Chapter Eleven
What Are You Going to Do?
How You Can Transform the Media—Starting Today
I’m not one to depress and run.
I know how frustrating it is when books, lectures, and documentaries get me all fired up about poverty, violence, misogyny, bigotry, or impending environmental doom, yet leave me without any realistic solutions to those problems.
I won’t do that to you.
If anything in this book made you angry, I want you to find ways to channel that frustration into effective action—and so do the independent media producers, educators, and activists you’ll hear from below.
As I said in the introduction, I wrote Reality Bites Back because we need to take an honest look at how reality TV’s backlash against women’s rights and social progress is affecting our beliefs, our behavior, and our culture. I hope that you will use the previous chapter’s media literacy tools to resist the seductive sexism of The Bachelor, the hateful racism of Flavor of Love, the ugly torment of America’s Next Top Model. And though I may need to wash my brain out with soap, all those hours transcribing VHI marathons will have been worth it if this book prompts dinner table conversations, classroom discussions, op-eds, academic scholarship, blogging, and satire.
Still, becoming critical media consumers isn’t enough. We can’t afford to see media literacy as the means to an intellectual end. Instead, let’s use it to prepare us to take on Goliath (for example, the “Big Six” media owners: Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, General Electric, Viacom, and CBS). Structural changes are needed to achieve the creative, diverse, challenging media we all deserve, and we’re going to have to fight for such shifts. But what does that kind of activism even look like? How can we envision the change we hope to see, and what do we need to do to achieve it?
I’ll level with you: We’re facing an uphill battle. Reality TV’s ideological and commercial biases stem from a combination of institutional factors, including
• financial and political agendas of megamerged media monopolies;
• Big Media networks and producers pandering to advertisers’ and owners’ profit motives without regard for the impact of their entertainment (and news) programming on viewers or our larger culture;
• limited access of women, people of color, low-income people, LGBT people, and other marginalized communities to the means of media production, distribution, and information communication technology;
• marginalization of women and people of color from positions of decision-making power within media companies; and
• funding restrictions that limit independent media alternatives.
Seems overwhelming, doesn’t it? Never fear. A vibrant, multifaceted media justice movement is working for change on all of those levels, and there are plenty of ways you can plug in. If you truly want media that entertains, engages, and informs rather than harms, there has never been a better time to become a media activist, or more ways to make a difference.
The following women and men are doing crucial work at various points across the media justice spectrum. I’ve asked them to answer one question: What are you doing—and what can Reality Bites Back readers do—to positively transform the media?
There’s an issue area for nearly any interest and a strategy suited to every temperament. You don’t have to do it all . . . just choose something that feels important, roll up your sleeves, and dig in. Together, we can make media justice a reality.
I’ll get you started with a form of activism directly related to the problems outlined throughout this book:
Regulate Product Placement and Deceptive Marketing
Did you know that there is a legal framework through which you can take action to curb embedded advertising in media content?
People are “entitled to know by whom they are being persuaded.”1 This longstanding legal principle gets to the heart of media ethics and consumer rights. Under federal law and Federal Communications Commission rules, TV and radio broadcasters must disclose the source of any message embedded in a program in exchange for a payment.
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Problem is, disclosures are buried in the credits—too small, too fleeting, and too confusing (“promotional consideration provided by”) to be effective, when they take place at all. Worse, there are no disclosure rules for most cable and satellite programs, no codified rules to protect children from embedded TV ads, and no rules requiring disclosure of paid brand integrations in movies, songs, music videos, video games, or novels.
HERE ARE SIX WAYS YOU CAN TAKE ACTION:
TWO: Talk, blog, and/or report about product placement. Until Americans become aware of the scope and impact of embedded advertising, public officials will have little incentive to curb corporations that profit from deceptive or harmful marketing practices.
