How do Brown, Iglesias, and Pyles each think differently about the role of media work and/or media justice in social movements?
We start this week with our Loretta Pyles reading. And in this particular chapter, she’s doing a deep dive about the mainstream news media and how we might re-imagine media to be in the service of transformative organizing.
So Pyles describes the mainstream media as corporate owned and identifies a key problem with this is the 24-hour news cycle and the generation of advertising revenue and constant– the constant production of news.
So this, too, is a hallmark of neoliberal cultural production– that it’s nonstop and geared towards selling things to consumers.
So Pyles identifies this as a key problem because what it means for consumers is that we’re constantly available for the kinds of news that’s repetitive and that doesn’t actually move forward any kind of transformative organizing.
So she suggests that in opposition to that, we should develop an actual media strategy. So we should think about how we want to utilize mass media and mainstream media in the service of publicizing transformative organizing work.
So she posits that we have to consider four things when we’re thinking about our messaging and our media strategy to engage the broader public in understanding transformative organizing and, as Gramsci would say, to make an ideological intervention, which we’ll talk about more in just a second.
So these four things are that we should consider our timing, our target audience, and our messaging. So we want to make sure that we understand who we’re trying to move with our media.
And we want to make sure that we time the release of information to the media in such a way that it will have the greatest impact, so it’s most likely to get published.
And then last but not least, we want to make sure that we understand our messaging in the context of our audience.
So we want to make sure that our message can actually reach the people we’re trying to convince or trying to move.
So Pyles is also positing that in addition to employing the mainstream media in the service of transformative organizing, that we should also be pushing for media justice.
So we should be developing our own media outlets and our own understandings of the kind of universal and democratic media production that could exist.
So she has 10 ways that she’s conceiving of media justice and what that might look like and what it might look like to have publicly available information and control of the narrative.
So when Pyles is explaining this to us, what she’s really saying is in order for regular people, for the working class, to have power, for us to shift the relations of power in our society, that we need access to information and we need to be able to share power about how we distribute information. So she’s not talking specifically about media in the case of entertainment.
She’s talking about media as the conduit for moving information in the political world and for having power.
So the first piece of her platform for media justice is that we should have representative and accountable content, meaning that the content produced is representative of the dere featured in the media and that this content is accountable, meaning that it tells a story about people’s lives that is true to the material reality of their lives.
She also suggests that we should have true universal medmographics of the United States– that the faces and lives and identities of people of color, not just white people, aia access, so full, fast, and free for all. So we shouldn’t have to pay for media– that media should be publicly accessible and owned. So this gets to the third platform of her platform for media justice– or the third piece of her platform for media justice
— that the public should own the airwaves and that no single corporation or single group of elites should be able to adjust what we see and when we see it– so the fight around net neutrality in recent years is an example of this kind of– the other direction of this, an increasing privatization of our systems of information and media. So she’s suggesting, again, that we go in the opposite direction– that the public would own the infrastructure for media production.
And then the fourth– she suggests that we have community-centered media policy. So rather than mass media outlets where syndicates are owned by one large corporation, she’s suggesting that we have smaller community-centered and democratic media policy or media institutions and that our policy be derived from smaller, more local groups.
She’s also suggesting that as a part of this platform for media justice in tandem with the democratizing, nationalizing of media and the media infrastructure that we have corporate media accountability and the enforcement of a general system and standard of rules for the production of media.
So this exists now. But as we know, corporate media accountability is increasingly less as a neoliberal public policy takes hold– again, net neutrality being an example of this and the increasing control by private interests of corporate media.
She’s also suggesting that we redefine and redistribute first amendment rights. In this particular piece of her platform, what she’s saying is that first amendment rights should apply to individuals, not to corporations, and that we should think of our right to access information as fundamental and core to any kind of media justice work that we’re doing.
She also believes, like Adrienne Maree Brown, in cultural sovereignty and self-determination, concepts that we’ve talked about thus far in this class– the idea that we as the people most affected by a certain decision should be able to make those decisions collectively for ourselves rather than imposed– rather than having a decision imposed from a group of more powerful people above.
She also believes that we should have full and fair digital inclusion– so the publicly accessible internet should be expanded to parts of the country where that currently doesn’t exist, so rural areas, urban areas where internet is privatized.
And instead, we should have totally publicly available internet service.
She also believes that we should create our own media and that we should fund it ourselves.
