Journalism as Activism

Recoding Media Power

Adrienne Russell

• Editorial: Polity
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509511327
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Media Studies

In the mediated digital era, communication is changing fast and eating up ever greater shares of real-world power. Corporate battles and guerrilla wars are fought on Twitter. Facebook is the new Berlin, home to tinkers, tailors, spies – and terrorist recruiters. We recognize the power shift instinctively but, in our attempts to understand it, we keep using conceptual and theoretical models that are not changing fast, that are barely changing at all, that are laid over from the past. Journalism remains one of the main sites of communication power, an expanded space where citizens, protesters, PR professionals, tech developers and hackers can directly shape the news. Adrienne Russell reports on media power from one of the most vibrant corners of the journalism field, the corner where journalists and activists from countries around the world cross digital streams and end up updating media practices and strategies. Russell demonstrates the way the relationship between digital journalism and digital activism has shaped coverage of the online civil liberties movement, the Occupy movement, and the climate change movement. Journalism as Activism explores the ways everyday meaning and the material realities of media power are tied to the communication tools and platforms we have access to, the architectures of digital space we navigate, and our ability to master and modify our media environments.

1
Introduction

Everyone now has a license to speak. It’s a matter of who gets heard.

Aaron Swartz¹

Civil rights champions and Americans across the country in 2015 celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the voting-rights marches led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama. The marches were hailed as political and cultural victories. But they were also and first a media victory, and they came in an age of media transition.

King rallied citizens and activists in a series of three marches to protest racial injustice and to win for black Americans, especially in the Old South, the unfettered right to vote. According to contemporary reports,² King worked with President Lyndon Johnson to intensify the impact of the marches by drawing reporters from national news outlets to Selma to produce coverage that would draw attention beyond Alabama’s borders to the state’s anti-democratic racist policies. The strategy succeeded remarkably well. Television networks and the nation’s top newspapers ran images and reports of troopers and state-conscripted possemen riding in riot gear on horseback through crowds of peaceful marchers, beating them bloody. The news stories rocketed around the country, horrifying the public and providing the political momentum Johnson needed to pass the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Although the law was enforced in fits and starts in the beginning, it marked a turn for the larger civil rights movement, mainly by raising awareness that changed majority attitudes in the United States. That activist media strategy – staging actions to draw the attention of news outlets – has been a model ever since, but it is evolving in significant ways in the digital-networked age.

In September 2011, Occupy Wall Street protesters sought to draw attention to the rogue high-finance industry that had been fueling vast inequalities in the global economy and destabilizing it as well. The protesters filled New York’s Zuccotti Park in the financial district. One of the activists, Tim Pool, began recording events on the ground using his cell phone. In a feed called “The Other 99,”³ he live-streamed footage using the internet video platform Ustream. When police raided the park on the night of November 15, removing and arresting protesters, including a number of journalists, Pool recorded the action. Millions of people around the world watched his marathon in-the-scrum reporting. His work was also picked up on news sites, including sites run by NBC, Reuters, CNN, and Al Jazeera. Pool was both protester and roving news outlet. He was “being the media,” as the contemporary slogan goes, and for that reason the message the protesters aimed to send – about Wall Street and its sympathetic, some say captured, political and police authorities – was more directly conveyed. In the moment, the message and the meaning of the coverage Pool was delivering were lost to many news outlets covering the story of the Occupy movement. The narrative developed by mainstream outlets was that the message of the Occupy movement was muddled and too broad to result in concrete change. But, for better or worse, one of the animating ideas at the heart of the global movement was that the time had come to seize the levers of control from the “1 percent” – the elite in finance, in government, in media – and the first victory Occupy achieved was a media victory. The activists who broadcast news of the movement from the moment it began never seemed to doubt that the traditional news media eventually would take up the story.