THREE: Fight to regulate stealth advertising: Pressure Congress to regulate product placement and embedded advertising in realityTV storylines built around brands, and in movies, video games, books, “adversongs,” and VNRs (video news releases from advertisers packaged to look like journalism). File comments to the FCC and the FTC (Federal Trade Commission).
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FOUR: Stop manipulative marketers from targeting children and adolescents: Banning product placement in children’s TV shows will not protect youth during prime time (for example, twelve-year-olds who watch CoverGirl commercials masked as content on
America’s Next Top Model or Coke and Ford branding on
American Idol). Many child advocates are calling for a ban on embedded ads in prime-time shows. Others want the FCC to provide a ratings system for commercials and product placements, so parents can protect their kids.
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FIVE: Lobby to ban embedded ads for harmful or addictive substances: Health advocates such as the Marin Institute are calling for a ban on product placements for alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceutical drugs, gambling, and weapons.
SIX: Use your consumer power: Write or email sponsors who use deceptive or harmful marketing tactics, and tell them you will not purchase products advertised in this manner. Turn off shows laden with product placements. Tell broadcast and cable networks that you will not watch programs that are, in fact, paid infomercials.
Loving—and Improving—Pop Culture
BY ANDI ZEISLER,
editorial director, Bitch Media, which publishes
Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture magazine
Love/hate relationships aren’t always ideal, but as the cofounder and editorial director of Bitch Media, a multimedia organization devoted to feminist media and pop culture criticism, I base my activism on my love/hate relationship with television, movies, advertisements, and more. At Bitch—we’re best known for publishing the magazine of the same name—we truly believe that you can love pop culture, but also want to make it better: smarter, less sexist, and healthier for women. We see pop products like TV shows and blogs as a great jumping-off point for feminist change making.
How does that work? One important step is to
demystify the process. A lot of
Bitch readers don’t know that most women’s magazines exist to sell readers to their advertisers. We educate our readers about the ad-driven model of most magazines—explaining, for instance, that it’s no coincidence that a magazine with thirty cosmetics ads in each issue isn’t going to urge you to eighty-six your pressed-powder foundation. Likewise, blogs like
Jezebel.com delight in revealing the way women’s magazine cover subjects are airbrushed into improbable versions of womanity.
Don’t be shy about speaking up. It’s easy to get resigned to the idea that media and culture can’t change—that we just have to get used to it. (Or have to, as so many advise us, “get a sense of humor” about sexism in the media.)
Bitch urges readers to believe that even one person speaking up can make a difference. And readers have shared with us their triumphs—“girlcotts” of Abercrombie & Fitch and their offensive T-shirts, letters of apology from corporations who really didn’t get just how offensive their billboards were until a critical mass of protest letters arrived. Finally, have fun with activism by finding actions and events that speak to you.
Pop Culture and Community Engagement
BY PATRICIA JERIDO,
TV, film, music, and video games can be solitary experiences, or they can help us bond with friends and family. But as much pleasure as they can provide, engaging with pop culture often requires compromises of the highest order: dancing to songs that promote abuse, playing video games where you’re killing “foreign” enemies, watching movies or reality shows that denigrate entire communities. We have many reasons (it was the only thing on; I just need to relax after a hard day at work/school; that song has a killer beat!), but the bottom line is that we all make choices about which pop cultural mediums we consume. Those decisions, and their meanings, offer a great opportunity for social engagement.
At
GoLeft.org, a community of progressive-minded media junkies, we use pop culture to inform, inspire, and move people to action. We host movie nights discussing what we learn and how we can use positive (or respond to negative) images, ideas, and narrative themes in our political organizing. For example, a viewing of the
Sex and the City movie opened up space for activists, parents, and teens to discuss the consumption and production of fashion. How can women resist manipulative commercial messages, and what opportunities exist to pull women together as a sisterhood that mirrors the close bonds of Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte? When screening films in a group setting where enjoyment and critical thought are encouraged, we can indulge in the comfort of entertainment, but limit our detachment from reality. The key is not to denigrate or critique, but to connect our realities with media messages.
