"Change" is fast becoming the buzzword of the year. While it’s often associated with Barack Obama, even John McCain has hijacked the word for his campaign of staying the same. And while such appropriation also means "change" is in danger of fast becoming more meaningless than a coffee bean, this past weekend’s National Conference for Media Reform at the Minneapolis Convention Center promised real change in spades.

From the increasing pressure mounted on mainstream media to cover the Bush atrocities to the growing new democracy of independent, non-corporate-owned media to the shifting U.S. cultural landscape, "change," according to conference speakers and attendees, is inevitable right now.

The same sentiment was echoed throughout the three-day Free Press conference filled with 60 panels and workshops on media and Internet freedom: "The tide is turning; the time is ripe" to enact change, journalist and Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein reiterated during the keynote address, "Media Reform Begins with Me"; "Take Back the American press," Dan Rather emboldened; and "We are on the precipice of something that could be either good or bad," warned David Sirota, author of The Uprising, during a panel on media coverage and the war.

Sirota cited three times this century that such a grassroots convergence similar to today’s significantly altered history: In 1932 with the New Deal; in 1964 with the anti-war and civil-rights movements; and in 1980, when the conservative movement exploded. What happens next, Sirota told a group of 500 or so, is up to you.

And for a significant number of panelists and attendees, the impending change doesn’t simply reflect an ideological shift from right wing to left wing. Instead, it’s indicative of a new citizen-led democracy irrespective of political party. For many attendees, these notions sound like optimal solutions to a decade of media conglomeration and corporate control. But some, like teacher Elise Klein of Connecticut, still had questions: How can citizens play a part? What happens now? And what does "change" really mean?

One problem: There aren’t two sides to every story

Five years ago, the U.S. landscape looked different. Blue states were shifting to a shade of bruised purple. Scarcely populated rural areas were fast becoming exurbs as new-home construction swelled. And new mega churches were giving rise, and a voice, to a neoconservative movement. The message at the end of the 2004 election was unmistakable: Progressives had failed to create a clear and sustainable message to counteract the rampant fear and wedge issues the Bush administration and neocons were creating and exploiting. And the mainstream media failed to ask the important questions and push back to the pressure mounted on them by those in power.

Former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan was colluded in the sea of lies the administration fed the media. At the same time, as Rather noted, he called the media "complicit enablers" in creating propaganda and support for the Iraq War. To be sure, McClellan is deferring responsibility for his role in the sale. It’s another way of discrediting the media and making them incapable of being trusted — a game of "I dare you" where you’re a fool if you do or you don’t.

Underneath that avoidance, the media-expert panelists echoed, is another major issue with mainstream media: Shareholder desires have superseded any incentive to produce good and valuable news in the interest of the public. According to Arianna Huffington, author and blogger at HuffingtonPost.com, one of the problems with mainstream media is their "addiction to presenting every story as if it has two sides." The earth is not flat. The world was not created in seven days. These, she notes, are facts that don’t deserve to hear from both sides because doing so convoludes the truth.

Klein noted that mainstream media have a vested interest in perpetuating "disaster capitalism," a phrase she coined in Shock Doctrine. News is not the primary role of many major news organizations, she and others noted. NBC, for example, is owned by GE, a weapons manufacturer, which is deeply embedded in the war economy.

Whether it was fear of being silenced by the right wing, a serious abuse of private power, or both, the mainstream media failed to ask important questions regarding serious conflicts of interest with the war and beyond. The "new economy" of the war, Klein notes, is more than Hollywood and the entire entertainment industry combined. And its main goal is to serve the "disaster capitalists" like George Schultz, who simultaneously served as chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and a board member of Bechtel Group, a major defense contractor.

Despite such connections, the media have failed to connect the dots and hold elected officials responsible, and the Iraq War has largely disappeared from the news due to what Klein calls a "projected disinterest" by a media more interested in covering schlock and scaremonger he said/she said punditry.

For progressives, the election is not the end but a means

The tagline for the NCMR is "Media reform begins with me." The criticisms some attendees had was that the resounding ideology was all well and good, but applicable practices tended to be noticeably absent. "I thought there’d be more workshops. I expected a lot more. I wanted how-to workshops for people to learn how to do all of these things they talk about," noted Elise Klein with Teachers Without Prejudice, a Connecticut nonprofit. A young blogger from Kansas City said she drove up in hopes of learning how to gain access to valuable documents and resources that would allow her to do more hard-hitting reporting.

Indeed, the conference was more about inspiring spirit than work, and a lack of actual workshops gave it more of a feel of a rally than a conference. But if attendees left learning anything it was perhaps best said by Robert Greenwald of The Nation during a panel unveiling that magazine’s social-media video series, "This Brave Nation." "Elections are a means to an end," he said. "They are not an end themselves."

"This is only the beginning," Klein noted. "We have to push" those we elect, just as the major companies funding their campaigns push from the other side. The New Deal would never have happened, she noted, without enormous pressure from the grassroots. The alternative, she said, would have been revolution.

Now, she notes, the time is ripe to enact that same change. Obama does not have a plan to get out of Iraq. "We need to do more than cheer for popular candidates as if they are rock stars," she told the crowd during the keynote address. The greatest gift, she said, is to be a threat.

Rather’s keynote speech ended with a similar call to arms. Take the inspiration from the event tonight and "magnify it, multiply it, and spread it," he intoned. "Make it viral." And of course he added his signature closer that resulted in a standing ovation: "Good night… and Godspeed."