19.1: Introduction

When Alex Nogales, president and CEO of the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), narrates the history of his organization, he tells a story of continuity and change. The core mission of the group—to integrate Latinas/os into more jobs behind and in front of the camera, ameliorate derogatory images of Latinas/os in the media, and advocate for telecommunications policies that serve the needs of Latina/o publics—has remained consistent since the NHMC was founded in 1986. What has changed, according to Nogales, is the organization’s strategies, which have evolved with the group’s experiences in media activism and advocacy. In his telling, the NHMC went from being a comparatively naïve organization, committed to addressing the exigent concerns of local communities, to a sophisticated group capable of exerting meaningful pressure on a national scale, especially via participation in the policymaking sphere.¹

The NHMC’s emphasis on media labor has been in keeping with the priorities of other identity-based media advocacy groups who have worked to bring people of color into media industry workforces at all levels. For the NHMC, to ensure that Latinas/os have access to these jobs is, like other equal employment advocacy, to enable them to participate in a sector that had historically discriminated against them; in addition, it is to transform the kinds of stories told and perspectives voiced in media texts, from news reports to entertainment programming. While securing Latina/o jobs has been a consistent goal of the NHMC, it has had to navigate a legal environment increasingly hostile to race-conscious policies to promote diversity and a regulatory system increasingly committed to media deregulation. In response, the NHMC, like other advocacy groups, has had to rethink how to promote diversity in the absence of what had been essential regulatory tools and in a climate unreceptive to such interventions.

Media advocacy, the kind of actions undertaken by groups like the NHMC, thus not only has been centrally concerned with media labor, but has constituted its own form of work. The work of media advocacy often is a labor-intensive enterprise, one that relies on myriad forms of capital—financial, cultural, institutional—to function. While media advocacy has often depended on uncompensated labor, from the work of volunteers whose contributions create the scaffolding upon which media advocacy efforts are built to the citizens who respond to calls to action by filing letters with or calling the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or members of Congress, it also has been guided by media advocacy professionals. These are professionals in two senses of the term: they have expertise and they are compensated for their labor.

To examine media advocacy as work is to alter the kinds of questions we ask and the kind of narratives we construct. While there are meaningful differences in how scholars have understood the political stakes, moments of opportunity, and mobilizing structures and strategies of media advocacy efforts, what they share is an understanding of media advocacy as a social movement or as a form of civic participation that has sought to transform the media to meet the communication needs of citizens in a democracy. Media advocacy campaigns are often narrated as David-and-Goliath stories, in which public interest groups try to reform the media only to be defeated by better-resourced media corporations that more successfully manipulate public opinion and gain sway over public officials.

The emphasis of media advocacy scholarship, furthermore, often is the media advocacy campaign, a temporally bounded effort undertaken at a particularly propitious moment when political changes or new technologies introduce fissures that make reform seem possible.² Media advocacy has also often been analyzed along a success/failure binary, an assessment of how and why media advocacy has or has not attained its desired goals. As the first section of this article discusses, to see media advocacy as work is to shift our focus off outcomes and onto process and to rethink the success/failure binary that has structured much of media advocacy scholarship. Media advocacy for groups like the NHMC is a long-term, multifaceted commitment that shifts with technological, political, and regulatory changes, as well as with the increasing savvy of the media advocates themselves. Their work is continuing, not contingent on singular campaigns or issues. Viewed through this lens, media advocacy can be seen less as a rhythmic exercise in hope and failure and more as a continuous hum of activity that sometimes yields actionable policy changes, in which communities outside the official regulatory sphere make themselves legible as stakeholders in the policymaking process. To consider media advocacy as work is to see it as ongoing, cumulative, and flexible.

In addition, as the second section demonstrates, many contemporary media advocacy groups in the United States are engaged in media work, labor that contributes to, rather than interferes with, media production and the interests of media companies. Media advocacy, however, has been invisible to scholars of media labor, who mostly have been interested in how the production process under which media are made, as well as the occupational cultures and power relations structuring the mode of production, affects the narratives, values, and images that media audiences consume. Deploying ethnographic and historical methods, and focusing on a range of media, this subfield traditionally has focused on above-the-line workers (directors, writers, producers, and executives); labor within these texts is imagined as both the creative labor of artists and the managerial labor of executives, the friction between them understood as alternately stifling and generative for the production of media texts.³

More recent scholarship, however, has expanded the methods and subjects of media labor scholarship. John Caldwell, for example, has blended ethnographic research with sophisticated discourse analysis to investigate not only the diverse range of labor practices—both above and below the line—that constitute film and television production, but the discursive labor involved in shaping and sustaining the occupational cultures within the entertainment industry.⁴ In a similar vein, Vicki Mayer, in her Below the Line, has broadened the definition of production to include the “invisible labor” that is constitutive of television production but frequently absented in both industry and academic discourse.⁵ Conceptions of media labor thus have been extended to the myriad forms of work that contribute to media production and to the discursive formations that sustain its division of labor.

While media advocacy has often existed outside media production, it has also intersected with, and contributed to, both the workflow of media production and the underlying assumptions about audience and narrative that structure it. For decades, media advocacy groups’ work with media producers has been a constitutive part of their reform efforts. Increasingly, however, this collaboration has extended to advocacy groups using their position as representatives of the public to promote the policy agenda of media corporations. As the second section discusses, for some organizations, media advocacy work thus has given way to media work, their adversarial role transformed into a collaborative—or, to some critics, collusive—one with media and telecommunications corporations.