The History of Media Alliance – Excerpted from “Remaking Media: The Struggle to Democratize Public Communication”.

Posted by Bob Hackett (Author) and Bill Carroll (Author) on May 27th, 2009

In its 7 January 2002 cover story on media reform, the respected progressive periodical The Nation recognized Media Alliance in San Francisco (now Oakland) as one of several ‘crucial organizations’ for building media democracy in the US.

The seed from which this non-profit media advocacy group sprouted was the post-Watergate generation of journalists, against the backdrop of a high tide of liberal reformism in American politics. The tumult of the Vietnam war era had receded following the withdrawal of US troops, but the movements which it had engendered were impacting the State machinery. Lawmakers and courts were moving forward on environmental protection, reproductive rights, women’s equality and other issues. Buoyed by the liberal zeitgeist but frustrated by the conservative disposition of mainstream media, about 50 journalists began meeting in 1975-6 to socialize and discuss media and political issues.  Larry Bensky describes his fellow founding members as journalists, especially freelancers, but also many employed in both corporate and alternative media, people dissatisfied with corporate media coverage of events in the Bay Area (like the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement), and hoping to change that.

After months of debate, the Alliance adopted a mandate to ‘support, in all ways necessary, media workers faced with attacks on their human, constitutional, and professional rights and obligations’ (Wolschon 1996).

By contrast with its more recent history, the original Media Alliance began as anorganization of ‘insiders’, albeit marginalized ones – people involved in news production – but hardly at its apex. Moreover, while critical of the performance of the corporate media, it was then the Alliance’s main field of action – something potentially reformable, and from within. A not unusual view at the time; after all, hadn’t Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post’s celebrated investigative journalists, brought down the corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon?

As a geographical and cultural context, the vibrancy and creativity of the San Francisco Bay area has been fertile ground for movements and media activism. The Bay Area’s assets include its rich cultural diversity, with large populations of Asian, Latin American and African as well as European descent, and its large and politically active gay community. (Gays have unquestionably contributed to the city’s diversity and social liberalism, but relatively little directly to media activism. Tracy Rosenberg, now the MA Director, suggests that gays’ economic and political success in the city grants them access to dominant media not available to other minorities; and moreover, their main battles are in the legal and political rather than media fields, over such issues as property rights, same-sex marriage, and employment discrimination.)

Notwithstanding the conservatism of city authorities in some respects (vis-à-vis the homeless, for example: Edmondson 2000), the city is known for its relatively strong popular traditions of labor militancy, progressive politics, and cultural innovation. Venues like City Lights Bookstore still manifest the heritage of both the 1950s Beatnik poets, and the youthful counterculture’s ‘summer of love’ a decade later. ‘That whole people’s cultural movement is still really strong here’, contends Dorothy Kidd of the University of San Francisco, and in addition, the city is near the Hollywood ‘dream  machines’, with an infrastructure for film and video production. Moreover, she points out, nearby Silicon Valley has brought expertise and capital to build the computer, software and multi-media industries. (Among its many effects, the dot.com boom during the 1990s fueled enrolment in the Media Alliance’s computing skills courses, which in turn helped cross-subsidize its advocacy work.) These rich media production capacities and oppositional popular traditions – the first and second ‘circles’ in the potential constituency for media democratization – have combined to increase awareness of, and activism against, the commercial media’s ‘blockade’ of the distribution of diverse and progressive media. The density of media-savvy advocacy groups by the 1990s in the Bay Area has provided a fertile organizational ecology for networking. And the reputed mediocrity of the San Francisco daily papers (the Chronicle has nothing like the stature of the New York or Los Angeles Times), contrasted with the global image of the city, provide a paradox to mobilize around.

What is impressive and distinctive about Media Alliance itself? It is not so much institutionalized and permanent successes in the media field, which few progressive advocacy groups can claim in the past generation of neoliberal hegemony. Rather, what distinguishes the Media Alliance are two characteristics.

