19.3: Media Advocacy as Media Work
-
- Last updated
- Save as PDF
- Allison Perlman
- University of California Press
Media advocacy has long been concerned with shaping the parameters of what media production can be and how it can be profitable. Battles over, for example, media ownership limits, equal employment rules, children’s television requirements, and indecency regulations are efforts to influence the labor conditions of media companies, the composition of their workforce, and the cultural products they make. While not engaged directly in the creative labor of media production, media advocacy groups frequently have intervened in the economic and cultural logics of production. In addition, media advocacy groups have contributed their labor to media producers. Frequently this work has been advisory—the reading of scripts, for example, to ensure that the politics of representation within them are not demeaning or harmful—and accordingly, it has been part of the mission especially of identity-based advocacy groups. 19 Work on behalf of media companies has more recently extended for some advocacy groups to their policy work, as they have supported positions that, to their critics, do the bidding of media companies at the expense of the communities they ostensibly represent. Critics of the NHMC’s support for the NBC-Comcast merger have read its actions in this light.
This recent synergy of interests in the policy sphere between advocacy groups and media companies is inseparable from the increased financial support advocacy groups receive from media corporations. Fund-raising, as Gonzalez has put it, is the “dirty skeleton in the closet” of advocacy work. 20 While many media advocacy groups at first rely on volunteer labor, over time they require a sustained staff who can pursue both long-term and short-term objectives. Thus sustained media advocacy requires sustained access to financial support. Early media advocacy groups were funded by a combination of donations and grants from philanthropic foundations. Action for Children’s Television (ACT), for example, founded in 1969 to combat commercialism in and raise the quality of children’s programming, was supported by individual membership fees, higher donations from “benefactors,” and grants from the Ford Foundation and the Markle Foundation. 21 Ford additionally was the primary funder of educational telecasters in the fifteen years leading up to the passage of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, and as Jefferson Pooley has demonstrated, Ford from 1998 onward has been one of the biggest benefactors of the media reform movement. 22
While grants from philanthropic organizations and individual donations continue to provide substantial support for media advocacy work, they are either inaccessible or inadequate for many organizations. The NHMC, when it formed, relied on the volunteer labor of its members. In the 1990s, it formalized as an organization, secured its 501(c)(3) status as a nonprofit organization, and expanded the scope of its activities. While it initially had been difficult to attract foundation support, the NHMC in the 2000s secured a Ford Foundation grant to support its policy advocacy. Both Ford and the Media and Democracy Fund continue to support the NHMC, the latter also operating as an important advocate for the NHMC’s work with other potential funders. 23 Professional and personal networks can be pivotal for media advocacy groups, often making the difference between being visible or invisible to potential funders, regardless of the significance of the organization’s advocacy commitments or its credibility with the community it represents.
While foundation support has been crucial, it also can be insufficient. Thus a number of advocacy groups rely on corporate donations and sponsorship. The NHMC itself receives financial support from media companies like Univision, Entravision, Disney/ABC, and Comcast/NBC-Universal. This funding enables the NHMC’s writers’ program, a screenwriting workshop that prepares Latina/o writers for writing careers in the television industry, and its pitch program, which trains writers to package their ideas as “pitches” and connects them to executives at broadcast and cable networks. The NHMC’s goals with these programs—to bring more Latinas/os into above-the-line creative positions in television—lines up well with the interests of media companies seeking not only potential new series but strategic hires that can underline their dedication to diversity. 24
The NHMC also raises money through annual events that fuse the organization’s fund-raising with its mission to promote Latina/o talent and to honor allies and advocates for Latina/o rights. These include an annual gala held in Beverly Hills to honor Latina/o performers; an annual conference that brings together industry personnel, artists, and activists in substantive conversation about contemporary media practices and Latina/o creators and publics; a local impact awards luncheon that honors local talent in the Los Angeles area; and an impact awards reception in Washington, DC, to recognize individuals in the policymaking and legislative sphere who have championed issues central to the NHMC mission. To organize these events, the NHMC has two staff members who spend half their time on fund-raising, along with one dedicated intern to support fund-raising, out of a total staff of six full-time and two part-time employees. 25
With these activities, the NHMC operates a sort of para-industry, which trains creative talent and honors the accomplishments of media workers. In return, they strengthen the NHMC’s identity as a Latina/o media advocacy organization and its personal ties with media professionals. Yet they also link the NHMC to companies whose policy objectives often contrast with its own. As both Gonzalez and Nogales insist, NHMC’s record should quell concerns that it is a shill to the companies that help fund its work, as the NHMC has routinely taken positions contrary to their interests. The organization has been a consistent advocate of network neutrality, has filed comments or signed onto comments filed by other public interest groups in support of retaining current media ownership restrictions, and has aggressively opposed some proposed media mergers that it has seen as harmful to its community.
