Absolute first steps
If you feel like the mainstream media isn’t doing its job, here are first steps anyone can take to start making change happen. Commit to taking one of these steps!
- Go to the information night at your local cable access station. You’ll find out about how any community member can learn the tools and produce a television show on their own. Cable access stations are a hard-won public resource that puts media tools in hands of citizens. THAT’s media democracy!
- Begin watching, reading, and listening to indpendent news sources, such as Democracy Now, the Twin Cities Daily Planet, the Minnesota Independent.
- Read critiques of the mainstream media at www.nygaardnotes.org (Minneapolis-based!) and www.fair.org.
- Sign up for action alerts from Free Press, a national organization that supports media policy reform.
- Challenge what you see in the mainstream media. Write a letter to the editor of the newspaper you read. (Most accept these letters in electronic form online.) Whether or not your letter is published, it’s certain to be read.
- Make a list of issues–local, national, and international–on which you feel inadequately informed. Envision being able to easily access media that offered insightful and diverse perspectives on these issues. How would that change your life? Change your community? Change the world? Make a list of voices you feel are missing or inadequately represented in the mainstream media. How would hearing those voices change policy decisions? Enrich the community? A system geared towards maximizing profits doesn’t necessarily produce the media we need. What IS the media we need?
Next steps
You’ve taken the first step. You’re convinced that democracy and justice demands a media system that truly informs us. Here are more steps you can take to reclaim our media system…
Be the media
The media’s not just for journalists anymore, a good thing. Become part of the solution by taking part in the storytelling. It’s your right!
- Attend the training to get licensed at your local cable access station. Then, think about a topic you care about or something you enjoy, get together a few friends, and produce one show about it.
- Volunteer at KFAI Community Radio, either with news production or other tasks
- Become a Democracy Now volunteer. You don’t have to live in New York!
- Submit ideas or stories to your neighborhood or community newspaper.
- Submit written stories and photos to an online news source like the Twin Cities Daily Planet.
- Get out with a videocamera to shoot news for The Uptake.
- Join one of the efforts that will be featured in the new Media Blizzard blog!
Change media policy
The media system that exists now is a result of government regulation that favors big corporations over smaller, localized media outlets. We can decide as a people to create the kind of media system we want to see, from refunds for independent media donations to preservation of the Internet as an open and accessible public space.
- Learn about state and national media policy fights through Free Press (and right here on Media Blizzard!
- Talk to legislators–and candidates!–about how they’re supporting a more democratic media and share your concerns that media-related policies should promote democracy and the public interest as its primary concern.
- Make sure local elected officials provide full funding and support for local media efforts like cable access television.
- Support funding for non-commercial media in all forms and opportunities to shield these efforts from political pressure.
Change mainstream media content
Most people still turn to the mainstream media for most of their information, so changing it to better meet our needs and better reflect our communities is a worthwhile effort.
- Get a group together to assess local media coverage of issues you care about or evaluate the coverage of diverse communities. Here’s one example of a news scorecard. You could also create your own. Tabulate your results and develop specific changes you’d like to see. Meet with the media outlet to share your results and ask for a commitment on those changes.
- Visit your local television station and ask to see their public file, which shows how they are fulfilling their obligation to serve the public in exchange for free use of our airwaves. See if you agree that they are meeting their obligations and open a discussion with them.
- Radio and TV stations must renew their FCC licenses periodically. These license renewals can be challnged by citizens. Though the FCC usually just rubber stamps these renewals, one group has mounted an effective challenge by enlisting their federal legislators in their cause.
- Host a community gathering to create an action plan to improve local media
Support Independent Media
Independent media has seen tremendous growth as the mainstream media’s audience flees in search of better and more authentic journalism. Independent media comes in a variety of forms, but it’s characterized by a commitment to remaining free from the commercial and political pressures that hamper mainstream media coverage.
- Help promote independent media. Hold a sign reading “Turn on Democracy Now” and “90.3″ (in Minneapolis) or “102.7 (in St. Paul) and stand where there’s traffic from noon to 1pm, Monday through Friday.
- Make donations to independent media efforts.
Learn and share with others
- Start a book group to read and discuss books about the media
- Advocate for media literacy/empowerment curriculum in the schools
- Talk with your friends and family about our media system; how it affects the decisions we make and the lives of people in our communities and around the world.
Take the long view
Don’t lose hope! The media system we have now has been decades in the making and won’t be dismantled overnight. The media system seems huge (and it is), but there’s nothing about it that can’t be changed through popular will. We MUST have a media system that adequately informs us about our role in collective decisions that affect others, that empowers everyone to speak and be heard, that allows us to thoughtfully consider issues without profit-driven interests controlling the debate.