First, its sheer longevity, its organizational growth and survival. By contrast with industry and professional associations, which by definition have an economic base for their advocacy work, public interest groups organized around political ideas have a precarious existence. Moreover, compared to their industry counterparts in the media field, public interest advocacy groups have been more prone to dying off rather than adapting their mandates or merging with other groups in response to a shifting political environment (Mueller et al. 2004: 28, 52). Bucking this dismal tradition, Media Alliance has now survived three decades. A key to its initial growth and long-term survival has been its provision of exclusive or discounted services and benefits to its members, thus minimizing the ‘free rider’ problem facing many public interest groups. These benefits include(d) access to health and dental insurance (a significant draw in the US, where a profit-oriented medical system leaves millions of citizens uninsured), a credit union, a job-listing service, and discounts on journalism and computer skills classes and computer rentals.

With such incentives, membership  reached about 4,000 at one point in the 1990s; member fees, along with course tuition, enabled MA to generate 75 to 85 per cent of its half-million dollar average annual budget internally, with the rest deriving from external project grants and donations. (In the late 1990s, member- ship was restructured to distinguish between a basic category, and those paying more for access to MA’s benefits and services.) In effect, that benefit-driven internal revenue stream has reduced MA’s vulnerability to the vagaries of founda-tion funding, and has cross-subsidized MA’s political work, enough to hire a staff of ten (four of them part-time) as of 2001, headed by an executive director accountable to a Board – a standard pattern for US non-profit advocacy groups, with the commendable (and, as became clear in 1996, fateful) exception that the Board is elected by the membership.

MA’s second notable achievement is its linkage of different constituencies and tasks in concrete steps towards media democratization.  Over the years, it has provided a social as well as a political outlet for journalists; it has enjoyed the support both of freelance journalists and those employed by media corporations; it has combined training for the media with critique of the media; in later years, it has coalesced different ethnic communities in common cause; and it has worked in different venues and with a range of tactics, from nonviolent civil disobedience to interventions at policy hearings. It does not fit easily inside the strategic quadrants that we identified in Table 3.2. At the same time, as we shall see, there are still limits to how far such boundary-crossing can go.

The MA’s roots in the muckraking, you-can-beat-city-hall optimism of 1970s journalism are evident in the pages of MediaFile, the newsletter which MA has produced with only occasional interruptions since 1978. Its headlines in the first fifteen years read much like a progressive journalism review: political and ethical issues facing journalism (censorship, source confidentiality); critical analyses of corporate media coverage of city and state politics, of minority rights, of movements and their issues (nuclear disarmament and Central America in the 1980s, the 1991 Gulf War); occasional surveys of local, minority, independent, alternative, movement, gay, and ethnic media, ranging from the laudatory to the sympathetically critical; some attention to regulatory and legislative issues affecting news media (freedom of information versus national security, deregulation of radio and cable, even Unesco’s NWICO debate); profiles of the winners of the annual Media Alliance Meritorious Achievement (MAMA) awards; financial, legal and techno-logical developments affecting Bay Area journalists and their rights, particularly freelancers, along with occasional professional advice.

The Alliance’s campaigns during the 1980s were, for the most part, activities that progressive-minded journalists could endorse without compromising their occupational self-image as independent truth-seekers. During its very first year, MA voted overwhelmingly to support Newspaper Guild and Typographical Union workers, striking at the weekly  San Francisco Bay Guardian for guarantees against job losses due to the use of freelance material. Guardian editor and publisher Bruce Brugmann defeated the strike, but the solidarity effort defined MA as a political entity, united MA members, and attracted many of the strikers to its ranks (Wolschon 1996). (Interestingly, Brugmann and MA became allies vis-à-vis the corporate dailies in later years.) In 1994, MA staff, board and members again walked picket lines, this time in active support of striking workers at the two San Francisco dailies. As if to balance the ledger between freelancers and employees, MA successfully negotiated a contract with Pacific News Service in 1978, setting fees and freelance rights for PNS contributors – reputedly the first such agreement between a freelance group and a news organization.

In 1979, MA united in a long, hard legal battle on behalf of two of its own. As a result of their 1976 investigative articles on a 1972 Chinatown murder, freelancer Lowell Bergman and Examiner reporter Raul Ramirez were sued for $30 million by a former district attorney  and two police detectives.  The  Examiner refused to provide the pair with legal counsel. MA members responded  with a defence committee which raised $60,000 in legal fees until the pair’s exoneration in California Supreme Court in 1986. Commented Ramirez of the ordeal, ‘Individuals are powerless; you have no idea how energizing, inspiring and encouraging it was to have a group of people standing behind you’ (Wolschon 1996).

