I am live blogging from Memphis and the National Conference for Media Reform:NCMR2007: Bill Moyers is delivering a powerful opening keynote to the conference. He's giving a lot of deserved kudos to the media reform movement's role in "changing the debate" in Washington on both media ownership and Internet freedom: Here's my rough summary of a key section of his remarks, which you can watch in full on the NCMR 2007 videostream.

In reference to deposed former FCC chairman Michael Powell, who resigned after a series of failures and missteps including his brazen attempt to ignore millions of public comments and even the technical reports of his own staff to push forward in his largely-failed attempt to weaken important media ownership rules, Moyers said: [Your coalition and the public you organized] "flooded" the FCC and Congress with comments and "Michael Powell not only backed off, he backed out."

On net neutrality and the run-up to the stunning eleventh hour decision last month by the now-Kevin-Martin-led FCC to force AT&T to agree to Internet freedom [net neutrality] as a condition of its merger with Bellsouth: "First, you lit a fire and put Washington on notice that it had to guarantee the Internet's First Amendment [net neutrality]...I prefer to call it the Internet's Equal Access provision...[it serves] to foster democracy, not abridge it...I believe you [the coalition] changed the terms of the debate...It is no longer about whether the [Internet will be free and open] it is about when and how."