June 7, 2008

No Justice Without Media Justice

Posted by Samhita Mukhopadhyay at 4:25PM

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(Via Feministing — where Samhita has been liveblogging from the National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis, MN.)

When we speak of a justice agenda we are talking about greater political, social and cultural changes that are plugged into an analysis of power that reform focused movements often times overlook. Many times it is a matter of semantics, since all of us working in justice are effecting change at the level of reform. We are usually working on strategic campaigns, limited in scope that create small pieces of change, but hopefully greater in impact. Collectively and through sharing pieces of our agenda these changes can become a justice movement.

The media reform movement has been around since the 90's and made its debut in 2003 when fighting the cross-ownership rules that are being challenged currently. One of the explicit differences between the media reform movement and the media justice movement is that media reform believes the appropriate end goal for media reforms is more diversity. Media justice believes that reform without a power shift leads to reproduction of status quo inequities. This means that without a redistribution of the means of media production and ownership, our media will not reflect the needs and issues of our communities.

Although, reform and justice work together on certain pieces of reform and many of the wins have been fundamental, any type of social change that is not grounded in the needs of our most disenfranchised communities, often fails to be as effective as we want it to be. Media reform is a key and necessary step on our way to media justice. As I sat at one of the pre-conference events at the National Conference on Media Reform, the convening of Diverse Voices on Power, Justice and Media Change we started to lay the groundwork and have a conversation on the ways that we can build a media policy movement that is accountable to social justice goals. Simply put, how do we create media change that is driven by the needs of our most marginalized communities? Racist, sexist, classist, homophobic media policy affects all of us, whether it be through our inability to control the way we are represented in the media or the means of control to that representation. The dearth in community owned media due to corporate take over has had disastrous effects on the way that we are represented, the way we tell our stories and how we are understood. The danger of this is not just about having the ability to tell our stories. When our stories are not told in a fair and balanced way, our needs are not met at the legal, cultural, economic and social ways.

Kudos to NCMR for creating spaces where we can talk about the different ways that communities of color, women and queer folks have used media change and media activism to educate our communities and work for a just and fair media. But our work is till cut out for us. According to Carol Jenkins at the Women Media Center:

According to various studies, women hold only 3 per cent of “clout” positions in the media (“The Glass Ceiling Persists,” Annenberg, 2003). Only a quarter of the newsrooms are led by women (Dates 2007, Cramer 2007, Nicholson 2007, Media Management Center), while women hold only a quarter of jobs as syndicated opinion writers at our newspapers (Estrich 2005, Pollitt 2005). Women online are facing the same fate. Across all platforms, women are missing. Women of color are the most invisible of all.

Minority ownership is just as tenuous. According to Reclaim the Media:

The state of minority media ownership in America is in crisis. According to a study by the nonprofit, nonpartisan group Free Press, people of color own just three percent of all local TV stations and eight percent of all local radio stations, even though they make up 35 percent of the U.S. population.

A media justice agenda would target the structural forms of oppression that create these disparities in ownership and that also lead to this "crisis of representation" for disenfranchised communities.

The media is an issue of life and death. Blogging, vlogging, independent and alternative media are all ways we have started to retell our stories. But without changing the mainstream media, without fighting for a fair and just media, and for our fair and equitable access to the media, the mainstream media will continue to set the agenda for the way we tell our stories. We are always responding to biased coverage and forced into a defensive position as opposed to setting the agenda ourselves. We can tell our stories till we are blue in the face, but if we are still playing by their rules, our stories are never told the way we want them to be.