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Introduction: Teaching About and With Alternative Media
By Pepi Leistyna

It happened. A few minutes ago, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and his two fellow GOP commissioners approved new rules that will unleash a flood of media consolidation across America. The rules will further consolidate local media markets–taking away independent voices in cities already woefully short on local news and investigative journalism. We need 100,000 people to get Congress to reverse the FCC's rules right now.

Robert McChesney, Free Press Action Alert (12/18/07)

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC)¹ in the United States has been working vigilantly to pass legislation that makes way for a handful of massive conglomerates to further monopolize the use of public airwaves and other public resources. Gaining momentum during the Clinton administration's support for the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and propelled forward by more recent Republican efforts, this wave of power consolidation has reached such an extreme state that it now will allow a single corporate body of the likes of Rupert Murdoch–one of the richest men on the planet–to own and operate an unprecedented combination of newspaper companies and radio and television stations within a single media market.

This new policy initiative makes it virtually impossible for anyone, except elite private powers, to obtain a federal license and compete financially. Thus, the rhetoric about the virtues of deregulation–informed by the neoliberal philosophy that ending government-imposed market restraints will free the world through open competition–is really a concerted effort to regulate the media in the interests of big business.

As research has shown, media consolidation drowns out any diversity of news and programming. What's particularly frightening in this respect is that the United States, a country that prides itself as the apogee of democracy, with a Constitution that protects freedom of speech and a free press, continues to move towards the Orwellian dystopia of a single organization controlling the circulation of information in society.

The FCC currently finds itself at the center of controversy for refusing to participate when beckoned by members of Congress to investigate how the Bush administration has been working with AT&T, BellSouth, and Verizon to collect information on customers and illegally wiretap their phones. Commissioner Martin, appointed by President Bush, excused himself from intervening, saying that this is a classified program of the National Security Agency. Meanwhile, Republicans have been working overtime to get a bill on the house floor to grant immunity for these phone companies that have illegally aided in spying on Americans.

What should be clear from all this is that elite private powers and corporate bodies do not fool around when it comes to understanding and using media to shape public consciousness and political agency. They understand, as imperial powers have always understood, that controlling the flow of information in society is critical to maintaining hegemony by effectively circulating a vision of the world that suits their needs.

Take television, for example, when considering the awesome power that is wielded by a handful of organizations. In the United States, this medium is largely controlled by five massive transnationals: Time Warner (which among its many assets, owns and operates CNN, Turner Classic Movies, HBO, Court TV, TNT, TBS, and the Cartoon Network), Disney (owns ABC, ESPN, the Disney Channel, The History Channel, A&E, Biography, Military History, Lifetime, E, The Style Network, and Soapnet), News Corporation (owns Fox, National Geographic Channel, Direct TV, FX, and STAR), General Electric (owns NBC, Telemundo, Bravo, MSNBC, CNBC, Sci Fi, Paxon, the USA Network, and Sundance–which is a joint venture with CBS), and Viacom (owns CBS, MTV, Showtime, Comedy Central, BET, TV Land, VH1, CMT, Nick at Nite, Spike TV, and Nickelodeon).³ These corporations also own publishing houses, newspapers, record companies, movie studios, radio stations, public relations firms, advertising agencies, online services, and other powerful and influential pedagogical forces.

Such corporate bodies have time and again helped the White House march to war, have been known to use slanted sources like conservative think tanks in the majority of their news, and have historically played a significant role in squelching dissent and disappearing important issues.⁴ They have also worked to cut public funding for PBS and NPR so that these public resources are forced to rely on corporate sponsors and begging in order to financially sustain themselves. As strings come with such underwriting, both of these public media have moved ideologically to the right and have been placed under conservative leadership. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and Project Censored: The News that Didn't Make the News are good independent alternative resources for getting informed about such media scandals (www.fair.org/index.php; www.projectcensored.org).

