Abstract

Speaking for Ourselves

The authors describe the agenda and activities of the media justice movement. With the Congressional deregulatory frenzy that started in the early 1990s, many media restrictions were loosened, and after passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the floodgates were completely thrown open. The lobbyists and scholars leading the current efforts at media reform are focusing on a whole different set of concerns-resistance to corporate media consolidation, the battle to preserve localism and against content that is commercial and sensationalistic-which are a far cry from the issues of racism and unfair treatment that launched the earlier movement. If the media justice movement had a coming-out party, it was at the venerable Highlander Research and Education Center in August 2002. Highlander convened a group of grassroots activists to discuss media organizing strategies, and by the time the group had worked out plans to create education materials, build constituencies and work in partnership with social justice campaigns, it had become the Highlander Media Justice Gathering. Today's media organizers employ a few basic strategies: building and controlling our own production and distribution outlets; using, confronting and transforming corporate media; and changing the underlying regulatory structures, policies and framework. For media scholar and longtime advocate Mark Lloyd, the movement that calls itself media justice today is just getting back to these civil rights roots.