Media Activism

Media activism can be defined as two related kinds of activity. One creates media that challenge the dominant culture, structure, or ruling class of a society. The other advocates changes within that society intended to preserve or open up space for such media. Often media activism encompasses both these activities in the same historical moment; or it quickly moves between the two modes of action.

Perhaps the most famous example of such activism predates the establishment of the United States. In 1732 New York newspaper printer John Peter Zenger published a provocative essay accusing the British colony's governor of corruption. When said governor indicted and jailed Zenger for libel, a jury ruled that no libel had been committed because Zenger had printed the truth. The Zenger case both advocated and paved the way for independent media.

The years after the American Revolution saw the emergence of a popular press that often identified with the artisan and emerging working class. But the rise of the telegraph in the mid-19th century allowed cartels to monopolize the production and distribution of news. Government hearings held in the 1870s revealed that Western Union blocked the sending of news reports critical of the company. Activists now called the telegraph a glorious invention.

In response, leaders associated with the single tax, Grange, labor, and populist movements of this period called for the government either to take control of the nation's telegraph lines or to establish a government-chartered competitor to Western Union. The years from the Civil War through 1900 saw Congress consider more than 70 laws that would enact some variation of these proposals. But with the collapse of farm populism after the election of 1896, this ferment subsided.

The introduction of wireless telegraphy in the late 1890s saw the media activist baton taken up by an unexpected class of runners: adolescent boys who built their own elaborate wireless Morse code transmission networks across the United States. First adored by the popular press and then blamed for telegraph miscommunications during the Titanic disaster of 1912, these early broadcasters organized to resist the Radio Act of that year, which relegated their activities to less desirable frequency signals and forced them to apply to the government for licenses. Their moment eclipsed when Congress nationalized telegraph transmission during World War I.

As broadcast radio became popular in the 1920s, commercial radio became equally unpopular among middle-class media reformers. When the Federal Radio Commission, established in 1927, began to favor commercial over early community radio stations for licenses, a critical mass of educators, labor leaders, clergy, and civil libertarians organized a resistance movement. Led by a Paulist priest from New York City whose station had recently lost a frequency hearing to a CBS affiliate, in 1934 they proposed that the new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reserve 25% of the AM broadcast spectrum for nonprofit entities. The proposal failed to pass the U.S. Senate by one vote. But in 1940, activists won a victory on the fledgling FM spectrum when the FCC set aside the five lowest channels on the frequency range for educational stations.

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