By contrast with such solidarity, a 1981 controversy over the journalistic ethics of MediaFile itself foreshadowed how bitter internal disputes could become. In a debate over a story on prisoners’ rights, a letter to MediaFile by the story’s two authors betrayed confidential, and potentially life-threatening, information that had been supplied to them by a source. The source, Eve Pell, happened to be then-president of the MA board. MediaFile readers responded with a stream of letters, some questioning the editor’s judgement in publishing the exchange, culminating in his resignation and an apology from MA staff. MA’s executive director later commented that the controversy was ‘a shock’, a case of ‘devour [ing] your young’ (Wolschon 1996).

Nevertheless, during the 1980s, a burgeoning Media Alliance moved quarters to historic Fort Mason overlooking the Bay, created internal committees, launched its JobFile system and computer classes, and published a directory of local news media, a valuable tool for community and advocacy groups. It initiated the annual MAMA awards, intended to recognize both social responsibility and outstanding achievement in Bay Area journalism. While they drained MA’s resources until their abandonment after 1994, they could be seen as a means of attracting main-stream journalists’ interest, and influencing media performance. Throughout its history, the Alliance has also hosted panels and forums relevant to journalism, from skills (for example, ‘Writing and editing for online publications’) to the politics of media (`Smoking out the truth: The CIA, drugs, and media coverage’). Presciently, the MA helped mount a Media and Democracy conference in 1992, with keynote speaker Ralph Nader, and analyses of campaign coverage (Wolschon 1996).

During the 1980s, MA’s agenda was influenced by the political ascendancy of the ‘great communicator’, Ronald Reagan, and much of the US media’s servility to his reactionary politics “On bended knee’ was how journalist/author Mark Hertsgaard (1989) described the press’s relationship with the administration). One of MA’s major projects during the 1980s was the Propaganda Analysis Review Project, intended as a media education tool exploring the connection between politics and the manipulation of symbols and ideas. It produced several issues of a magazine, which eventually foundered from funding and mission difficulties; some of its originators feared that an exclusive focus on right-wing propaganda made the magazine itself a propagandist tool of the Left. A second project was the Central America Committee, whose purview later expanded to Latin America and the Caribbean. It undertook critical analyses of mainstream coverage of the region, including US intervention, produced a resource guide for journalists, and attempted with some success to expand the Bay Area media’s breadth of opinion and reportage on the region.

So, on the one hand, MA has served the professional and career needs of its members and tried to influence mainstream journalism. On the other hand, it has sought to promote progressive political goals, in the face of North American journalism’s waning but still hegemonic ‘regime of objectivity’ (Hackett and Zhao 1998). Striking a balance was a constant challenge during the first two decades. To be sure, many of MA’s founding members, like liberals and rationalists generally, would deny any contradiction: journalism at its best – truth-telling (in the public interest) and democratic governance are mutually supportive. Tell the truth to the people, and it shall set them free. That’s the view expressed in the Bay Guardian’s summary (on 13 March 1996) of MA’s mission: to seek ‘excellence, ethics, diversity, and accountability in all aspects of the media, in the interest of peace, justice, and social responsibility’ with the goal of a ‘free and unfettered flow of information and ideas in order to achieve a democratic and just society’. An unpublished statement of purpose commits MA ‘to bringing about a more humane and democratic society by protecting freedom of speech and freedom of the press; by fostering genuine diversity of media voices and perspectives; by holding the media accountable for their impact on society, their hiring practices, and the integrity of their products; by working together with other groups and individuals who share our goals; and by providing services, support, and a sense of community for media workers committed to these goals’. Founding member Ken McEldowney put it simply: ‘This was not an organization of dispassionate reporters who sat on the sidelines and wrote stories in the form of Journalism 101. We were concerned about the content of news’ (Wolschon 1996).

