New member of the CIIJ family

PopandPolitics.com founder and author expounds on how to use media to reach the 100 million missing voters

by Lena-Nsomeka Gomes

Farai Chideya is a multi-media journalist, author and founder of PopandPolitics.com, an online journal of news and opinion for a diverse national and international audience. She is currently a host at Your Call Radio 91.7 KALW-FM Chideya has been a correspondent for ABC News, a CNN Political Analyst, an anchor for the prime time program "Pure Oxygen,î and a contributor of commentaries to CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and BET. Her stereotype-shattering book, Don't Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African-Americans, and her second book, The Color of Our Future have been featured in college curricula across the country. She is currently working on her third book, Trust: Reaching 100 Million Missing Voters, due out this fall. What brings you, and Pop and Politics to the Center for the Improvement and the Integration of Journalism at SFSU?
Well, Iím migrating a site that I had for eight years, called PopandPolitics.com to San Francisco State, under the umbrella of CIIJ. Weíre hoping to get that going in August. And Iím looking forward to using the students as writers, reporter and editors, and also to use professional writers as well. The categories we cover are electoral politics and civic engagement, gender and sexuality, race and justice, hip hop and pop culture, and youth. Why do you want to migrate PopandPolitics.com to San Francisco State?
I started this site when I was 25 years old and I was doing political analysis for CNN. People were interested in having political analysis from a youth perspective. The reality is thereís this niche that needs to be filled of youth political analysis. And Pop and Politics needs to be somewhere where it can tap into younger peopleóyounger citizens, because people under 35 donít usually have a strong voter history or strong civic engagement pattern. I think California has a very interesting cross-section of people. It has a different sense of ethnic politics than the rest of the country. And San Francisco State reflects that. I think it will be a good fit. Do you think online sites provide a better vehicle for young people to get their ideas out and to develop a national consciousness?
I have mixed feelings about this honestly, even though I am running Pop and Politics online. The two reasons I moved to San Francisco was to run Pop and Politics here and to start a new job as a radio host on KALW. I would love to see Pop and Politics expand into radio and print. Because I think the plus about the web is that itís cheap and you can do a lot with it. But people have to come to you. Itís an active medium and in some ways an elitist medium because you have to have access to the hardware and the bandwidth to access it. I think that stand-alone internet media is not the most effective way to reach people, but itís a great place to start. Tell me about your upcoming book, Trust: Reaching a 100 Million Missing Voters. Who are these voters missing in action?
Well, the 100 million missing voters are what I consider the Pop and Politics audience. They are younger Americans, Americans of color, and poor and working class Americans. The book is really an appeal to the hip-hop generation voters. And by that I mean under 35, multi-racial, economically diverse but primarily working class. Itís an appeal to help them mobilize and take control of their political lives. The black civil rights generation has not transferred power to the younger generation. The civil rights generation took the power when they were in their 20s and 30s and they have kept the power since then. And thereís a whole group of people in their 20s and 30s now who need to start taking political power. They need to step up to the plate, run for political offices, do community organizing. There are people doing this, but itís not a groundswell. And thatís in part because people have not defined the political objectives for the 2000s. When there was a color line people could organize behind a color line, but now thereís the prison industrial complex, thereís need for medical care and education. People have to vote, they have to participate in political life. The book talks about the reasons basically why half of the voting population does not participate (and) why people need to. There needs to be basically a populist movement in American politics. The way we think about the left and the right is generally about social issues, like abortion or the war on drugs. There needs to be a focus on the populist access, where you talk about how wealth is distributed and who gets what-for-what. People are paying a lot of taxes and not getting much for it. The way the conservatives play that it out is to say theyíll cut the taxes. Well, actually, people support taxes if they can get education and health care. I think there needs to be a reassessment of what it means to participate in government, not just in voting, but economically. People have gotten so used to the government failing them that they would rather get rid of the government than reform it. Iím making the case to reform the government. How is your hosting of the Your Call radio program (on San Francisco-based KALW-FM) going and whatís your vision for
Itís going great. I like radio because itís very intimate. Itís a call-in show and I do it from Monday through Wednesday (at 11 a.m.). The strength of radio is that you can operate in a broad range, from culture to politics and back again. Do you think right wing perspectives are dominating mainstream media?
Well, I think, instead of left and right, letís talk about populist and elitist. I think that the media is elitist more than it is right. Itís not speaking to the needs of working people. Certainly it has drifted towards the right. The right has spent a lot of time cultivating its own media base. People have literally spend billions of dollars to create outlets like Fox news which markets themselves as neutral when in fact they are far right. However, itís interesting to see where the populist ideas break down. For instance, Lou Dobbs, a multi-millionaire businessman (is) on CNN. Heís an on-air person and heís also a show producer. Heís done this thing called the ìExporting America,î which is this huge project about companies moving their labor overseas. Thatís actually a populist segmentóeven though itís an elitist show because it deals with the stock market and other business. I think itís interesting to see where things break through, where things are desperate enough and people start paying attention to them. I also think the media is not relevant enough to peopleís lives. It doesnít pertain to putting food on the table, to getting better health care or education. Itís more esoteric and intellectual. The media has to realize that it needs to discuss the issues more deeply. For example, if theyíre going to talk about the war in Iraq, they have to talk about geopolitics, and how the war affects working families. Itís a matter of perspective. There is a lot of power in learning how to decode the news and I think there needs to be more media literacy.