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Media reform is a great and formidable challenge. Across international contexts, reformers are inspired by what the late C. Edwin Baker referred to as the democratic distribution principle for communicative power: “a claim that democracy implies as wide as practical a dispersal of power within public discourse” (Baker, 2007, p. 7). The challenge is made manifest in battles over the future of investigative journalism, media ownership, spectrum management, speech rights, broadband access, network neutrality, the surveillance apparatus, digital literacy and many others waged in pursuit of the normative ideals at the heart of Baker’s vision. At the same time, those committed to media reform confront formidable challenges: entrenched commercial interests and media conglomerates; sometimes powerful, sometimes disorganized and sometimes neoliberal governments; a general public often disenfranchised, digitally illiterate and not focused on issues of media reform; and always, the uphill battle of organization, mobilization and influence that is the work of any activist. In light of these significant challenges, the central question addressed by this volume is: What strategies might be utilized to overcome these obstacles in the pursuit of media reform?

To enact a campaign aimed at changing the “shape” of the media often requires engaging in myriad forms of communicative work, which in turn demands knowledge of policymaking processes, the regulatory and legal history of the issues at stake, and the contemporary legal and political environment. This chapter seeks to re-conceptualize media policy advocacy by foregrounding not only the work that it involves but the multiple forms of knowledge on which it is based, and argues that media reform is, therefore, centrally connected to media policy literacy. Media policy literacy can be engendered through a combination of critical media policy pedagogy and opportunities for situated learning.

This chapter examines the theology behind the media activism of Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association (AFA). It aims to explain how Wildmon understand religion and its relationship to public action and how does religion change for evangelical Christians like him who had once been reluctant to address public issues when they become conservative activists. It also explores how religious organizations in the U.S. dealt with the entertainment industries and discusses Wildmon's relevant theological beliefs.

This chapter utilizes the Prison Radio Association's (PRA) core statement regarding ‘the power of radio’ as a starting point from which to explore the key ideas around radio as a socially and individually transformative medium in order to inform the understanding of how it came to be used in prison. The chapter outlines the shifting relationship between radio broadcasting and social change and argues that the evolution and establishment of radio within prisons is indicative of new opportunities for media activism, demonstrating the enduring social relevance and impact of radio. The chapter also places the development of National Prison Radio within a wider debate on the history and future of noncommercial broadcasting, based on the balance between governmental regulation and control on the one hand, and the countercultural opportunities it produces on the other.

This chapter follows the diverse paths people take as they become politicized, connect to others, and make their way into social movement worlds. The chapter explores the case of DREAMers: undocumented youth who were brought to the U.S. as young children and who are increasingly stepping to the forefront of the immigrant rights movement. The term comes from the proposed Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, which offers a streamlined path to citizenship for youth brought to the United States by their parents. Among other pathways to participation, the chapter finds that making media often builds social movement identity; in many cases, media-making projects have a long-term impact on activists’ lives. DREAM activists, often young queer people of color, have developed innovative transmedia tactics as they battle anti-immigrant forces, the political establishment, and sometimes mainstream immigrant rights nonprofit organizations in their struggle to be heard, to be taken seriously, and to win concrete policy victories at both the state and federal levels.

This chapter examines three contemporary media reform initiatives in Anglophone Canada—an annual community event (Media Democracy Day), a campaign organization (OpenMedia.ca), and a specific coalition run campaign (Reimagine CBC)—and presents four insights: Media reform groups need to understand their regional and national context: Organizations need to know the history of media development in their jurisdiction, the current competing power structures and discourses about the media operating there, the work of other media reform groups, and the unique barriers to media reform they face. Media reform movements should seek collaborations and coalitions: Networking and collaborating with other organizations, campaigns and events helps enhance organizational reach and resources, as well as increasing awareness of the need for media reform. Academic institutional support can be particularly important: Support from universities and colleges can help legitimate reform organizations, and add expertise to campaigns, regulatory proceedings and public debates. Media reform movements need to use multiple campaign approaches and modes of engagement: Online campaign tactics combined with off-line traditional communications engages the largest numbers of people. Similarly, campaign goals need to be framed in terms easily grasped by people of different ages and diverse backgrounds and education.