Even so, MA’s direct engagement  in overtly political campaigns  has been limited by its media-oriented mandate, its concern for political independence, and its tax status as a ‘charitable  organization’: Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code precludes attempting to influence legislation as a ‘substantial part’ of its activities,or participating  at all in campaign activity for or against political candidates. Rather, MA typically analyses biases and blind spots in media coverage of political issues and progressive constituencies – Asian-Americans, gays, refugees and immi-grants, the environment, Hispanics, community youth issues. In 1991 the MA served as an information clearing house for members on events related to coverage of the Persian Gulf War. The Alliance has also partnered with community groups to conduct joint projects, typically adding the ‘media piece’, such as skills training and strategic communications advice. Some collaborative projects have included tours to Cuba for American journalists (with Global Exchange, a human rights organization); a summer internship  and training program  for reporters  of color (with the Independent Press Association); media training on domestic violence (with community press and legal aid associations); co-sponsorship of events with the Society for Professional Journalists, the National Writers Union, the Film Arts Foundation, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, and many others. By contrast, MA’s links with Bay Area organized labor (apart from journalists’ unions) have been minimal, other than through the efforts of individual rank-and-file activists like writer David Bacon, who served on the MA board. Somewhat by contrast with Britain and Canada, the conservatism of American labor leadership, and the lower rate of unionization in the workforce, has argu- ably impeded American media activism in general; it has certainly contributed to its distinctive form, with a greater orientation towards the countercultural Left and minority group struggles for equality. Occasionally, MA has assisted other groups, and even helped launch them, by accepting tax-deductible funds on their behalf, saving them the tedious process of acquiring 501(c)(3) tax status. (One relatively recent example is the Bay Area Independent Media Center, which was centered on local community organizing rather than a major anti-globalization action.) Such fiscal sponsorship is ‘a way to make friends and alliances’, explains a former MA staffer.

While turf issues are more likely to arise than with non-media community groups, MA has also partnered with other media-related advocacy groups, especially where there is a history of mutual support and complementary expertise. San Francisco’s rich organizational ecology has offered many such partners. One example is We Interrupt This Message, a national media strategy and training centre, which former MA staffer Kim Deterline helped launch in 1996. Others include the Independent Press Association, Community Press Consortium, Project Censored, the Center for Improvement and Integrity of Journalism, FAIR, the Public Media Center, and alternative media like Pacific News Service and the Bay Guardian.

By the 1990s, a decade of conservative hegemony had shifted the political environment to the right. By contrast with its apparent momentum in the 1960s and early 1970s, the US Left had fragmented into factions seemingly more intent on self- expression and identity-assertion than on coalition-building and broad societal transformation (Sanbonmatsu 2004). In the media field, corporate priorities and hypercommercialism were becoming more blatant and seemingly more difficult to challenge from within newsrooms, where the public service ethos was withering (Hallin 2000; McChesney 2004: 87). The post-Watergate generation of journalists, MA’s original membership base, had aged; acquiring family responsibilities and career success, they no longer needed the professional and social support of MA (including its renowned ‘great parties’). Parties aside, some felt that the organization was losing the fire in its belly and its sense of purpose.

Media Alliance was ripe for renewal. Its critical juncture came in 1996 initially disguised as chaos. In the first contested board election in MA history, seven petition-nominated candidates defeated a board-nominated slate after an acrimonious campaign. Led by Van Jones, a young African-American civil rights lawyer, the reformers promised to energize the Alliance by making it more accessible to the poor and minorities, only to run into a sea of troubles once in office: sour relations between MA’s still divided board and staff, a high rate of staff burnout and turnover, and ‘a perilous financial situation’, according to a 1998 letter from Jones to the membership. After nearly two years of ‘miserable frustration and floundering’, a new executive director, appointed from within the ranks, took the helm. With an activist sensibility and a consensus approach to administration, Andrea Buffa is widely credited with helping to save MA from self-destruction, and to energize and build an activist-oriented staff. According to Jones, Buffa’s leadership ‘completed the coup’ and ‘made it possible for the organization to move in a different direction’. In Jones’ view, ‘an old boys’ club’ of 1960s/70s media professionals was transformed into one reflecting MA’s younger activist members and more relevant to contemporary media realities – including online and alternative media, as well as ‘the monopolization of all media by corporations as a dire problem for democracy’. For Jones, the old guard had failed to grasp how corporate  media had become ‘an absolute barrier to any kind of social change, whether the issue be homelessness, police issues, whatever’.

