19.2: Media Advocacy as Work
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- Allison Perlman
- University of California Press
In the United States, public participation in media policymaking is technically part of the process. The FCC is required to solicit public input on new policies or changes to existing regulations. By design, members of public are to have their say in the shaping of regulations; in actuality, the role of the public has been far more constrained. Not only have industry lobbyists and attorneys had far more purchase with policymakers than members of the public, but administrative law requires federal agencies to consult the public but does not require them to pay heed to what the public says. 6 As a result, a range of social movement and civil society organizations have included media advocacy in their broader fights for social justice and political reform, and a number of dedicated media advocacy groups have emerged with the mission to reform the media. Many of these groups have been engaged in media advocacy for decades and have adapted to changes in media technologies, regulatory decisions, and broader political and social conditions.
As Becky Lentz and I have argued elsewhere, media advocacy hinges on the acquisition of media policy literacy, a set of competencies to understand not only the processes by which media policies and laws are formed, debated, and enacted, but also how to participate in a milieu of action to effect meaningful change. This literacy forms out of experience; that is, it is through sustained participation in advocacy that individuals and organizations gain the capacity to critique the sociopolitical impact of media structures, media practices, and media representations, and to strategize how best to tackle them. 7 Part of this literacy involves recognizing the myriad functions of a media advocacy campaign. While campaigns have identifiable goals, they also make an advocacy group legible as a stakeholder in the policymaking process and can establish the group’s credibility with fellow advocacy practitioners. The work of the NHMC, which has been committed to media reform for nearly thirty years, exemplifies the long-term, multifaceted, and flexible nature of media advocacy work.
The history of the NHMC shows the organization expanding its understanding of how media and communications matter to the Latina/o community and accordingly increasing the scale of its activities. When the NHMC first began its media advocacy work, it focused primarily on the practices of local broadcast stations. The NHMC utilized the petition to deny license renewal to broadcast stations as its primary means of redressing discriminatory employment practices and derogatory programming. The threat of a petition often would incline local stations to negotiate with the group rather than face the legal fees and irritations of a license challenge. In its early years, the NHMC reached agreements with local Los Angeles stations and soon extended its reach to television and radio stations in heavily Latina/o areas across the United States. The NHMC, in the process, also built ties with Latina/o groups in communities across the nation and began to establish its visibility as a Latina/o rights organization centrally committed to reforming media practices. 8
Throughout the 1990s, the NHMC enlarged its focus to include not only local stations but also broadcast and cable networks, along with the media conglomerates that owned them. In addition to an extensive economic boycott of the entertainment holdings of Disney-ABC in 1997, the NHMC targeted media consolidation, specifically the merger of ABC and Disney and the sale of the Spanish-language network Univision to non-Latina/o interests, in its advocacy campaigns. The NHMC was especially concerned over the potential transformation of Univision, the largest Spanish-language television network in the United States at the time, into an adjunct to Mexican and Venezuelan media empires. 9 For the NHMC, media consolidation in the English-language sphere and foreign control of the Spanish-language sector would portend fewer jobs for Latinas/os, diminished opportunities for Latinas/os to gain control of their own stations, and the continued invisibility of Latina/o concerns and perspectives in the national media.
