Introduction to the Media Guide

From Media for Social Change: A Resource Guide for Community Groups (Revised edition, 1986), published by the Community Forum on Shared Responsibility, Toronto.

Introduction

We prepared this kit as an aid for community groups in the Toronto area, hoping that it will help them obtain greater access to mainstream media or to existing alternative media, or even to create their own media.

The Community Forum on Shared Responsibility makes the kit available believing that there is value in popular education the notion that ordinary people in the community have skills and stories worthy of sharing with other people, and that all of us can learn from each other.

Like media critic Barrie Zwicker, we note a tendency to talk about the media abstractly. "It's not entirely misleading to say each of us is a medium a walking, talking transmitter of information," says Zwicker, the founder of the media directory Sources. "People are media. This is an empowering notion. It's important not to give away all the power to the commercial media."(1)

Popular educators tell us that social change begins with reflection on a personal experience of oppression, or identification with someone else's experience of oppression.

Rarely is someone persuaded adopt a radically different approach to issues by something they have been told or that they have read. When embarking on a media project, it is important to realize that the information you are conveying is most likely to be used by people who are already in essential agreement with you, and that what you are doing is adding to their knowledge and empowering them to take further action.

Our bias then is towards the smaller groups, the ones without much money and little access to mass media, the ones which probably don't want much to do with commercial media anyway, but which do want their message to reach more people.

To engage in a media project, however, means confronting a few problems. One of these has to do with the nature of news.

A standard definition of news comes from U.S. writer Mitchell V. Charnley: "News is the timely report of facts or opinion that hold interest or importance, or both, for a considerable number of people."(2)

But the words of Loren Lind, a former Globe and Mail reporter who teaches journalism at Ryerson, remind us that news is not as simple as it seems: "Like the Eaton Centre, news has about six levels above ground and four below ground, each with hazards all its own. So what seems very simple on the surface all flash and glamour turns out to be full of funny sales clerks and strange exits."

The standard working definition for news comes from John Bogart, a city editor at the New York Sun in the 1880s: "When a dog bites a man, that is not news. But when a man bites a dog, that is news."

In other words, news is an unusual occurrence, an exception to the general state of affairs. But in focusing on the immediate and the unusual, news cannot always help us understand an event. News tends to ignore the background to events, the relationships and currents in the flow of history.

Moreover, news reporting carries with it reporters' and editors' ways of seeing events. While members of the Canadian news media claim objectivity, they tend to show their pro-business, middle-class biases when they attempt to deal with issues like poverty, the third world and critiques of our socio-economic system.

Another factor is that what merits coverage is partly determined by the structures of the capitalist system. Newspaper business and social pages are filled day after day after day with accounts of the world of the well-to-do.

Poverty, on the other hand involving the lives of more than five million poor Canadians is not covered adequately. It is obvious that Canadian newspapers have far more writers who are knowledgeable about the oil and gas industries and the stock market than they have writers who are knowledgeable about social services (or the lack of them).

A 1970 Senate Committee on the Mass Media concluded that the economics of advertising ultimately determined all other decisions basic to the operation of a newspaper or broadcasting station. (Advertising makes up 65 per cent of the gross income of the newspaper publishing industry and 93 per cent of gross revenue for private broadcasting).

An advertising executive told the senators how advertising affects media coverage of the poor: "The measure of editorial acceptability becomes... 'Will it interest the affluent?' We don't have mass media, we have class media - media for upper and middle classes. The poor, the young the old, the natives, the blacks are virtually ignored. It is as if they do not exist."

Our media, however, are part of the social fabric, reflecting the values and levels of power of our society. That poor people have no voice within our media reflects an attitude of our affluent society. It is likely that most Canadians still regard the poor as authors of their own misfortune. That the poor are poor because of circumstance over which they have no control may be still be too much for most Canadians to face. It is important for community groups or their media representative to understand the nature of the news if they want to interact with existing mainstream of existing media, or to create their own media. The article by Max Allen which follows this introduction encourages community groups to avoid the mainstream media and to work with alternative media.Appendix A provides a short bibliography on the problems of mass communications.The rest of the book will help you select and/or create media which are appropriate for your group or project, whether it be through print, graphics, photography slide/ tape, video, film, radio or television.

This book is a revised version of a two-volume kit published in 1983 by the Community Forum on Shared Responsibility. Much or the original research (done by Lois Marsh) and writing (by Barbara Walsh) is still valid today and is reproduced here. Resources, facts and contracts have been checked and updated by Teresa Guerriero and Jim Hodgson.

We hope this volume will be a valuable addition to the growth of alternative media approaches.
As the news media became a massive industry during this century, it has faced a great deal of controversy. The themes of twentieth century criticism, in general, have been these:

1. The media have wielded enormous power for their own ends. The owners have propagated their own opinions, especially in matters of politics and economics, at the expense of opposing views

2.The media have been subservient to big business and at times let advertisers control editorial policies and editorial content.

3. Because the media are controlled by one socio-economic class, loosely the” business class, “ access to the industry is difficult for the newcomer; therefore, the free and open market is endangered.

4. Media do not reflect the diversity of voices in our society too much attention is paid to the affluent at the expense of the poor.

5. The media have resisted social change and have frequently been identified as instruments of social control.

6. The media have often paid more attention to the superficial and sensational than to the significant in its coverage of current happenings, and their entertainment has often been lacking in substance.

7. The media have endangered public morals.

8 The media have upheld tradition notions of public morality.

9.The media invade the privacy of individuals without just cause.

(CX5005)

Related Resources:

Sources - The directory which connects organizations with messages to get out to journalists looking for spokespeople and experts on the issues they are covering. Both the online and print versions of Sources are widely used by reporters, editors, producers and freelancers working on stories.

HotLink.ca - Web site featuring practical articles about media relations and public relations.

Media Names & Numbers - Print and online directory with listings and contact information for all print and online media in Canada. Also available as a database and mailing list.

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