National Progressive Media: Who's Left? by Andrea Buffa When it comes to the question of why most progressive national media outlets reach such a small persentage of their potential audience, progressive activists are conflicted. On the one hand, we're exhilarated when we reach large numbers--whether it's the Independent Media Center website getting 1.5 million hits during the protests against the World Trade Organization, or the Chronicle running a rare cover story on an issue we care about. On the other hand, we insist that progressive media must hold firm to their progressive missions regardless of how large an audience they draw.
Nowhere has this conflict been sharper than in free speech activists' struggle against the right-wing assault on the Pacifica Radio Network. For the past several years, the Pacifica board of directors and national management have been forcing structural and programming changes in the network that they claim will increase audience size and diversity. Since many of these changes have led to a tempering of Pacifica's programming, community organizers and activists contend that the issue of audience size is a red herring--what Pacifica managers are really trying to do is eviscerate the politics of the only progressive radio network in the United States. Free speech activists call for Pacifica to pursue its mission, rather than pursuing high audience ratings.
At other progressive media institutions, editors and producers offer their own excuses for their small audiences: when there is no mass social justice movement, they say, there will not be a socially conscious mass media outlet. But those who are active in social justice movements often see a different problem. Among ourselves, we criticize the left press--from The Nation to Mother Jones to the Pacifica Network News--for being boring, academic, homogenous, and out of touch with social justice activists.
Rarely, though, do activists or independent media producers go beyond the mainstream measurements of audience size and financial success to evaluate our own progressive media institutions. As we enter 2001 with apparently growing progressive political movements--the anti-corporate globalization movement, the Green party, youth fighting against the prison industrial complex--we owe it to ourselves to grapple with the difficult question of whether or not our national progressive media are serving the needs of our movements and helping promote social change.
http://www.media-alliance.org/mediafile/20-1/wholeft.html