It’s easy and usually inexpensive to organize movie or TV nights in your home, or in your local school, café, bar, or independent bookstore. Create spaces to share your feelings and reactions to media with others. It’s a fun, enriching way to become a more conscious and engaged media consumer.
Monitoring Media and Demanding Accountability
BY JULIE HOLLAR,
managing editor, Extra!, the magazine of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Challenge corporate media to be accountable for what they put on their airwaves. Freedom of speech belongs not just to corporate media—you have the right to speak out against bias and inaccuracy. The simple act of documenting and publicly protesting media sexism and bigotry can have a huge impact. It shows others out there that those views are not mainstream and not harmless, despite the fact that they’ve been given a prominent media platform. Putting your muscle behind media monitoring can ultimately help to shift cultural standards for what has a place in our media.
For example, FAIR has documented shock jock Don Imus’s hateful rhetoric for years, so when Imus took heat in 2007 for calling the largely African American Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos,” we had plenty of other examples to show it wasn’t an aberration. Imus called African American journalist Gwen Ifill “a cleaning lady,” tennis player Amelie Mauresmo “a big old lesbo,”
Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz a “boner-nosed . . . beaniewearing Jewboy,” and an Indian men’s tennis duo “Gunga Din and Sambo.” FAIR, Women In Media & News, the Women’s Coalition for Dignity and Diversity In Media, and other activists pressured MSNBC, which simulcast Imus’s morning radio show, to explain how his record of hateful rhetoric jibed with company policies. The network dropped Imus, citing the negative impact such derogatory language has on young women of color. Though Fox Business Network hired him in 2009, Imus is on record apologizing for his words.
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That’s the true victory: shifting the standards of what’s considered worthy and responsible media. If you don’t step up and speak out, inaccurate and biased content will continue unchecked. You have the power to demand change.
Advocating for Media Literacy Programs in Local K-12 Schools
BY ANDREA QUIJADA, executive director, and
CHRISTIE MCAULEY, community education coordinator,
Media Literacy Project (MLP)
The ability to critically consume and create media is an essential skill in today’s world. Here are several ways you can make media literacy (ML) available in your local K-12 schools.
Legislation: Work to create and pass legislation to mandate that ML is taught in your state’s schools. Support funding for technical equipment, professional development, and staff salaries for schools that teach ML. Hold an ML day during legislative sessions. Write or visit legislators, and encourage students/ young people to do so.
Professional Development: Provide ML trainings for all teachers in a school or district to get them interested. Offer support to the individual teachers who choose to infuse ML into their classrooms.
Build Community Interest & Support: Organize ML trainings for your local school board. Talk with district administrators and board members about ML. Provide ML trainings for PTAs so parents and teachers can collectively strategize to integrate ML into their school.
Assist Teachers: Offer curricula that are in line with the teaching standards of the state (for example, see MLP’s DVD-ROMs). This step means that teachers won’t have to justify teaching ML. Providing curricula with media examples means less prep time for teachers. Raise funds to purchase technical equipment for schools.
Use Educational Standards: Ensure that teachers and administrators understand that ML aligns with teaching standards for various departments (for example, Health, Consumer Ed., Language Arts, Social Studies, Library Sciences, Media & Digital Ed.) and does not need to be its own class. Learn if district standards have ML components or requirements (not all districts do). Create ML standards for your district, or push for stronger language in current standards.
Involve Higher Education: Demand that more universities and colleges have ML classes in their education departments for preservice and returning teachers.
Remember Librarians: School librarians and media specialists can help you get your foot in the door. They are often supportive of ML curricula and tools and have ideas on how to implement them into the classroom.
Use Research: Create fact sheets and reference publications to demonstrate the strong influence of media. Kaiser Family Foundation has several reports about media and young people, including how media impacts children from a health perspective. Create your own research by pre- and post-testing students who take ML classes in your district. Share research about ML and successes in the classroom. More resources are available at
www.medialiteracyproject.org and in this book’s resource guide.