Veteran and former members we interviewed are divided on MA’s new direc- tion. For some, the outcome was a rediscovery of MA’s original sense of mission. For founding member and former MediaFile editor Larry Bensky, the shift was both generational and political. It enabled MA to tap the energies of the new hip-hop protest movement, for whom diversity is a serious issue.
For others, the organization has marginalized itself, its critiques no longer to be taken seriously. An editor at the Chronicle, and one of MA’s founding members, says he drifted away from the organization a few years after it was formed because it had become ‘more ideologically driven than craft driven’, predictably supporting every radical demand, such as the release of controversially-convicted African American death row inmate Mumia Abu Jamma1. Some of these members blame Van Jones personally for an unnecessarily confrontational transition. Even Raul Ramirez, the journalist who had benefited from MA’s legal defence fund, observed in MediaFile (March/April 2001) that his colleagues think of MA as having ‘drifted much farther into the political world than they feel comfortable mingling with’, and that MA is no longer the ‘vehicle for the internal self-examination of mainstream media’. He attributes this distance to the traditional ethos of objectivity: `Don’t get involved in the story, translated into, “You’re not a part of the community.”‘ The further that MA’s advocacy extended beyond safeguarding the First Amendment and journalists’ rights, the more reluctant that working reporters (and still more their superiors) became to associate with MA’s campaigns.

The Alliance’s projects, campaigns and tactics since 1996 reflect its more activist and outsider strategy. One indicator was MA’s 1996 picketing of the New York Times’ San Francisco bureau, as part of a national ‘Melt the Media Snow Job’ campaign to protest dominant media’s lack of coverage of alleged links between the CIA and the drug trade. This classic outsider tactic earned the ire of some within the media, like the San Francisco Weekly, who might otherwise be sympathetic to MA critiques. In a similar vein, MA brought together media activists from around the country to San Francisco to protest at the 2000 convention  of the National Association of Broadcasters, the powerful corporate lobby group.

In 1998, MA campaigned  to expose perceived biases in media coverage of Proposition 227, a referendum initiative to abolish bilingual education in Cali- fornia, thus restricting Spanish-speakers’ access to public education in their own language. (This policy was one of the alleged violations of language rights adjudicated by the People’s Communication Charter’s unofficial tribunal at The Hague in 1999: Media Development 1999.) The campaign’s goal was to ensure that pro-bilingual voices were not shut out in the media. Andrea Buffa recalls regretfully the difficulty MA had in persuading mainstream media, notably National Public Radio, to participate in its public panels, which NPR officials considered ‘biased’ because they reflected majority expert opinion in favour of bilingual education. (The referendum passed, but its implementation was delayed by court challenges.)

Media Alliance did not altogether abandon its links with mainstream journalists – for example, it helped organize protests when the Chronicle removed one of its few progressive columnists from the op-ed pages in the political aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. But MA’s new focus had clearly become training community groups and political activists how to tell their story more effectively, whether through creating their own media or framing messages for the corporate media (though as Buffa conceded, better coverage certainly cannot be guaranteed). Critiques of corporate media coverage were still offered, but were seemingly intended less to encourage mainstream journalists to do better, and more to persuade activists to identify, and strategize against, corporate media bias. It was, however, a landmark battle within the field of alternative media that re- energized the Alliance and encouraged its activists to start redefining it as part of a broader media democracy movement. The campaign centred on resistance to the Pacifica Foundation’s crackdown on KPFA in Berkeley, one of the five stations in Pacifica’s radio network. We cannot elaborate here the station’s half- century history as America’s  first listener-supported independent station, its distinctive programming with the stated intention of supporting peace, social justice, the labor movement and the arts, and its relatively democratic, partici patory and often conflict-laden structure (see Downing et al. 2001, Chapter 21). Instead, our story begins with a decision by Pacifica’s  national board, which legally owned the station and was accountable to no other body. In 1995, the board began to develop and implement a plan to transform Pacifica’s program- ming and operations, for reasons not fully and publicly explained: it may have been an effort to win broader audiences for public service radio, and to address the perceived problem of ‘the stranglehold of … stick-in-the-mud local program- mers’ over Pacifica’s output (Downing et al. 2001: 348). Opponents, though, saw it as a kind of corporate coup; for veteran MA member and KPFA broadcaster Larry Bensky, at stake was ‘the survival of a unique institution dedicated towards speaking truth to power – free speech radio, non-corporate and democratically and locally controlled’.