So as we’ve talked about in transformative justice organizing, a key component of shifting the relation of power, as Kivel suggested in the reading for our very first week, in order to make sure that we have totally politically independent movements and organizations, we have to fund them ourselves.
Otherwise, we rely on the philanthropic gifts of incredibly wealthy people whose interest is to maintain this power relation in society.
And then last but not least, she believes in full and fair representation in the movement for media reform or in any transformative justice organizing she’s suggesting that we do.
Again, this is just simply getting at the idea of equality that and if we are to shift white supremacy and patriarchy, that we actually have to shift who’s in power in our movements.
So we can’t have white-led– or exclusively white-led and men-led movements if we are to actually reform society. So she’s applying that also to the movement for media justice.
So let’s turn to Brown. Brown this week is largely expanding on what we’ve already seen of her theory.
She’s suggesting, again, that transformation is non-linear, that iteration is key for transformative organizing, meaning we have to try lots of different things and see what sticks.
She talks this week a bit about charismatic leaders and her own experience of burnout as an organizer and that her natural tendency towards charisma and magnetism led her to often be identified as a leader in community-based organizing.
And she suggests that actually we should opt for a different model, a more leaderful model, as we’ve talked about, and that this would– the result of this would mean less burnout for community organizers and community leaders.
And it would also mean that more people would have access to the opportunity for leadership inside our movements. So again, this is kind of a controversial debate within organizing work– the role of charismatic leaders in our movements and whether or not those– that a movement framed around charismatic leaders is really going to bring us transformative justice if we also philosophically believe that no single group of elites or no single group of people with authority should control society for everyone.
She’s also diving deeper on the idea of interdependence and the ways in which in our day-to-day lives we are interdependent upon each other.
And then last but not least, she is continuing with, again, what we might call a metaphysical interpretation of how we do community organizing and is positing an analogy about community building and collectivity and spiritual practice and our own transformation as individuals.
So here she’s really trying to get us to think about how community building is a spiritual act and is an act of ritual that we– and a set of skills– that we can apply and repeat over and over again– again, in a iterative and non-linear way– but that we can do the practice of community building over and over again and that strengthens us, makes us more militant as organizers, and that it sharpens our sword, so to speak.
So it makes us stronger for the struggle ahead.
And when she’s suggesting these kinds of practices, you can intuit from the reading we’ve done so far in Brown that when she’s talking about community building, she’s suggesting that these are intentional practices, that there are things like one-on-one conversations, they’re slower, more methodical kinds of organizing practices.
So she’s definitely anti-opportunism and sort of anti an urgent organizing formation. She believes that we should see the entire field of play, as we’ve talked about, and move from there strategically rather than constantly reacting to what’s happening in the political field at large.
And then last, we have the Iglesias reading about Podemos and the Spanish elections. This is a particularly timely and interesting article because it talks about something we’ve been talking about since the beginning of class, this idea of an ideological intervention, which we’ll talk about again this week when we talk about Gramsci.
So Iglesias here is positing a Gramscian approach to left politics. He’s suggesting that in order to make leftist ideas hegemonic, in order to make them the only alternative and to have a new narrative, a new story that drives social formation and that shifts power in our society, that we have to create the kinds of signs and symbols necessary and the kinds of narratives necessary for people to move towards the left platform and left politics– so a politics of complete transformation of society.
So he’s specifically talking about that this may mean inventing new signs and symbols. And he’s rejecting the idea that the left should utilize what he sees as hackneyed or cliche symbols of the past, so symbols of left formations or left parties globally throughout the world like the sickle and hammer, the red star.
He’s saying we actually have to reject these signs and symbols that have come to signify something that we no longer want to represent our transformative justice organizing.
He’s saying, actually, we need a new vision for society. We need to posit that the kind of socialism or the kind of transformation of society that we want is distinct from the socialism of the past.
And this has been relatively effective inside Podemos and inside the context of Spain and Spanish organizing. So we can take Iglesias’– his posturing here and what he proposes and apply it to the US context or to a global organizing context.
And he’s also here still suggesting– he’s in the camp of people or the family of people and theorists who we’ve discussed– and political organizers– who believe that we need mass working class organization.
And to go back to the tree of change, the trunk of the tree, we actually have to build an institution like a political party, like Podemos, and do electoral work in order to take state power and in order to transform the power relations in society.
What similarities are there between their perspectives?