Fighting for Healthier Media Policy
BY JONATHAN LAWSON,
executive director, Reclaim the Media
A free, fair, and just media is as important a part of our democracy as Congress or the courts. Journalism is the only business deemed so crucial that it was specifically protected in the Constitution.
But TV, films, radio, newspapers, and magazines aren’t produced on a level playing field, designed to give access to all viewpoints and voices. Instead, the current system privileges a handful of giant communications companies. This is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, like the weather. It’s the result of a history of policy decisions. When it comes to what we see, read, and hear in the media, how important are these companies’ financial and political interests, versus the public interest?
To understand how the American media landscape came to be the way it is, we need to know something about the governmental and corporate policies that slant the playing field. As media activists (since you’re reading this book, that means you, too!), it is part of our job to help reveal those policies, and to figure out where our media could benefit from a little extra democracy.
So, how can we effectively improve the media? First, discuss how media problems affect your community (your neighborhood, your friends or colleagues, your organization), then reflect on what media structures or policy decisions may have contributed to these conditions. Effective media policy campaigns can begin with questions like these:
• Who decided that there should be so many sexist reality shows?
• Why are there so few local DJs on commercial radio in my town?
• Why are so few commercial TV or radio stations owned or run by people of color or women?
• Why does so much public TV and radio programming seem designed for upper-class, white audiences?
• Why is broadband Internet slower, less available, and more expensive here than in some other countries?
Next, take action—and understand where to push. At the federal level, Congress makes laws that have long-term effects on media ownership, distribution, and diversity. They set rules on how broadcasters use and share the public airwaves, provide support for public broadcasting, and check the power of large media companies. The FCC is the most prominent among several agencies that deal with media policy.
State and local governments have less to do with media policy than the feds but are also involved in broadband deployment and digital inclusion efforts,
gn negotiating local cable franchise agreements, and establishing media literacy education standards. Find out who else in your community is involved with media activism, and join them, or get your own organization to take an interest in media issues that affect you.
Grassroots community activism for fair media policy has exploded over the last decade, and a growing number of national and regional organizations can help you learn about ways to hold media accountable to values of fairness and justice. Visit
ReclaimTheMedia.org, Center for Media Justice, the Media Justice League, or
MAG-Net.org (the Media Action Grassroots Network) for information on current media issues and ways to get involved.
Building and Supporting Independent Media
BY TRACY VAN SLYKE,
project director, The Media Consortium
1. Be your own journalist: What subjects fascinate you? What information, voices, and reporting do you think are missing from the media? Ask yourself what unique niche you can fill in the media environment. Through independent newspapers and magazines, video production, blogging, podcasting, and more, tell the stories that need to be heard. Don’t be afraid to have fun and be playful, but if you’re relaying information and facts, always make sure to have reliable sources and check for accuracy. Audiences are attracted to strong voices and information they can trust.
But being my own journalist is too much work /takes too much time, what else can I do? Here are three options:
• Do you have friends or colleagues interested in the same topic area? Share the load with them. Create a group blog or website.
• Many popular sites, from Open Salon to Feministing, provide space for users to add their own content. Such platforms allow you to contribute whenever you want and have a built-in audience, so you don’t have to manage your own site.
• Work with already established independent media organizations that are looking for help with research, media production, commentary, etc. More and more independent media organizations such as The Uptake (tagline: “Will journalism be done by you or to you?”) are engaging their communities to be part of the editorial process.
