www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2006/01/independently.php -
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Published on: 9/29/2008
Last Visited: 9/29/2008
Paul Jay has a plan to make TV what it was meant to be.
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Paul Jay, news junkie and creator of Independent World TelevisionPaul Jay talks TV news from a black leather chair in his overstuffed downtown Toronto loft.With his black wire-rimmed glasses, cropped salt-and-pepper hair and loose grey sweatshirt, he looks every bit the left-wing intellectual.But Jay waxes as comfortably about business plans as South American coups.His ability to mix idealism with dollar signs is just one indicator his ambitious Independent World Television (IWT) just might work.
The idea for IWT came to Jay in the late '90s.Then the executive producer of CBC's CounterSpin and a documentary filmmaker (Return to Kandahar, Hitman Hart: Wrestling With Shadows), news-junkie Jay began to crave independent, in-depth journalism on television.In 2002 he started writing a screenplay set in the year 2020.The future world he foresaw included environmental disasters, escalating terrorism, more oppressive regimes and troubled international relations, thanks mainly to increasingly draconian US foreign policy.But when he imagined a world with a television news network that kept the world informed and empowered, things looked rosier.Jay realized there was writing, and there was doing.When, on February 15, 2003, upwards of 30 million people marched around the globe to protest the Iraq war, he became even more convinced that there was a demand for such a network."If we could harness even a small, small percentage of those people, we had an audience."
In quick order, Jay got seed funding from organizations such as the Canadian Auto Workers and the MacArthur Foundation and set up an advisory panel of stellar names, including Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham and AIDS advocate Stephen Lewis.
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Jay hired consultants and a small staff and began flying around the world, hawking his idea in India, London, South Africa and the US.
He found the sell easy.
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Jay has done opinion polls (17 percent of Americans and 22 percent of Indians are "very likely" to pay into such a service), developed a comprehensive website (which launched last June) and made the right contacts in all four corners of the globe.He plans on starting a fundraising campaign for small donors and members early this year, but already, without even being asked, people are giving on the web.
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Jay is promising a great deal—a dream network that could satiate the hunger for a new voice in world news—but can he deliver?To do that, he'll have to do more than keep the money rolling; he'll have to fulfill some pretty lofty promises.First of all, Jay is calling IWT "public broadcaster to the world," a claim that implies a huge range of people from a huge range of places will find themselves reflected in the network's images.
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But to his credit, Jay has set preventative measures in place to keep his network's stories as close to the truth as possible."I don't think you ever control bias," he admits."You just make sure the bias doesn't get in the way of journalistic methodology."All content will be screened by IWT's editorial committee, as well as put past the guidelines set out by the Project for Excellence in Journalism out of Washington, DC.Plus, Jay insists his network will be as transparent as possible in its acknowledgement of journalistic bias. (He cites the recent controversy at the New York Times and reporter Judith Miller's work on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.) He plans on picking up raw video from the wire services, but never wire copy." The real monopoly on information right now is the wire services."On some stories where opinions vary widely, Jay says he'll even air two conflicting stories.
Besides keeping bias at bay, Jay will also have to remember he wants the whole world to watch.And all America all the time won't cut it for viewers on the other continents the network claims it will be serving."It's going to be a constant battle to find the balance," Jay admits.That means devoting some time to national-interest stories from places like South Africa.But national stories from the US are bound to get much more air time."When you live in the Roman Empire, you'd better know what's happening in Rome," quips Jay.
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But Jay is one of the most fiscally aware media types around.In fact, a recent reality check about funds has triggered Jay to revamp.He's now launching a one-hour nightly news show, starting in 2007, that will require $13.8 million to get started.He's putting off his entire $30 million network until 2009 unless funds present themselves sooner.For that softer launch just a year from now, Jay is already securing funding from big donors as well as members.Numerous satellite deals are in the works, cable deals already in place and Jay has made worldwide contacts to get his content together.When the show airs, viewers around the world will pick it up from a hodge-podge of places: web, satellite in the US and, in some parts of Canada, through cable on-demand or possibly its own cable channel.
But don't let Jay's precise plans and right-brain talk fool you.He's still an idealist with a big idea: one that includes changing the face of the world by the next decade."It's more than a network, it's a movement," says Jay.
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