In a fantastic speech at the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis, Bay Area hip-hop historian and KPFA radio personality Davey D gave a keynote address (which he shared with folks like Al Franken, Jim Hightower and Patti Smith) on the role of media in the community and how people can strike back against giants like Emmis and ClearChannel. Early on, he issues his call to action:

The thing that I always tell people is that media -- at this point in time, 2005, we can no longer afford to treat media as a passive spectator sport. 2005, it requires us to step it up and be interactive. Interactive means that we hold everybody who is reporting the news, who is presenting information, who is on the airwaves that our tax dollars help pay for, we have to be in their faces 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every angle possible, whether you are coming at it from the low end, from the policy side, whether you are creating your own media to be competition to them, but we have to hold them accountable, because I can tell you as somebody who has been involved with some of these stations that have laid out some of the groundwork for some of these ongoing assaults -- and I worked for Clear Channel for a number of years -- that they spend a lot of time studying and figuring out ways to seduce and attract and lull a lot of the people who aren’t in this room to sleep and make it seem like what they present is something that is all good, and therefore, there's no problem, until one day we wake up and find out that there's a lot of things we don't know about, there's a lot of laws that have been passed, there's a lot of things that that are missing that are very important to our lives, but by then, the train has left the station...

You can check out Davey D 24-7-365 at his website or appearing on Hard Knock Radio weekdays at 4pm on KPFA. If reading isn't your bag, you can listen or watch the speech as well.

Photo from Davey D's online bio.