2. Become an independent media evangelist: Help increase the impact of the media you love on the public debate. Read and support independent magazines and websites such as
Bitch, ColorLines,
Teen Voices, Mother Jones, RH Reality Check, and WIMN’s Voices. Watch and listen to indie TV and radio shows, such as
GRITtv with Laura Flanders, Paper Tiger TV, Democracy Now!, UpRisingRadio, and CounterSpin. Check out listings of more great independent media outlets at
www.themediaconsortium.org/our-members/. Introduce these independent media outlets to new audiences. As I discuss in the book
Beyond the Echo Chamber5 and on
BeyondTheEcho.net, you are a key part in breaking the corporate media stranglehold. Now more than ever, everyday people have the opportunity to spread critical information through their networks, whether it be Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Digg, email, texts, and more. Explain what independent media outlets mean to you and what you think your friends, family, and colleagues can get from them.
3. Donate: If it’s $5 or $5,000, most independent media outlets are underfunded and struggle to stay afloat. Every dollar helps. It takes a lot of time and money to produce quality journalism, analysis, and more. If you want it, help them produce it.
Cable Access and Localism: Representing Ourselves
BY BETTY YU,
community organizer and media activist, former staffer, Manhattan Neighborhood Network
Are you tired of the mainstream corporate media’s portrayal of women, people of color, immigrants, and other traditionally marginalized groups? Do you want the opportunity to control how your community is represented? Public access TV can be the answer. Public, Educational and Governmental (PEG) Access television, also known as Community Media Centers (CMCs) provide an “electronic greenspace” that gives local residents and nonprofits control over some means of media production. They foster self-determination, allowing local communities to tell their own stories on their own terms.
There are nearly three thousand PEGs in the country, possibly one in your town. These centers produce ten thousand hours of programming a week, more than all the major networks combined. Today’s CMCs serve core principles of public access, social justice, and media democracy. Public Access is the only forum on television where residents can create and find local programming on issues that directly affect them. Today CMCs are taking advantage of “digital convergence” and have integrated the full range of Internet distribution and web 2.0 tools into their centers. Public Access centers are shifting from being just channel operators to becoming community multimedia centers that provide access to various forms of electronic media.
The introduction of broadband Internet services has blurred the line between Internet, phone, and cable TV services. Phone companies seeking to maximize their profits are spending millions of lobbying dollars pressuring states to pass state-wide legislation to replace local franchising—the major funding stream for PEGs. As a result, dozens of centers have shut down or reduced their services.
Community media advocates and public access supporters are mounting grassroots opposition to these changes. If you want to produce TV yourself, or want to ensure that historically marginalized communities have the opportunity to do so, join efforts to protect PEG Access. The Alliance for Community Media (ACM), the national organization that represents U.S. PEG Access Centers, is working with other media activist organizations to protect PEG and communication rights and
• end discriminatory treatment of PEG channels;
• direct the FCC to study and report on the negative effects of recent states’ video franchising legislation on PEG access; and
• close the loophole that telecommunication corporations use to avoid paying adequate franchise fees to PEGs.
Find out where your nearest PEG Access Center is located, and learn ways you can get involved.
Freeing the Radio Airwaves
BY SAKURA SAUNDERS, regulatory research coordinator, and BRANDY DOYLE, regulatory director, Prometheus Radio Project
You don’t own a radio station or a television studio. What right do you have to say what goes on the air? Actually, broadcasters use a valuable national treasure—the airwaves—that is owned by us, the public. The FCC leases out chunks of the spectrum—an invisible natural resource that is worth more than Bill Gates, the U.S. military budget, and McDonalds combined. They are entrusted to do this on our behalf.
Yet just a few companies control all our media, limiting the range of political debate and views that we can access and music we can hear. Only 6 percent of the full-power radio stations in the United States are owned by women, and only 8 percent are owned by people of color. A powerful few have taken advantage of the complicated bureaucracy of media regulation. They are rich, powerful, and—not surprisingly—they aren’t covered by the news.
At the Prometheus Radio Project, we demystify media policy and technology so that more people can make their voices heard. In the struggle for local, participatory radio, we helped organize more people to file FCC comments than had ever commented on any other issue. We won, and the FCC created the low-power radio service, opening the airwaves to noncommercial community groups such as unions, neighborhood associations, churches, and schools. Next, we teamed up with the Media Access Project to win a federal lawsuit to roll back media consolidation, while helping to build radio stations nationwide to reflect real community needs and values.