Whatever its motives, the board’s tactical tools included secrecy, central direc- tives, gag orders, firings and lockouts of staff, and a covert contract with a union- busting organization. Not surprisingly, such tactics met with resentment and resistance within the stations – and among listeners, especially in the Bay Area, where the station had deep roots, and where the confrontation became a crisis in 1998-9. Firings, demonstrations, sit-ins, even an on-air confrontation between a talk-show host and private security guards ensued. A sympathetic student of radical media sees the conflict as another example of the Left’s ‘self-devouring virus’, with the board and local programmers locked into position by rival messianic drives, fed by a shared conviction that Pacifica was the single beacon of light in a broadcasting wilderness. Each side saw itself as a savior and its opposite as the most infuriating and illegitimate of obstacles to survival and success. (Downing  et al. 2001: 346, 349)

For Media Alliance, however, the issue was clearcut, and it ‘jumped into the leadership role in the campaign’, as Andrea Buffa put it, organizing everyone from nonprofit organizations to journalist groups to local politicians in a demand that the station be reopened. We did everything. We did civil disobedience at the station, we started a campsite in front of the station, it was operating 24 hours a day. We organized activities at the station every day. MA also helped organize a march of ten to fifteen thousand people, probably one of the largest protest rallies on a media issue in American history.

By contrast with the outcome at other Pacifica stations, in Berkeley the board eventually backed down, the station remained on the air, and the staff stayed on their jobs. One could argue that the campaign was reactive, that at best it recap- tured ground previously held and made no new inroads into the corporate media monolith. But for MediaFile editor Ben Clarke, the campaign was a victory, even if it further marginalized MA in the eyes of some mainstream journalists. It ‘made people more willing to take risks to defend media democracy’ as embodied in workers’ rights at a free radio station; and it produced ‘a distinctly more engaged staff and membership, a greater visibility and reputation in the community’.

MA’s new sense of purpose was illustrated not only by the Pacifica struggle, but also by other lifeworld-based projects to claim media space for subaltern groups. A particularly important one was the Raising Our Voices programme, initiated in 1999 to challenge media myths by offering training in media skills to the victims of those myths, particularly the poor and the homeless. According to executive director Jeff Perlstein, the programme, which ran for several years, was ‘a strong example of the political agency and engagement that follows from people claiming their voice’.

Notwithstanding MA’s new resolve to do battle with corporate media, however, the idea of structural media reform was not yet on MA’s radar screen, Andrea Buffa told us in 1998. Although  MediaFile had kept members abreast of some communications policy issues since the late 1970s, MA had little tradition of actual intervention in state policy processes. But by 2001 Buffa and MA staffers were singing a different tune, however tentatively; and by 2003 ‘organizing local communities around media policy’ was part of MA’s public mission statement (Center for International Media Action 2003: 35). By the turn of the century, something resembling a self-defined media reform movement was emerging in America. Microradio activists had succeeded in persuading the FCC to legalize hundreds  of outlets, and it took the Republicans’ electoral  sweep in 2000 to quash that near-victory. More and more activists were making the connection between bad communications legislation, bad media, and bad political outcomes on other issues.

Thus, in 2001, campaigning against corporate giant Clear Channel Communi- cation, Media Alliance explicitly framed the issue as one of media democratization. The campaign centred on the firing of David Cook (`Davey D’), a popular and respected African-American radio talk show host at KMEL in Oakland, part of the 1,200-station radio empire amassed by Clear Channel after the 1996 Tele- communications Act’s passage. Davey D’s microphone had often been open for social justice groups, and many of them, with little prior interest in media politics, joined MA in the campaign,  including civil rights lawyers, the Latino Issues Forum, and youth groups organizing against the city government’s plans for a super-jail in the Oakland area. While the immediate goal was Cook’s reinstatement, Media Alliance linked the campaign to broader issues: Clear Channel’s abuse of its prominent position in Bay Area radio broadcasting, the grave implications of media deregulation and consolidation, and the culture of media silence and complicity engendered by 9/1 I (Cook was fired a week after he interviewed Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress to vote against giving the Bush administration carte blanche to invade Afghanistan and launch a ‘war against terror’). MA worked against post-9/ 11 chill in other ways too: a sign-on letter campaign in support of press freedom and diversity, and communications training for anti-war campus groups and for South Asian and other minorities being victimized by media hysteria.

