Bill Moyers kicked off the The National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis last Friday with a terrific keynote address that runs through the whole of American history and draws comparisons between the cotton plantations of slavery days and the media plantations of today. It's not to be missed, but it's long, so if you're not into listening to the whole audio version of the speech linked above, try the text version.

Moyers also penned last week's cover story for The Nation.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the keynote speech to whet your appetite:

For years, the media marketplace for opinions about public policy has been dominated by a highly disciplined, thoroughly networked, ideological “noise machine,” to use David Brock’s term. Permeated with slogans concocted by big corporations, their lobbyists, and their think tank subsidiaries, public discourse has effectively changed the meaning of American values. Day after day, the ideals of fairness and liberty and mutual responsibility have been stripped of their essential dignity and meaning in people’s lives. Day after day, the egalitarian creed of our Declaration of Independence is trampled underfoot by hired experts and sloganeers, who speak of the “death tax,” “the ownership society,” “the culture of life,” “the liberal assault on God and family,” “compassionate conservatism,” “weak on terrorism,” “the end of history,” “the clash of civilizations,” “no child left behind.” They have even managed to turn the escalation of a failed war into a “surge,” as if it were a current of electricity through a wire, instead of blood spurting from the ruptured vein of a soldier.

On our lackluster press corps:

I think what’s happened is not indifference or laziness or incompetence, but the fact that most journalists on the plantation have so internalized conventional wisdom that they simply accept that the system is working as it should. I’m doing a documentary this spring called “Buying the War,” and I can’t tell you again how many reporters have told me that it just never occurred to them that high officials would manipulate intelligence in order to go to war. Hello?

And finally, on the digital revolution:

The other story of America that says, free speech is not just corporate speech. That news is not just what officials tell us. And we are not just chattel in the fields living the boss man’s story. This is the great gift of the digital revolution, and you must never, never let them take it away from you. The Internet, cell phones and digital cameras that can transmit images over the Internet makes possible a nation of story tellers, every citizen a Tom Paine.