We have a long way to go to reach a brighter media future, but a national movement of grassroots groups is reclaiming the airwaves. We need your help for media to realize its full potential as a tool for social justice and community expression. Write comments at the FCC, engage Congress . . . you can even organize to start your own radio station! If the broadcasters aren’t serving the public interest, we can take the airwaves back and do it ourselves. Get involved at
Prometheusradio.org/take_action.
Documentary Films and Social Change
BY CYNTHIA LOPEZ,
vice president, American Documentary/POV, PBS
How can we use documentaries to tackle tough issues? At POV our films illuminate stories at the heartbeat of American society: obstacles facing young girls, the life of a white supremacist, mothers who have lost sons to police brutality, gay and lesbian issues, adoption, political corruption, family crises, healthcare, living wages, religion, immigration, the Iraq war, and more.
Like all good cinema, documentaries should take you on a journey, make you ask questions. One recent example is Made in L.A., directed by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Behar. The film follows three Latina women in Los Angeles’s garment factories as they wage a three-year battle against clothing retailer Forever 21 to get to the bargaining table. The film portrays the “other” California, where immigrants are paid subminimum wages for many long hours of work.
POV is not just a broadcaster; we create national public-awareness campaigns, and did extensive outreach for Made in L.A. We shared the goals of the filmmakers, to capture the attention of labor, policy makers, and economists and encourage discourse. We held fifty-five screenings in twenty-three states and forty-six cities and worked with filmmakers to coordinate a Capitol Hill event for labor and Latino policy makers. The film and its organizing kit are still being used as educational tools to change labor practices at sweatshops. We developed a dual promotional strategy to garner English and Spanish press, resulting in over 7,000 media placements, including 179 print articles, 13 radio programs, 17 TV news programs including CNN en Espanol, Primer Impacto, Univision, Fox News, and MSNBC, and created a wide-ranging online campaign.
Made in L.A. went on to win an Emmy and reach over 1.1 million viewers, most of whom learned something new about undocumented workers in America. Most important, documentaries are a reflection of life, and in this case the garment workers—the outsiders—were finally let inside, to the people who form public opinion and legislation. This film played an important role in a continuing effort to ensure that the rights of immigrants are respected. It’s a powerful example of the potential for public-service media to have a real impact on public policy.
Making Political Remix Videos: A Quick-Tips Guide
BY ELISA KREISINGER,
Want to try your hand at mashing up the media landscape, reinterpreting narratives, and blurring the line between passive audience and active creator? These steps will get you started:
1. Gather source materials: Record commercials off TV, pull TV, film, or music video clips from online video sharing sites, or download from file sharing sites such as Bit Torrent. Because you are transforming this copyrighted material to make a new work that comments, critiques, or satirizes original content, your remix video will be highly eligible to make a Fair Use of copyrighted material, protecting you from infringement.
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2. Convert file formats: Some of your source materials might be in different formats, or may not communicate with your editing software. Programs such as MPEG Streamclip allow clips to be converted to and from any format (for example, an .AVI file, an .MOV file, etc.).
3. Make your statement: Here’s the fun part. What are you trying to say? A political remix video works best when it articulates an argument and visually supports that argument with clips from appropriate media texts. Keep it short, simple, and effective. While not everyone will understand or like what you have to say, your critique is a valid contribution to participatory culture and media literacy.
4. Export: Once you’ve completed your remix, export your file and compress it for the web. The best formats for this compression are H.264 or MPEG-2.
5. Distribute: Make sure to look for the Fair Use clause on each site to which you plan to distribute your remix. (If they don’t have one, ask!) For example,
Blip.tv has a Fair Use clause; YouTube does not. Unfortunately, asking about Fair Use may trigger the removal of your material, due to identification systems that scan for copyrighted content. Don’t let this stop you if you believe your work qualifies as Fair Use. Check out the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and seven law schools, for legal help with the dispute process. Try your best to upload your work to multiple sites.