But media consolidation and abuses of power are not just a domestic problem. Within the current stage of global techno-capitalism, examples abound. Just to name a few: Disney's cultural invasion worldwide and its global exploitation of labor, Yahoo working in cahoots with the Chinese government to locate and arrest dissidents, or the U.S. government attempting to influence critical media in the Middle East by trying to shut down Al Jazeera during the war.⁵

The good news is that this corporate-driven, neoliberal assault on the public is being challenged by an uprising whose diverse members also clearly understand that the circulation of information is pivotal in generating collective identity and mobilizing people to act against the tyranny of market forces and other oppressive institutions, policies, and practices.

This special issue on Teaching About and With Alternative Media is intended to offer insights on the kinds of education that not only prepare people to read the media more critically but also encourage them to access, make use of, and even create alternative sources of information that aid in civic mobilization to democratize global media systems, and to fight against social inequities and oppression whenever and wherever they arise.

A Revolution in Technology

Media have always played a pivotal role in activist efforts, certainly with the advent of printing, newspapers, telephones, radio, TV, and film. Activists have found a great deal of inspiration in alternative film such as that produced by Media Education Foundation, Icarus Films, and California Newsreel; in alternative TV such as Free Speech TV, Paper Tiger Television, Deep Dish TV, and Dyke TV; in alternative radio such as Free Radio Berkeley, Democracy Now, and Alternative Public Radio; in alternative journals and magazines such as Counterpunch, In These Times, Z Magazine, and Against the Current; in zines (for a list of radical zines, see www.factsheet5.org); and in alternative, politically motivated music such as that of Joan Baez, Fugazi, Public Enemy, Bob Marley and the Wailers, and Rage against the Machine.

But more recently the sociopolitical landscape has been radically changed by new digital, multimedia, and wireless technologies. These new interactive modes have generated a technopolitics that has brought about revolutionary changes in the art of consciousness raising and organizing.

The new wireless, multimedia palette includes notebook computers, PDA (personal digital assistant) devices, cell phones (with digital cameras built in), text messaging systems, pagers, global GPS positioning systems, and digital camcorders. While interactive technologies facilitate organizing and coordinating efforts, even in the immediacy of direct action to help groups maneuver instantaneously, the new recording devices play an important watchdog role of collecting evidence of abuses during manifestations, such as police brutality, and they make possible more diverse coverage of events, which are generally misrepresented by corporate media. Along with the aforementioned tools, and often in connection to them, the Internet has ushered in a revolution in social activism.⁶ Unlike their predecessors, who were able to realize social change with what in today's standards would be considered primitive technologies, activists these days are harnessing the power of email, blogs, podcasts, computer-faxes, listservs, hyperlinks, chat rooms, and downloadable street posters with tear-off instructions. Such cyber-tools are very effective in educating the public on critical social issues, forging and mobilizing communities, coordinating events locally, nationally, and internationally, and influencing policy initiatives both locally and globally. These tools are also effective in bridging the language divide with software that instantly translates messages.

New affordable technologies and the internet have made possible independent media sites. Making effective use of web casting, news outlets offer access to internet radio and video feeds, information and photo archives, and frequently updated news reports. There is an abundance of hyper-organization web sites that keep the public up to date on current events, that support real-life mobilization, and that connect activists to other like-minded organizations through hyper-links. In addition, there is an infinite flow of electronic information that is available through online zines, e-journals, and info-pages such as Alternet (www.alternet.org), Indymedia (www.indymedia.org/en/index.shtml), and Common Dreams (www.commondreams.org).

In addition, these innovative technologies have made possible the reinvention of many traditional methods of activism into electronic civil disobedience in the form of online petitions, boycotts, blockades, sit-ins, and other kinds of cyberprotest. What virtual agency also brings to the table is that people can participate from anywhere.7

In fact, perhaps the most revolutionary contribution that these technologies have made is that they have radically advanced social networking. The Internet allows people, with relative facility, to cross geographical, political, and professional boundaries. As cyberculture helps groups transcend traditional borders, develop cross-interest coalitions, and forge collaborative knowledge, it simultaneously opens the door to more inclusive and effective political struggle.