Indeed, the movement’s internal reporting on the movement was part of the movement. Two decades into the digital-media era, there was defiant confidence in the ability of “amateurs” to make the news media they wanted to see about their movement. They were sure they could better convey their message by telling it themselves, in part because they would be demonstrating that, in general, “doing it yourself” – instead of relying on institutions they saw as failing to serve the public interest – was the message of the movement. Working from the middle of the fray in Zuccotti Park, Pool captured the emotion and spirit of the movement, the sense of widely shared frustration at the status quo. He was one of thousands of Occupy media makers working the story as it unfolded. Journalist Nathan Schneider’s early stories on Occupy were published in major US news publications such as Harper’s and the New York Times. Like Pool, Schneider was an occupier. His book on the movement, Thank You, Anarchy, was widely praised and even more widely influential. It was criticized and lauded as “not objective reporting,” an interpretation that underlined the ambiguity of traditional journalists toward the book, the larger Occupy coverage, and the state of journalism more generally. “I agonized a lot about the participant-reporter thing,” Schneider said in 2013, but then he added, “probably more than I should have.”⁴

Pool and Schneider and many others broadcast the story of the movement across the networked-media environment – on video sites and on blogs and on social media. They occupied the news media, or, in the vocabulary of the era of computer code, they “hacked” the news. The movement and the story of the movement, which are the same thing, continue.

From medium to space

Media in the digital era constitute a new kind of space, an environment that “provides at the most fundamental level the resources we all need for the conduct of everyday life,”⁵ as Roger Silverstone put it. Communication scholars have conceptualized communicative space in the past. Jürgen Habermas wrote about the public sphere. Marshall McLuhan wrote about the global village. Henri Lefebvre said media space was neither subject nor object; he described it in the 1990s as a social reality.⁶ Recent scholarship across disciplines has followed Lefebvre’s line of thought, discarding the dominant understanding of space as something locational and considering space instead as something social.⁷ Jason Farman, for example, rejects the notion of space as a container that can be filled. “Space needs to be considered as something that is produced through use. It exists as we interact with it – and those interactions dramatically change the essential character of space,” he wrote.⁸

In today’s networked space, publics are hyper-connected to connective media⁹ feeds, email inboxes, information streams. Large segments of the waking population only fleetingly exist completely outside of what used to be more widely referred to as cyberspace. Indeed, the term is beginning to feel anachronistic, as offline and online spaces merge. Networked experience is shaped by communication tools, platforms, architectures, and by our ability or competence to master and modify our media environments. Mediated publics faced with limited resources, structural restrictions, and varying degrees of competence manage nevertheless to wield symbolic, material, and structural power. They can work more immediately and for larger audiences today to shape representation of people and events, to hack media tools and move around communication barriers, and to challenge and alter legal, economic, and governmental machinery.

Pre-digital media were once similarly celebrated for their potential to revolutionize human relations, but the hailed radical potential of the radio, telegraph, television, telephone, fax, and so on was at one point or another “interrupted.” Those media went through what Tim Wu calls “the cycle,” in which technologies evolve “from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel – from open to closed system.”¹⁰ Why would digital media be any different? Perhaps because, unlike media of the past, networked media are a “multimedia” environment, characterized by the ability to host many different media and to spur the creation of more media. The diversity of styles, forms, interfaces, and skills that come together online may make it an open system that could prove particularly resistant to closure.

Digital media, as they evolve, force scholars to rethink media theory. Scholars like Nick Couldry see digital media as testing the usefulness of present thinking around media logics; for example, the concept commonly and often intuitively used by scholars when considering how processes tied to particular media distinctly shape content – the organizational, technological, and aesthetic determinants that make television journalism different than newspaper journalism, and so on. “Do all media have a logic?” Couldry asks. “Is it the same logic and, if not, what is the common pattern that unites their logics into an overall ‘media logic’ (this problem only becomes more acute with media proliferation)? Alternatively, when media change over time (as they are doing intensively today), do they acquire a wholly new media logic or does something remain constant?”¹¹ The concept of media logic is most meaningful when tied to a solid institutional framework, such as the one that s...