Mapping Media Justice Policy Activism in the United States & Canada
Research project funded by Concordia University’’s General Research Fund, 2008.
This research interrogates specific U.S. and Canadian media policy issues and the impact of media justice organizations in influencing policy processes. Policy issues include media concentration and consolidation, internet freedom, and independent and community media. Media justice organizations include many non-profit and grassroots groups who view media as a civil rights issue, thus advocating for social justice through promoting informed media policy that particularly addresses concerns of gender, race, and class. Media justice is situated within the burgeoning global Media Reform Movement. “I don’t think there is a movement that has grown so fast in the last 7 years”, enthused Stanford University intellectual property scholar Lawrence Lessig at the 4th annual National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis in June 2008, which brought together over 3,000 participants - activists, scholars, and the general public. This movement is broadly concerned with media and democracy issues: the impact of increased media concentration of ownership on ensuring a diversity of voices and quality journalism; curbing market-led media policies favoring de-regulation that lead to an evisceration of independent, local, and educational media content; promoting policies for universal broadband access; and internet freedom, including network neutrality (the principle that all information sent over the internet should be treated equally–a design principle that ensures that a useful public information network treats all content, sites, and platforms equally). The GRF goals include:
1) Mapping the contours of the nascent Media Reform Movement to identify stakeholders including media justice groups in the U.S. and Canada, identifying several groups to serve as research collaborators for a Standard SSHRC submission;
2) Examining the vexed definitional debates surrounding ‘diversity of voices’ media policy on concentration, ownership, and convergence within the Canadian and U.S. mediascape, historically and contemporaneously;
3) Providing a focus on emerging and provocative media policy issues including media ownership, internet freedom, community and independent media;
4) Analyzing how media justice groups mobilize to impact policy through traditional policy processes (legislative, lobbying on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill or Washington D.C.’s Beltway), participation in community, national, and global policy forums, and digital mechanisms including web-materials distributed through blogs, YouTube, and other social networking sites;
5) Assessing qualitative methodologies to support the plan of research, including: participant-observation at conferences and policy forums, interviews with informants involved in media reform and media justice activities, policy and political economic analyses of documents, and a scan of relevant academic literature;
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