In the early 1990s, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, provided an invaluable model of using media in this postmodern age in order to connect to a global audience and to cross traditional borders and forge an online transnational movement.⁸ An isolated part of the world got connected with activist groups from around the planet that helped sustain the Zapatistas' movement for human and indigenous rights and thus avoided total invasion by the Mexican military. Playing a critical role in contemporary acts of mass mobilization, the Internet has made possible the largest coordinated international demonstration in history–the post 9/11, global anti-war protest that occurred as the United States was preparing its invasion of Iraq.⁹

The Zapatista and antiwar movements show us that cyberactivism is by no means enough. It needs to be connected to mobilization on the ground and to the kinds of public education that can help people take a stand.

Teaching How to Make and Take a Stand

Our education system, like our media system, is in grave trouble in large part because some of the same corporate bodies also have a vested interest in profiting from and privatizing public education. Information abounds through television, radio, the internet, magazines, and books, but the educational system–obsessed with standardization, high stakes assessment, and careerism–often does little to help students or teachers understand how media influence our ideas and values and inform public opinion and debate. This is particularly disturbing given that, as the Media Education Foundation informs us, each year the average American youth spends 1,023 hours watching TV and only 900 hours in school.

While the media reform movement spearheaded by alternative media organizations like Free Press (www.freepress.net) has begun to educate the general population about the political economy of the mass media–that is, its ownership and regulation–and challenge the FCC and Congress to democratize the airwaves and new technologies, other efforts are already afoot to create alternatives to offset the years of corporate media indoctrination to which we have grown accustomed. These alternative media work in relatively autonomous zones as they do not depend on corporate sponsors.

The critical question is: How do we make learning about democratizing the current media system and making effective use of alternative media an everyday part of public schooling? Educators around the world are engaged in this very process. To benefit from their efforts, it is important to explore ways to teach the politics of media ownership, the role of technology in using alternative media in the classroom, what political or alternative media web sites students use, examples of student activism organized and managed through the Internet, how to teach students to produce alternative media, and new educational venues for discovering, discussing, and promoting media reform.

It is important to note that teaching and learning do not just happen in the formal classroom. Tami Gold and Gerardo Renique, in their article, "A Rainbow in the Midst of a Hurricane: Alternative Media and the Popular Struggle in Oaxaca, Mexico," expand the idea of pedagogy by addressing how other social spaces like houses of faith, living rooms, community centers, and town squares can be connected using alternative technologies. The authors explore how a new generation of media makers during the summer of 2006 in Oaxaca, Mexico used alternative media as an integral part of a social justice movement.

Numerous interactive sites can be used for consciousness raising and political action such as Facebook, You Tube, Xanga, and MySpace.¹⁰ Leandra Preston's contribution to this special issue, "A Space of Our Own: MySpace and Feminist Activism in the Classroom," takes up how service learning can be connected to social networking sites like MySpace and used in the formal classroom to foster learning and critical thinking. She demonstrates how students can be encouraged to produce alternative media that have a radical educational impact. As she notes: "Assignments that ask students to engage in cultural production within (and outside of) their own spaces can function as powerful forms of political activism while meeting course goals and learning objectives."

A key component of any activist effort to teach with and about alternative media should be to encourage the widespread development of critical media literacy, that is, the ability to read the values and beliefs embedded in the knowledge that is circulated throughout society so as to be able to defend ourselves from propaganda and participate in its eradication. It's important to look critically at the stories these corporate-managed media script and ask: Whose interests are served by such representations, and what alternative visions of the world are available to the public? Pepi Leistyna and Debra Mollen, in their contribution to this special issue, "Teaching Social Class through Alternative Media and by Dialoging across Disciplines and Boundaries," talk about the production of the documentary film Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class and how this educational tool can be used to raise consciousness about the corporate media's assault on America's workforce. Leistyna and Mollen also point out that educators now have access to a plethora of interactive software such as IMs, MMS, groups, Wikis, and virtual classrooms like Wimba that allow for creating more dialogical and interactive learning environments that transcend geographical and disciplinary boundaries.

