WHY WE NEED COMMUNITY MEDIA

The social and cultural movements of the sixties demonstrated how people outside formal circles of power can use popular media to communicate opinions and information about issues largely ignored by the mainstream media. Social justice-themed media messages helped lead to discussion, action, and ultimately policy changes and legal decisions that affected millions.

“What’s going on?” the late singer Marvin Gaye asked in 1968 as the Vietnam War claimed the lives of thousands of young men. At home, African Americans faced increasingly desperate economic conditions in U.S. cities. “Can’t find no work, can’t find no jobs, my friend. Money is tighter than it’s ever been. What’s happening, brother?”

The opportunity for people to form opinions about “what’s going on” is central to any democracy. To form such opinions, people must have real information about their own communities and the larger society. Under our current corporate-dominated media system, people of color, women, youth, immigrants, gays, people with disabilities, the elderly—groups which, taken together, are a majority of our citizenry—have been silenced and kept ignorant of one another’s perspectives. Their voices are left out of public discourse, which means they have little influence on policies and laws. The challenge before us is how to make and keep the democratic ideal real—to create and maintain a media that echoes with the voices, ideas, and perspectives of all of the people in society.

Access to the media is an essential feature of any modern movement for social change and therefore “media justice” is a necessary prerequisite to “social justice.” If we are to achieve justice for all, then all people must have equitable, democratic access to the media.

The opportunity for people to form opinions about what’s going on” is central to any democracy.

A central feature of all successful, modern social-justice campaigns is an ability to communicate through the media. Building connections with friendly mainstream journalists is important, but community- access TV is an important vehicle for speaking directly to citizens without being filtered by corporate media gatekeepers. Genuine social justice will only come when those who thirst for justice are able to “frame the issue” and “shape the debate.”

Community-access TV and the Internet are two places where this can happen. The real people, in real neighborhoods can inform themselves, as well as the masses about "what's really going on" in their community.

Source: Imagining the Unthinkable, 2007, Community Media Over the Next 5 Years.