Beyond Prime Time Activism

Communication Activism and Social Change

Charlotte Ryan, Karen Jeffreys

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351721653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Sostegno politico

In this accessible introduction to communication activism, organizer Karen Jeffreys and sociologist Charlotte Ryan draw on more than two decades of ongoing collaboration, using the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless (RICH) as a case study.

The book examines a community with shared values, decision-making, and conflict resolution procedures, tracking its organizing strategy and matched communication plan. The authors first describe a communication campaign during the welfare reform battles (1990–1995) in which they began to practice communication activism. In ongoing work with two organizations over the next two decades, they distil a model of communication activism that draws directly from vibrant traditions of empowerment communication in U.S. social movements and movements from the Global South.

Beyond Prime Time Activism provides students and researchers with an invaluable look at contemporary activism practices and with practical tools tried and tested in two decades of social movement engagement. This book is ideal for anyone participating in social change movements or studying how they navigate communication and media inequalities.

Part I
Models

At present, community-based organizations and groups representing marginalized communities—poor and working-poor families, communities of color, immigrants, elders, and others—routinely find their issues and perspectives sidelined in public debates. The same holds true for coverage of social justice movements. Here we explore whether and how communication activism can strengthen civil society campaigns to build a more equitable world.

Part I provides a conceptual framework for this task. We review communication models common in the Global North, where social movements are weak and corporate media have significant control over communication systems and policies. We then explore contributions from Global South and North movements that might strengthen communication activist work.

Chapter 1, Why It Takes a Social Movement to Raise an Issue, describes the Global North context in which U.S. communication activists operate. To illustrate the hostile climate faced by marginalized constituencies, the chapter follows the welfare rights group Coalition for Basic Human Needs (CBHN) in its attempts to change public opinion vis-à-vis welfare reform in the early 1990s. Coordinated by Karen, CBHN’s 1996 public awareness campaign culminated just before digital communication became widespread. Spoiler alert: CBHN activists lost but learned lessons that helped subsequent campaigns and organizations.

Chapter 2, Public Communication Models, introduces and evaluates two public interest communication models commonly used in Global North communication—social marketing and media advocacy—and provides exemplars of each. The chapter summarizes the two models’ contributions and limitations before turning to Chapter 3 and social movement communication models.

Chapter 3, Communication Activism for Social Change, describes a social movement/empowerment communication model that extends the social marketing and media advocacy models by integrating Global South approaches into a Global North context. To illustrate the model, the chapter follows a campaign by the Rhode Island Coalition for the Homeless (RICH) to pass a Homeless Bill of Rights. The final reflection lists strategic communication practices presented in more detail in Part II: forming a learning community, strategizing, and messaging. Part III focuses on practices that help social movement organizations learn from experiences and store that learning.

1
Why It Takes a Social Movement to Raise an Issue

Overview

Mass media systems embody the promises and problems of their times. As such, constituencies marginalized in other social arenas (politics, economics) tend to be marginalized in communication arenas as well. This is a matter of probabilities, not absolutes; mass media, including social media, present an uneven playing field, more accessible to some social players and viewpoints than to others.

To illustrate Global North communication disparities, Chapter 1 describes Karen and Charlotte’s first joint foray into national communication activism. In 1996, Congress, with support from the Clinton administration, passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation (Welfare Reform) Act, a sweeping welfare reform designed to appease conservative critics of the 1960s War on Poverty programs. In the lead-up to the congressional vote, Karen, working with the Coalition for Basic Human Needs (CBHN), and Charlotte, working with the Media Research Action Project (MRAP), tried to challenge media portrayals of poor families receiving public assistance. Communication inequalities permeated this campaign, and the groups involved failed to change the public discourse. That said, Karen and Charlotte learned core lessons about communication activism and noted unresolved challenges, setting the agenda for this book.

Let’s review the labor organizer’s relational approach to initiating political conversations:

I sit next to them and I put my hands around their heart… I listen as they tell me about their lives. We sort the problems, and as we talk, the relation between their problems and everyone’s problems becomes clear.

This vignette captures the starting point of an empowerment approach to communication activism. In this approach, the organizer opens a dialog that surfaces private troubles in a personal history. Through dialog, the parties redefine these previously private troubles as shared social conditions. In so doing, the dialog builds a “we,” an emerging community that shares not only a grievance but also an understanding of that grievance and its roots, context, and role in maintaining social relations. Individuals who previously perceived their troubles as private or as their sole individual responsibility (student debt, homelessness) begin to express themselves collectively. A case in point is the Occupy Movement (Kavada, 2015), called Precarios in Italy (Mattoni, 201 6) and Indignados in Spain (Romanos, 2014).

As similar conversations occur and accrue (Hardt, 2009), social movements can emerge. Movements are not the same as campaigns or platforms. The movement may (over time) build programmatic platforms, but a platform does not a movement make; building a movement requires more than a shared program. Movements’ transformative power depends on the establishment of a group sharing core values, vision, and practices that advance that vision through shared actions and continuous inquiry—recurring dialog, action, and reflection. While here we call this a learning community,¹ Latin American activists often call it a comunidad de base, and the Black Liberation tradition would call it the beloved community.

