week it’s off to Boston to the CCFC Annual Summit, Consuming Kids: The Sexualization of Children and Other Commercial Calamities (Morgan Spurlock, Jeanne Kilbourne, Juliet Schor, and Enola Aird, to name a few).

Now that I’ve confirmed pants are still in, I think I’m ready.

*A strange craving for pizza, however, did send my family and me to the Franklin Avenue Pizza Luce for dinner.