Improving Representation of Transgender People: Tips for Media Makers
BY JULIA SERANO,
author, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on
Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity
There are a number of things that reporters and media producers can do to improve coverage of transgender people and issues. The most basic of these is to use pronouns and language respectful of the gender trans people currently live and identify as, rather than the one they were assigned at birth. Depictions that are needlessly objectifying or sexualizing should be avoided, including those that:
• focus on trans people’s physical transitions (e.g., surgeries and other medical procedures);
• rely on before/after photos and shots of trans individuals putting on clothing and cosmetics;
• place undue attention on trans people’s sexualities;
• purposefully employ trans characters as a device to elicit sexual anxiety in other characters or the audience.
Trans people should be viewed as fully formed human beings, rather than mere objects of fascination or controversy, and they should be allowed to speak in their own voices about issues that are important to them.
Finally, media makers should recognize that transgender people vary widely with regard to ethnicity, class, identity, background, and so forth. Media coverage should reflect this diversity, rather than relying primarily on white, middle-class trans women who neatly fit the woman-trapped-in-a-man’s-body stereotype that the public is most familiar with.
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Activist Scholarship in the Media Justice Movement
BY CAROLYN M. BYERLY, PHD,
Department of Journalism, Howard University
Are you an academic or independent communications researcher? If so, you can play a significant role in the media justice movement. First, you can help develop theories, i.e., overarching explanations, for gender and race issues in media, and standards for evaluating media performance. For example, in
Women and Media: A Critical Introduction,7 Karen Ross and I created the Model of Women’s Media Action to describe patterns of women’s media activism in twenty nations. After the 2008 election, I posed a Theory of Feminist Social Responsibility,
8 which states that socially responsible news organizations must
• provide coverage of issues and events affecting women’s status and well-being;
• include a range of women’s views in such coverage;
• offer a forum for exchange, comment, and criticism on gender-related issues;
• include equal gender representation in all levels of professional practice, governance, and ownership.
Second, applied research is invaluable. Media justice activists need scholarship that provides data and other information for reshaping federal communications law. A 2006 study I conducted with Kehbuma Langmia and Jamila A. Cupid in Washington DC neighborhoods revealed that nonwhite news consumers want news content from the perspective of Black or other nonwhite communities. The two hundred people we interviewed didn’t see such journalism on major TV channels or in newspapers. Such a perspective goes to the heart of both media ownership and localism (meeting of the informational needs of local audiences). Applied research helps make the case that media policy activism should advance gender- and race-conscious standards for ownership and operation, particularly in broadcast arenas.
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Third, by adopting a media-conscious pedagogy, academics can acquaint their students with the impact of media on issues related to justice, inequality, and activism. Develop curricula that include readings from the perspective of those doing media justice work and opportunities to critically analyze news and entertainment media with respect to gender and race.
Empowering Youth to Make Media
BY MAILE MARTINEZ,
program manager, Reel Grrls
Youth: Are you tired of the sensationalized drama and harmful stereotypes that mark most depictions of young people in reality TV, scripted programs, and movies? If so, the youth media movement may be for you! Young people are responding to mainstream media in increasingly sophisticated ways. At Reel Grrls in Seattle, teens are trained to use professional-quality video cameras, audio equipment, lights, and editing software to create short films, TV shows, vlogs, and web series showcasing their own authentic values and issues. Other after-school programs teach youth radio production, audio recording, graphic design, and more. If your school does not offer media production classes, consider taking a class at a local community college or technology center, or visit
ListenUp.org to find a youth media organization in your area. For a DIY approach, Andrea Richards’s book
Girl Director10 will get you started making your own video for very little money.