Gathering to discuss social problems can be transformative in and of itself: “Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may follow” (Arendt, 1969, p. 52). In the context of a movement, participants identify a shared grievance or grievances that many see as unfair. But not all join movements because of a shared experience of inequality; others join movements because their worldview, ethics, or values make the unfair treatment of others unacceptable.

From here, the movement’s participants imagine a more equitable world and then build relationships that allow them to develop a strategy—a well-considered plan for acting in concert to advance their vision. To reach others directly affected and potential allies—and to shift the public will—typically involves navigating and/or challenging communication disparities to reach all relevant audiences. This is the practical work we will describe at length in Part II.

Broadly conceived, communication activists work to expand public visibility for their social agenda via all communication venues that reach their desired audiences. Since communication arenas themselves are not level playing fields, communication activists must identify and address communication disparities as part of their strategic plan to challenge broader social disparities. This work is far easier said than done. To illustrate the challenges, this chapter describes one of Karen’s early efforts to integrate communication activism into grassroots organizing. Despite creative, skilled communication work by many, the campaign to shift the public will vis-à-vis welfare programs failed. Our “failure,” however, taught those involved much about how to build communication power, and about how to learn.

There Is Always a History

In the mid-1980s, social movement scholar William Gamson started a weekly breakfast seminar exploring how movements and media institutions interact. From this seminar, Gamson, graduate students, and associated scholars² formed the Media Research Action Project (MRAP). The group’s first formal mission statement explained that participants sought to “identify and challenge barriers to democratic communication; to develop proactive messages and strategies; and to build ongoing communication capacity”³ (MRAP, 1996). MRAP members did not use the phrase “engaged scholarship” but, in that spirit, strived to make academic knowledge, skills, and resources available to underrepresented and misrepresented communities (see www.mrap.info).

Prime Time Activism (Ryan, 1991) reflects our work during that period. In conversation with labor and community organizers, the book explored how U.S. civil rights, labor, anti-intervention, women’s, and gay liberation movements were addressing the growing power of corporate-controlled mass media. The publication of Prime Time Activism triggered a deluge of requests for MRAP’s help from activist groups. In response, Charlotte and others at MRAP began to offer workshops to community organizations and social movement groups. What happened next was humbling.

The Mediated War on the Poor

It was 1994. In the wake of a recession, U.S. president Bill Clinton launched a campaign to “end welfare as we know it” (Clinton, 1992). But even before Congress passed Clinton’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation (Welfare Reform) Act in 1996, state-level human service cuts deepened economic inequalities. As part of organizing to reverse state-level cuts, economic justice groups organized to counter the largely negative portrayals of welfare mothers dominating mainstream media and public debates. MRAP started to get calls for workshops and communication planning.

In MRAP’s home state, Massachusetts, welfare rights organization Coalition for Basic Human Needs (CBHN) was one of the concerned groups seeking to shift the public image of welfare. The state’s legislators previously supported social welfare programs, and the press had been sympathetic. Now, however, U.S. public opinion and media coverage suggested growing hostility toward welfare recipients.⁴ CBHN wanted to counter that shift.

To do so, the coalition organized messaging workshops to help its members, largely women on welfare, initiate conversations with reporters. At a statewide retreat, members prepared messages they wanted to transmit; many messages flagged the never-ending obstacles faced by poor mothers and called for shrinking the widening gap between rich and poor. After the workshop, groups began to reach out to local media.

One North Shore welfare mothers’ group met with a reporter to propose a feature article on the failure of welfare to address the roots of poverty. The reporter was initially interested but called later to say that her editor had rejected the idea. He wanted tear-jerking personal stories, not a critique of welfare programs.

Other CBHN members had, in fact, offered the desired personal stories but met similar resistance to messages about economic inequalities as rooted in social conditions (as opposed to being rooted in laziness). One CBHN member gave this account:

The reporter kept asking how hard I was trying to get a job. I told her what had happened to me—a battering spouse, payless pay days at the daycare center where I worked—and then she’d say, “Oh, but after that you got a job.” “No,” I’d say. “Then, something else happened. My kid got sick. I couldn’t risk being without health insurance.” “Oh, … but, then, you got a job, right?” she asked. The reporter went on and on, like a broken record.

(Ryan, 1996, p. 34)

A Gulf War veteran described being homeless on welfare, unable to find either a job or affordable housing. He’d written to his local daily paper to say that he felt betrayed by his country. The letter wasn’t published.

Meanwhile, personal stories demonizing welfare recipients abounded. Massachusetts’s leading daily, the Boston Globe, published a tightly researched investigative series documenting a sensational case of welfare abuse. Latina welfare mother Clar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Models
• PART II Practices
• PART III Sustaining Communication Activism
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: Communication Assessment Tool
• Appendix B: Strategic Communication Planning Worksheet
• Appendix C: Message Development Worksheet
• Index