Taking news Liberty (continued)

"One of the mistakes progressives shows make a lot is they’re too stern," says Power, who, with a masters in journalism from the University of Florida, is the only member of his crew with a background in the field. "We wanted it to look like CNN or Fox News, to have that same production quality."

"We simplify things," he says of his news stories. "We as progressives see everything in a thousand shades of gray. I’m trying to condense it to black and white."

In April, Liberty News was picked up by the progressive nonprofit Free Speech TV. According to Eric Galatas, Program Director at FSTV, the production quality of Liberty News is better than many of the other news shows the company distributes. FSTV now airs Liberty News several times a week on its satellite cable station (channel 9415 on Dish TV) and on 108 public access stations in 28 states. This means, including viewers of the public access channels in 10 Maine towns and in Massachusetts, Michigan, Maryland, Hawaii, and California to which Power himself distributes, the brainchild of these pissed-off baby boomers is available to some 28 million American households.

Liberty News is Portland’s contribution to what some prominent media critics claim is a nationwide push toward opposition journalism, in which news programs are overtly biased and agenda-driven. While conservatives have long complained of the "liberal media," some liberals think more progressive opinions are exactly what national news media needs. The notion of an opposition press first registered on the media radar in the days after the 2004 election when New York University journalism professor and blogger Jay Rosen wrote about a progressive answer to Fox News on his blog www.pressthink.com.

"At some point between now and 2008, either MSNBC or CNN may break off from the pack and decide to become the liberal alternative to Fox," wrote Rosen. "[After the election] everyone realized at once the power of GOP-TV and how much sense that system — the more partisan system — made."

But Rosen’s prediction, rather than being seconded, was widely derided by mainstream press. To date, no commercial progressive news channel has been successfully launched.

But in the nonprofit realm, where media companies rely on individual and foundation funding rather than ad revenue, a few TV networks and distributors are stepping up to the progressive plate. Free Speech TV was founded in 1995 in Boulder, Colorado and is the oldest progressive news network in the US. Billing itself as the "antidote to Fox News," FSTV has recently been joined by two international progressive news networks — Link TV and Independent World Television News. Together, the three networks herald the dawn of a US broadcast opposition press for progressives, albeit on channels so low or high on the dial the average viewer might never see them.

"We have the emergence of what I call a media and democracy movement in America," says national media critic and journalist Danny Schechter. Schechter is the executive editor of Mediachannel.org, the world’s largest online media issues network, and has worked at CNN and taught at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. Schechter, who’s perhaps best known for his blog www.newsdissector.org, believes networks like FSTV mark the beginning of a shift in priorities on the Left.

"For a long time media was a complaint, it was something that people bitched about, now it’s an issue that people organize around," says Schechter. "You had three million Americans opposing [Federal Communications Commission] rules of media concentration. You have more people speaking out, affirmatively by wanting changes and negatively by not tuning in. So there’s an opportunity here to create something different, something new, because there’s so much dissatisfaction in the marketplace among the American people."

But FSTV and others like it are not commercial entities like Fox News and they don’t have the kind of money Fox does to reach into every home. FSTV, for example, scrapes by on a $2 million annual budget comprising donations from individuals and private foundations. Its reach is national, but limited primarily to the Dish satellite channel and to public access stations, which are rarely the first stop on the dial.

As Power and friends prepare the seventh show of Liberty News, the group is celebrating its first business sponsor — the independent distributor Olive Films — and positive feedback from viewers of FSTV, according to Power and FSTV’s Galatas. Eventually, Power, who funds much of the show himself, hopes to move Liberty News out of the basement to a proper studio and to expand distribution to a true nationwide audience, be it on public access or commercial cable. As Power puts it, when Americans get fed up with CNN or Fox, he wants them to tune in to Liberty News for the progressive alternative. Whether they believe his version of the truth, however, is entirely up to them.

Sara Donnelly can be reached at sdonnelly@phx.com