Adults: Support young people making their own media. Donate your time, skills, and/or money. Volunteer filmmakers, video editors, camera operators, sound technicians, and screenwriters can make a huge difference in the life of a young person—and in our media landscape—by teaching their skills. But you don’t need to have expertise in those areas to empower young people to tell their stories: You can plan, promote, and host public screenings of youth-produced work, help a young person find interview subjects, be a story consultant or editor, fundraise, and more.
Youth Media in Action: In 2007, Sami Muilenburg, a teen filmmaker and Reel Grrls participant, decided to make a documentary about media consolidation. She understood that although media economics directly impact young people, many of her peers had never thought about who actually owns the media. Her film,
A Generation of Consolidation, has screened at festivals nationwide and won a Student Emmy award! Other Reel Grrls participants created a
Top Model spoof,
America’s Next Top Dork, to ask the question: What if, instead of competing with other women to be crowned the most beautiful, reality TV contestants demonstrated who was the smartest, the most compassionate, and the most individualistic?
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Many Ways to Bite Back
I hope you will be inspired to learn more about these projects and issues, and that you will get involved in one or more of these crucial media justice and independent media arenas.
If the strategies, projects, and issues outlined here don’t speak to you, know this: The dedicated women and men above represent just a small sample of the vast array of work being tackled within the media justice and media reform movements.
Along with a team of independent journalists and women’s rights advocates, I founded Women In Media & News in October 2001 to increase women’s presence and power in the public debate. We offer media literacy presentations and workshops for students and communities across the country and provide media training for women’s, social justice, and youth groups. We help journalists and media producers diversify their Rolodexes with qualified women experts through our POWER Sources Project. We host WIMN’s Voices, a dynamic group blog on women and the media, where we welcome your questions and observations. And since media content is the direct result of institutional problems, we advocate systemic changes that can result in a more just, open, democratic media climate. We envision a landscape in which unfettered journalism features a broad range of perspectives and serves the public good, while pop culture amuses us, connects us, and pushes us to think and feel in new ways. Just like all nonprofits, we need your support—financial (for the reasons Tracy Van Slyke mentioned above) as well as your volunteer time, energy, and ideas—to help us pursue that vision. The feminist media justice movement can’t succeed without you.
I know some readers may not necessarily get why I’m closing a book about reality television with a selection of short essays about topics as seemingly unrelated as low-power radio, independent magazines, broadband policy, and the like. We need to understand that all of these issues are inextricably linked. The problems afflicting contemporary commercial media—and, as a result, negatively impacting the lives of women, people of color, youth, LGBT people, and the poor, among others—are varied and interconnected. Therefore, one of WIMN’s founding principles is a strong belief in the importance of multiple strategies to achieve lasting change. While I believe deeply in the importance of WIMN’s mission and programs, we are only one important piece of a larger puzzle. That’s why I’ve opened Reality Bites Back to the contributors above. They are just a few of the folks who have inspired me during the nineteen years I’ve been doing independent journalism and media activism. Each offers a way for you to jump in . . . and that’s just the beginning.
It’s only for want of space that this chapter didn’t also include contributions from advocates for copyright policies that protect artists but don’t stifle innovation or information, ethnic press publishers, indie zine makers, hip-hop activists, local pirate radio operators, communities organizing against hate speech, municipal broadband activists, Internet neutrality and digital inclusion activists, lawyers working on media policy regulation, men doing profeminist media literacy education . . . you see where I’m going with this? We could fill an entire book just with how-tos from an ever-growing list of racially, geographically, and age-diverse individuals and organizations whose practical and powerful strategies are helping to create the kind of media we all deserve.
Remember, you don’t need to turn off your TV. I’m certainly not going to give up mine! Anyone who tells me to sacrifice my Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Arrested Development DVDs will have a fight on their hands. You want to watch Project Runway or What Not to Wear? You’ll get no argument here; just watch with your critical filters intact. Television can be a fun, cathartic, and yes, a source of much pleasure (guilty or otherwise).