Unless I’m maimed in a horrific accident, etc., I will be presenting the paper below at this year’s Union for Democratic Communications conference in State College, Pennsylvania. (Now, of course, all I have to do is write it.)
Theorizing Media and Movements: A Framework for Linking Theory and Strategy
Abstract
Corporate news media now pose such a tremendous threat to movements for peace and social justice that left-progressive activists across the board must directly confront “the problem of the media” to further their struggles. Unfortunately, neither the administrative nor critical research traditions in journalism and mass communications studies adequately confront this problem. Whereas administrative research supports and advances corporate media power, critical researchers rarely go beyond critiquing this power or explaining how it operates. Despite the usefulness of their explanations, critical theorists’ heavy emphasis on criticism unfortunately reflects an inability to theorize ways that movements can challenge corporate media.
This paper argues that activist-scholars should adopt a radical research agenda as an alternative to administrative and critical research perspectives. As a two-way street, radical research should inform as well as be informed by struggles, i.e., develop praxis. In particular, radical researchers should go beyond critiquing how oppressive power dynamics shape news content by also theorizing how activists can change this process.
This paper couples complementary holism (Albert et al. 1986)—a multisystem analysis of our society’s polity, economy, culture, and kinship spheres—with Shoemaker and Reese’s (1996) hierarchical model of influences on media content to provide a map or typology that activists can use to explain and challenge oppressive power dynamics that operate through media. According to complementary holism, four irreducible oppressive power dynamics—white supremacy/racism, capitalism/classism, patriarchy/sexism, and political authoritarianism—characterize the major institutions in our society. Moreover, these do not operate separately, as pluralist views suggest, but rather texture one another. Shoemaker and Reese’s model describes five levels of influence on media content: newsworkers, media routines, news organization, extramedia factors, and ideology. This paper appropriates from Shoemaker and Reese by treating these levels as “targets,” so to speak, which activists can strategize about transforming. As an example, activists can help to counter state-corporate power at the newsworker level by helping to organize journalists, or they can strategically challenge racist influence on news production at the extramedia level by fighting white supremacy in society at large.
This framework, it is hoped, will provide a useful takeoff point for theorizing ways that social movements can challenge corporate media and build movement media.
References
Albert, M., Cagan, L., Chomsky, N., Hahnel, R., King, M. Sargent, L., & Sklar, H. (1986). Liberating Theory. Boston: South End Press.
Shoemaker, P. & Reese, S. (1996). Mediating the Message: Theories of Influence on Mass Media Content. 2nd ed. White Plains: Longman Publishers.