The 1940s was a contentious decade for U.S. media policy. Activists, policymakers, and media industries grappled over defining the normative foundations that governed major communication and regulatory institutions. At this time, a reform agenda took shape at both the grassroots social movement level and within elite policy circles. An analysis of the rise and fall of this postwar media reform movement holds at least three key lessons for contemporary media activists. First, it reminds us of the imperative to maintain a strong inside/outside strategy that keeps regulators connected to the grassroots. Second, we learn that media activists retreat on structural reform objectives at their own peril. Finally, we must remember that media reform rises and falls with other political struggles and radical social movements. With these lessons in mind, media reformers should seek to build liberal/left coalitions and, perhaps, a new popular front.

This introductory chapter discusses the process through which relatively small-scale media activism, based on prisoners' rights, came to be an intrinsic part of prison culture in the UK, playing a central role in institutional operations. It considers prison radio growth within the context of political and economic change, and argues that the successful development of an independent, prisoner-led service represents resistance against the forces of corporatisation and managerialism that have redefined the organisation and function of broadcasting, punishment, and social welfare. Against a backdrop of public service privatisation and media commercialisation, the growth of the Prison Radio Association (PRA) illustrates the complex processes of working in partnership with institutions and agencies to give a voice to people in prison.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book focuses on the national television news narratives about the second wave of feminism that proliferated in 1970, a year in which the networks' eagerness to make sense of the movement for their viewers was accompanied by feminists' efforts to use national media for their own purposes. The interaction of these efforts produced coverage that was distinguished by its contradictions—it ranged from sympathetic to patronizing, from thoughtful to sensationalistic, and from evenhanded to overtly dismissive. The effects of the movement's heightened public profile proved to be equally unpredictable. Even negative coverage had positive outcomes for movement growth; at the same time, some feminist media activism that proved surprisingly successful had an adverse effect on movement cohesion.

This chapter looks at the online circulation of breastfeeding selfies — or brelfies — and asks what their benefits might be in terms of making breastfeeding easier. It looks at brelfies as social media activism, drawing attention to embodied mothering, and upending assumptions about the solitary nature of maternity. It argues that brelfies provide a means through which breastfeeding can emerge from its existing practical, conceptual, and imaginary confines, by communicating images of breastfeeding to an almost limitless audience. Not only have brelfies attracted extensive media coverage, raising awareness about breastfeeding in the community, the images also provide a unique form of communication between breastfeeding mothers and their friends, families, and children, as mothers see themselves in the act of taking their own photos. By considering the implications of increased images of women breastfeeding in public — as well as the increased circulation of images of women breastfeeding generally — this chapter argues that brelfies invite us to reconceptualise breastfeeding in public as breastfeeding in social contexts more broadly: in short, to reimagine breastfeeding in relation to its many publics.

For the first decade of the 2000s, the Prometheus Radio Project led the fight in the United States for the Local Community Radio Act, a federal law. With its passage in 2011, local community organizations had the opportunity to apply for low-power FM (LPFM) radio licenses in what had the potential to be the largest expansion of community radio in the country’s history. In preparation for the LPFM application window in 2013, Prometheus informed and educated potential applicant groups through intensive networking, national tours, and press campaigns. In order to provide applicants with affordable and accessible assistance, we published detailed guides for how to complete the legal and technical portions of the LPFM application, hosted online tools that enabled applicants to find available frequencies and complete the application’s engineering studies, provided legal support via our networks of discount and pro bono attorneys, and organized a team of staff and volunteers that fielded thousands of inquiries from applicant groups. When the LPFM application window was held in fall 2013, more than 2,800 organizations submitted applications in fifty states and Puerto Rico, and of those, approximately 1,000 received support from Prometheus.

This chapter focuses on the March 18, 1970, sit-in at Ladies' Home Journal (LHJ), a crucial episode in feminist media activism that had dramatic internal and external consequences for women's liberation. Conceived as a radical action by a small group of women incensed at the demeaning portrayal of women in a publication that touted itself as “the magazine women believe in,” the LHJ protest was an unpredictable success, precipitating significant changes in editorial and employment practices at women's magazines. That outcome was the product of several factors, including the emphases of the print and broadcast coverage of the LHJ events as well as the action's timing among a wave of protests and discrimination complaints launched in 1970 by women employees of major media institutions. Equally important was the recognition of the magazine's editors—and those of their sister publications—that incorporating and commodifying women's liberation was more profitable than resisting it, processes that would soon escalate across all forms of mass media.