In addition, the NHMC has sought to distance itself from other civil rights organizations that have similarly accepted corporate monies but whose integrity allegedly has been compromised for it. As Juan González and Joseph Torres have argued, civil rights stalwarts like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the League of Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which “used to rail against the injustices of the white media,” now often advocate for policies that support media and telecommunications companies at the expense of the communities they represent. 26 For González and Torres, this turn constitutes a “startling and tragic” setback for minority media rights and is directly tied to the financial support provided to these organizations by media corporations. 27
Most notably, in June 2013, David Honig and his advocacy group, the Minority Media Telecommunications Council (MMTC), came under attack as being under the sway of their corporate donors. 28 Honig is a long-standing media advocacy professional, who, prior to forming the MMTC, had worked for the NAACP on a range of minority media rights campaigns. Honig’s longtime experience as an advocate for minority media rights put him in strong standing to advise civil rights groups on media policy issues. And so when the MMTC—along with the NAACP, LULAC, and others—supported diminished media ownership restrictions, opposed network neutrality, and backed media mergers, other media advocates cast suspicion on the integrity of the MMTC’s position and the influence of corporate donations in its decision making.
The MMTC’s about-face on media ownership issues is of especial concern. When the FCC voted in 2003 and 2004 to diminish its existing ownership restrictions, it faced an enormous public backlash and had its rules remanded by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals for procedural violations and failure to consider how the changes would affect female and minority ownership of broadcast stations. 29 When, in 2010, the FCC voted to repeal its newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership rule, the Third Circuit once again remanded the rule to the FCC and admonished it for not considering the change’s impact on female and minority ownership of broadcast stations. 30 In each review, as the FCC has asked for comments on its ownership rules, the NHMC, often in collaboration with other advocacy groups, has drawn on the concern over levels of minority ownership to persuade the commission not to diminish or repeal existing regulations. Thus for one of the leading civil rights–based media advocacy groups to argue that media consolidation poses no harm to communities of color, and that the loosening of ownership restrictions could benefit them, is a tremendous opportunity for advocates of deregulation and the media companies who would benefit from it, and a substantial obstacle to public interest advocates who fear the impact of consolidation on the diversity and quality of the media.
The MMTC’s opposition to network neutrality has similarly raised the ire of advocacy groups and elicited accusations that the MMTC and the civil rights organizations with which it works have forsaken a public interest agenda for a corporate agenda. Opposition by the MMTC, NAACP, LULAC, and National Urban League to network neutrality rules indeed echoes the claims of media companies that open Internet provisions would harm communities of color by reducing jobs and inhibiting the expansion of broadband into underserved communities. James Rucker, cofounder of ColorofChange.org, has characterized this advocacy as “the deployment of our civil rights organizations in support of a corporate agenda,” one facilitated by the heavy financial support provided by telecommunications companies to these groups. 31 Honig has responded to these charges by reasserting that his organization and other civil rights groups are centrally committed to protecting communities of color, accusing his “netroots” critics of paternalism toward communities of color that in fact misunderstands their interests. 32
In 2013, Nogales publicly admonished Honig and the actions of the MMTC, accusing Honig of having become “too chummy with the industry.” Nogales also resigned his position on the MMTC’s board because of concerns over the organization’s ties to media corporations. 33 In this, Nogales joined a chorus of media advocacy group leaders who sought to delegitimize the MMTC as an advocate of the public interest broadly, and of the civil rights community specifically, on media regulation issues. In the process, Nogales was able to distance the NHMC from damning accusations that advocacy groups who accept corporate monies become corporate mouthpieces rather than watchdogs or opponents. Such a move was necessary for the NHMC to retain its credibility with its own community and with fellow advocacy practitioners.
Thus part of the current practice of media advocacy groups is to police what counts as an acceptable relationship with a media company and what constitutes advocacy capture, the process by which public interest groups adopt the priorities of their funders over those of their communities; it is to distinguish the kinds of media work that are acceptable forms of media advocacy work. Significantly, it is the ongoing, cumulative nature of media advocacy work that has rendered the recent actions of the MMTC, NAACP, and LULAC so threatening to other advocacy groups and their allies. The power of these groups’ positions on media ownership and network neutrality hails from their clout as long-standing media advocates for communities of color and their past record of reform campaigns to ensure that the media meet the needs of a multiracial public. This work is what makes them credible advocates to policymakers, desirable allies for media and telecommunications companies, and heartbreaking adversaries to other media advocacy groups.