Throughout, the NHMC confronted a regulatory apparatus that was seemingly disinterested in enforcing existing policies, especially around media ownership restrictions. These experiences signaled to the NHMC a divide between policy and enforcement and exposed a persistent willingness on the part of the FCC and the federal courts to facilitate media consolidation even in the face of the commission’s own rules against it. In addition, though the NHMC was not able to prevent the sale of Univision in the 1990s, its tenacity in fighting it established the organization as a formidable Latina/o advocacy group. Univision sent representatives to meet with the NHMC in the mid-1990s, and in exchange for ceasing their legal actions, the NHMC gained programming commitments in areas like children’s educational television, which it viewed as critical to the needs of the Latina/o community. 10
These experiences in the 1990s were highly instructive for the NHMC in its approach to media advocacy. It more fully committed to affecting policy at the national level—as Nogales states, the NHMC realized that the “big game” was being played in DC—and in the early 2000s hired two attorneys specifically to do policy advocacy work. In addition, its scope continued to increase as telecommunications issues of particular concern to the Latina/o community arose—for example, the expansion of broadband connectivity, the preservation of network neutrality, the maintenance of the Universal Service Fund. And as nativism accelerated in the United States in the mid-2000s over undocumented immigrants, the NHMC has made hate speech one of its top priorities, combating what NHMC executive vice president and general counsel Jessica Gonzalez refers to as “low-hanging fruit,” the programs that circulate what strikes the NHMC as particularly dangerous invective against the Latina/o community. 11
Media consolidation has continued to be a top policy issue for the NHMC. Since 2003, it has worked continually to prevent the FCC from diminishing its ownership restrictions. And while it has fought some media mergers—most notably the 2011 proposed merger between T-Mobile and AT&T—it also has sanctioned mergers in exchange for concessions for communities of color. Perhaps most controversially, the NHMC encouraged the FCC to approve the merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal in 2010. When asked to serve on a Hispanic advisory board, the NHMC and other Latina/o groups negotiated a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Comcast and NBC-U for diversity measures such as the creation of a Hispanic Advisory Council, increased Latina/o representation in the companies’ workforce, enhanced procurement diversity, and the expansion of Spanish-language broadcasting. Members of the NHMC subsequently held ex parte meetings with FCC commissioners in which they described the conditions of the MOU and asked, should the merger be approved, that enforcement of the MOU be written into its conditions. 12
A galvanizing moment for the NHMC took place in 1999 and 2000, when it banded together with other identity-based advocacy groups to secure memoranda of understanding with each of the Big Four (ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox) broadcast networks. Greg Braxton in the Los Angeles Times had reported that of the twenty-six new prime-time shows premiering across the major networks, not one had a person of color in a recurring role. 13 Working in a “grand coalition” with the NAACP, the Asian Pacific America Media Coalition, and Indians in Film and Television, among others, the NHMC secured MOUs that included hiring commitments, mentorship and training programs, commitments to work with minority-controlled vendors and production companies, and designations of in-house executives to promote diversity. 14 These MOUs were struck at a low point for minority advocacy work, as the federal courts and Congress by 1999 had eliminated or ruled unconstitutional all the rules adopted in the 1960s and 1970s to promote minority employment and ownership in broadcasting. Direct negotiations with the networks were, at this moment, the most immediate and advantageous way to bring more people of color into the television industry. It was this experience with the networks, according to Nogales, that shaped how the NHMC approached the NBC-Comcast merger. 15
The NHMC was certainly not the only civil rights or advocacy group to support the merger. The NAACP, National Urban League, and National Action Network similarly secured an MOU with the two companies for programming and hiring commitments, as did a consortium of Asian American civil rights groups. 16 The stance of these organizations put them at odds with public interest and consumer advocacy groups who had been allies, especially over media consolidation issues, including Free Press, whose then president and CEO Josh Silver labeled the merger a “comcastrophe,” fearing that with it would come an onslaught of greater levels of consolidation that would diminish diversity, raise prices, and gut network neutrality. 17 While the NHMC feels ambivalent about its role—Nogales referred to the NHMC’s action as something of a “cop-out”—its actions speak to a tension within its advocacy agenda. While philosophically the NHMC sees public interest harms in media concentration, it also, as part of its mission, has prioritized the inclusion of Latina/o perspectives and narratives in the media and Latina/o access to jobs within media industries. Its decision to support the merger thus speaks to the experience of the NHMC in unsuccessfully fighting mergers of the past, its assessment of the FCC’s inclination to approve, and its estimation that this was the best way to secure some services to its community. And to be sure, identity-based media advocacy groups historically have butted heads with public interest advocacy groups over the issue of media consolidation. While the latter have imagined substantial public interest harms in enabling fewer companies to own more media properties, the former at moments have been willing to sanction media mergers in exchange for concessions, especially hiring and programming commitments. 18 When the NHMC supported the NBC-Comcast merger, it followed in a longer history of civil rights organizations choosing to secure benefits for their communities at a moment when it seemed like the regulatory sphere was inhospitable to considerations of minority media rights.
As the shifting strategies of the NHMC illustrate, examining media policy advocacy as work illustrates that it is an ongoing process in which advocates continually learn and revise the optimal way to intervene in the policymaking process. Their campaigns hinge on and are informed by previous experiences with advocacy. Accordingly, media policy advocacy is a cumulative process in which advocacy groups both acquire the skill sets and resources necessary to intervene in policymaking while at the same time adjusting their expectations of what can be accomplished at particular historical junctures. Sometimes, as in the case of the NBC-Comcast merger, this experience leads advocacy groups to work with media companies and to use their standing as public interest representatives to sanction their interests. In other words, as the next section addresses, media advocacy work can constitute media work .