This chapter focuses on the Women's Strike for Equality on August 26, 1970. By this time, women's liberation seemed poised for its triumphal moment in the media spotlight. The House of Representatives had passed the Equal Rights Amendment a few weeks earlier, and all three networks had produced stories that linked this outcome to the movement's momentum. The strike seemed to confirm that momentum: involving tens of thousands of women in the United States and abroad, it was the subject of more national print and broadcast attention than any other feminist event that year. Despite the strike's inclusion of an array of liberal and radical feminist groups, it was an instance of media activism conceived and controlled by the National Organization for Women (NOW), and it put the organization's media pragmatism on full display. Confounding NOW's careful planning, the reports on the strike took an essentially liberal action and presented it as a radical one. Featuring almost no discussion of the three carefully chosen issues—abortion, equal pay, and child care—that the event was designed to dramatize, the network reports instead presented a narrative of feminist deviance, visually depicting the masses of women protestors as an entertaining spectacle.

This chapter contends that a corporate libertarian vision of media policy established the discursive terrain in which conservative media thrived in the United States after World War II. The corporate libertarian approach conceives of news media as a commodity—as opposed to a public resource—best left under private control and ownership. This vision became a hegemonic common sense that came to dominate US media policy discourses beginning in the late 1940s—thanks in part to a propagandistic influence campaign executed by corporate interests. This led to insufficient resources invested in a democratic news system. Such a policy orientation created conditions for a commercial media system driven by a competition to meet consumer demand. It also created a space for right-wing media activists to mobilize and cultivate conservative publics through outlets propped up by patronage networks and ideologically motivated venture capital.

Five lessons learned from the fight for low-power FM radio in the US: 1) There’s no replacement for a passionate grassroots effort that wants to build something. Even though Prometheus was a tiny outfit working out of a two-room church basement, we were able to harness the power of people who felt robbed of the community radio they needed. 2) Local voices with meaningful stories can be louder than the richest broadcasters in the world. We encouraged people to share detailed, specific, personal stories with legislators about how their community could use a radio station. 3) We learned how long it takes to make change. It took our grassroots efforts ten years to get a pro-public interest correction through. 4) Choose campaigns well, campaigns that will keep on making a difference in long term, and stick with them long enough to win them. 5) If we can organize together outside of campaign work—outside of calling Congress, signing petitions, taking action—we will build a more permanent understanding of each other across communities, race and class: the lines that divide us and keep big media strong.

Despite the dangers and risks, as this chapter demonstrates some international NGOs are continuing to challenge oil, mining, and timber companies with confrontational, direct-action campaigns. Chapter 10 opens with the story of the Greenpeace campaign against oil drilling in the Arctic, once again demonstrating the courage and conviction of “eco-warriors,” to use the phrase of Greenpeace founder Bob Hunter. Yet, as this chapter also reveals, Greenpeace is increasingly turning to social media activism, employing humorous videos to call on consumers to boycott well-known brands, such as Kit Kat, Barbie, and Head & Shoulders. In response, some brand manufacturers and retailers, including Nestlé, Mattel, and Procter & Gamble, have discontinued contracts with a few suppliers (such as ones caught clearing tropical forests to produce cardboard or grow oil palm). What Greenpeace is telling consumers is a “victory,” however – such as getting Mattel to package Barbie in a different box – is revealing of how limited eco-consumerism is as a force of global environmental reform.

The conclusion drives home the argument that commercial journalism has failed to meet society’s communication needs that are required to support democracy. Therefore, we need non-market models for journalism. As well as advocating for a new public media system, the conclusion describes the policies and politics that are necessary to build such a system and discusses what these new public newsrooms would actually look like. In addition to calling for journalist- and community-owned and controlled news outlets, it argues that we need to frame this as a social democratic policy program that aims to entirely remake existing news organizations while also creating entirely new ones.