I would be remiss to recount the history of Chicago Media Action without paying homage to one episode -- an episode spanning more than four years marked by extraordinary outreach and even some modest policy victories. I'm referring to CMA's activist contributions to the digital television transition in the years 2005 to 2009.

America's television stations changed its broadcast medium from analog to digital, with a deadline requiring a full transition for 2009 (more on that deadline later). But the efforts about that were as bungled as could be: the outreach efforts by the government and by the commercial broadcast lobby were half-hearted and not very effective, and poised to leave a lot of people hanging. I don't remember the exact moment when I realized this could be a problem; it probably emerged gradually in the course of reading media news from aggregators like the Free Press newswire and the Benton Foundation's website. But it was in late 2005 when matters crystallized and I realized that this was poised to be a disaster and we needed to get to work.

Early on, other CMA organizers and other political activists were lukewarm to the matter. Commercial TV sucks, so went one counter-argument, so why help them especially since they have a lot of negative effects (like the media-fueled war on Iraq) to account for? I conceded that point, but the fact remains that a lot of poor and working-class people still rely on commercial TV for various critical needs, and disasters could unfold if that information is lacking (recall the Minot incident).

The activism took the form of outreach, the results of which may have been the most successful of any of the initiatives that CMA took on. One of the earliest was an interview with, ironically enough, WGN News. This is ironic because WGN and Tribune generally gave CMA the cold shoulder for decades, and was in the middle of a license challenge filed by CMA when the segment was broadcast.

I set up a sister website to CMA to serve as a clearinghouse for public-service information on the DTV transition, which I called dtvredalert.org. I was contacted by Flow TV, a journal about television published by the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas, to write and speak about the matter. I wrote two articles for Flow TV, and even chaired a panel held in Austin, Texas, to discuss the matter, the full audio of which remains online.

In late 2008, after the first election of Chicagoan Barack Obama to the presidency. CMA members were part of a phone call with leaders from the FCC/Obama transition team (I was fortunate enough to be on that call).

Then there was the American Forum -- a national network for distributing editorials to newspapers. Fellow CMA compatriot Steve Macek had discussed the possibility of writing an op-ed for distribution, and given the growth of coverage on the issue (the forthcoming Obama administration had mentioned the issue and the FCC had even taken to a whistlestop tour, even making a stop in Chicago), it made sense to continue. So I agreed, and in the course of writing it, I also thought that there was so much we could say at a level far more complex than what I had been doing, given that I had been working on the issue non-stop for three years, that it seemed almost insulting to me to write what we were writing -- a 700-word op-ed, very high-level and low-sophistication, completed in just two days. Even so, we very quickly wrote it out and sent it out.

We got the piece out at exactly the right time, since what followed was simply breathtaking. The American Forum had informed us that the op-ed we had written had grown to become the most popular op-ed in the American Forum's history, getting published in some 160 newspapers nationwide.

Then there was Liam Warfield. Liam is a Chicago-based writer an activist whom I knew for organizing a 40th-anniversary celebration of the 1968 DNC protests in Chicago's Grant Park. Liam reached out to me to write an article about the DTV conversion, and using me as the focal point of the article. I agreed; Liam interviewed me twice over two weeks at The Grind Cafe in Chicago, and the result was a cover-story for the Chicago Reader.

All told, it was upon reflection the most extraordinary burst of coverage I and CMA had ever gotten, with one putative win after another. Did this translate into policy improvements and impacting people's lives? Congress did pass the DTV Delay Act, which delayed the conversion deadline from February 2009 to June 2009, just four months. That did provide additional time to raise further awareness (I even saw coverage on the issue on NASCAR and on Fox NFL Sunday), and to get help to people who needed it.

And what of things since? What signs we have of the immediate aftermath were not encouraging: you will recall that the U.S. government alloted money for vouchers that could be used by low-income individuals to offset the cost of purchasing digital conversion boxes. That program ended with a surplus -- that is, the government didn't spend all of the money that was allotted. That could mean that folks didn't know about the program and thus didn't apply for them. It could also mean that folks could have gotten assistance by other means and that the government over-budgeted. It could yet still mean that people didn't get the assistance and simply went dark in June 2009. I have not seen any research that has explored this question (if anyone knows of anything, please let me know). There is also the critique that the DTV conversion marked a lost opportunity to expand public service broadcasting.

I admit, I let the dtvredalert.org website expire during the years that followed. Plus, with the internet serving as more and more infrastructure for media, in everything from podcasts to streaming to social media, the days of the primacy of broadcast television seem to be in the past. Again, the question beckons, as I've asked before, was it worth it? And the answer is yes, as I've answered before, we do what we can with what we have where we are to try to improve things. It's really the only thing we can do.

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