Another campaign, around cable franchises, further enabled Media Alliance to combine community and policy concerns in 2002. The proposed merger of two of America’s largest cable companies, AT&T and Comcast, meant that the new post-merger firm would be required legally to renegotiate the contracts with each of the 2,000 municipalities where the two pre-merger companies had franchises. Two Washington DC-based public interest organizations, the Consumer Federa- tion of America and the Center for Digital Democracy,  saw in the franchise transfer an opportunity to extract concessions from the cable companies. They identified 80 affected cities for intervention, and supplied logistical and informa- tional support for local advocacy groups, thus reducing their costs of mobilization. In San Francisco, Media Alliance organized a broad coalition that included local advocacy groups and school-based community centers in eight neighborhoods. Campaign goals included discounted cable rates for seniors and low-income residents, open access to the cable infrastructure for independent service providers, and more resources and channels for community access production and programming. As Jeff Perlstein explains, the campaign strategically presented an opportunity to encourage community activists to expand their repertoire, from alternative media production  to policy intervention. It was also a chance to educate the broader public, which is aware of cable TV but generally overlooks the implications of increasing cable company control  over broadband and high-speed internet. As the MA website explains, citing the American Civil Liberties Union, in a deregulated monopoly environment, “Not only will [cable] be allowed to charge whatever toll they want, they will be able to discriminate against other ISPs … cable companies could engage in various forms of discrimination against consumers, from reviewing e-mails to extracting marketing data to slowing down transmission speeds to Web sites that compete against cable-affiliated products. ‘An ISP controlled by a politically inclined CEO or board could use the network to promote political positions …,’ the ACLU said. ‘It could block or slow access to the Web sites of rival candidates, or redirect users to the preferred candidate’s site.’

What did the Pacifica, Davey D and cable transfer campaigns have in common? They all challenged threats to the ability of community activists to disseminate their messages publicly . As Ben Clarke observed, that threat may be the strongest stimulant for media-related activism.

In sum, Media Alliance’s project for its first two decades was system change from within the media field – reforming corporate journalism, through defending media workers’ rights, critiquing `bad’ journalism and celebrating the ‘good’, and training aspiring journalists (including those with little interest in MA’s politics). Since 1996, MA has found its main constituencies amongst those marginalized within the media field and the broader field of power, communities seeking racial and economic justice and an effective public voice. MA is rooted within the lifeworld, with a focus on media production and content, but also increasingly on media policy – an environing condition of media production.

In 2002, Jeff Perlstein explained the rationale behind this shift: In order to achieve systematic change, activist organizations must be willing to do policy work, political lobbying, and broader base-building at the grassroots level, and we have to figure out what the entry points are in the local media policy that can ripple up to national media policy.

He notes that some constituencies who have been ‘making their own media’ or`accessing the mainstream media’ have not been previously engaged in media policy reform. Accordingly, Media Alliance has been consciously attempting to link strategies: Those two pieces (alternative media and strategic communication) are really crucial, because what that does is build an understanding on a very gut level around what we mean by changing media policy. You’re making your own media, and you find out well, all the great alternative media distribution networks still aren’t really getting it out there quite enough just yet. There’s still this (structural) barrier … that we’re hitting.

Since 2001, the policy focus has been evident in a steady stream of MediaFile features (on FCC proposals, media concentration, telecommunications politics, postal rates for independent magazines, and much else). As it has shifted emphasis away from working with mainstream media workers and towards training the marginalized to create their own media, MA is also paying more attention to the substance and processes of government media policies, mobilizing for interventions in regulatory processes (FCC hearings, industry conventions, cable franchise negotiations) from a public interest perspective. It appears that journalism’s objectivity regime may have been a greater impediment to policy engagement than younger activists’ distrust of the state and electoral politics.

With varying intensity and at different times, MA has worked within all four of the sectors identified in our schema. Its history illustrates the permeability of the boundaries between the different sectors of media democratization we sketched in Chapter 3, as well as the potential for a particular vector of media democratization– from subaltern communities in the lifeworld, via alternative media or media training, to interventions in media structure and policy. It also shows the integral links between media activism’s trajectory, and the energies of broader political currents, particularly those of social movements.