Teaching with and about alternative media is particularly important in this age of media consolidation made possible by the synergy that exists between the government and corporations. In order to confront this colossal abuse of power, our efforts here are to radicalize public education by helping to develop a critical media component that should become an indispensable part of learning and teaching. This cluster not only offers examples of people doing such work, but also provides a list of web resources, suggested readings, and alternative journals for those educators looking for tools to expand their efforts. We hope that the focus on this theme will provide some stepping stones for developing your own pedagogical ways to help students keep a critical eye on the media, to become the media, and to use this cultural force to democratize society and bring about equity and justice.

Not all of these important efforts are made possible by elaborate technological advancements. Using art as an alternative media has long been an effective way to contest abuses of power. Rejecting the binarism between artistic expression and social responsibility and borrowing aspects of the carnivalesque approach to politics that have been around since the Middle Ages, contemporary activists have made effective use of street theater, puppets, painting, music, and dance. A celebration of the life work of artist and activist Liz Powell, a Radical Teacher board member who recently passed away, is a very special part of this cluster on teaching with and about alternative media. While we are greatly saddened by Liz's passing, and we miss her dearly, we continue to be mobilized and radicalized by her energy, creativity, and spirit to work towards a more just world.

Endnotes

¹The FCC is a U.S. government agency that was created as part of the Communications Act of 1934. It is granted power by Congress to regulate all non-Federal Government use of the radio and television broadcasting, as well as all interstate and international telecommunications that either begin or end in the United States.

²Like his predecessor Michael Powell (son of Colin Powell), Commissioner Martin went about pursuing the policy initiative regardless of the fact that the general public is widely against this move and that 26 senators from both parties sent a letter to the FCC Chairman promising "to revoke and nullify the proposed rule" if the FCC voted in favor of it.

³Radio in the United States is in a similar state of affairs given that the corporate giant Clear Channel controls a great deal of the public airwaves.

⁴They also work to control what we hear, as is evident in the recent Payola scandal where corporations paid radio stations to play their licensed artistes.

⁵Something that deserves serious recognition but is beyond the scope of this particular special issue is how to use alternative media under totalitarian regimes like China where the risks and reprisals are extreme. How are subversive media used in many of the countries that are supposedly our allies in the "war on terror" — countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Pakistan, which have no free press?

⁶The impact of the Internet has led to the institutionalized field of Internet Studies, with the typical accompaniments of journals and conferences.

⁷In addition to informing and mobilizing groups, the Internet has also expanded the terrain of culture jamming with laser-projected messaging, the creation of subversive web sites (such as those generated by the Yes Men (www.theyesmen.org), and Google bombs that expose and ridicule abusive individuals and corporations. The group the Electronic Disturbance Theater, with its focus on electronic civil disobedience (e.g., www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/ecd.html), embodies this new electronic ethos. Its members, who have combined theory and politics with performance art, and computerized resistance with mass decentered electronic direct action, have, for example, developed webjamming tools to flood and block corporate and supranational organization websites. It's also important to note here that there's a long history of electronic hacking that has been critically appropriated by this new generation of hacktivists. Hacktivism–a combination of grassroots political protest and computer hacking–has assumed the earlier waves' electronic populist and anticorporate values, and has become a powerful force in the globalization debate.

⁸The Chiapas Media Project is a fine example of the power of alternative media and the mobilization of youth (www.chiapasmediaproject.org).

⁹While some theorists see the Internet as working within the model of the public sphere–as a communication medium that is decentered and nonhierarchical– a key issue that needs to be confronted pertains to the realities of the digital divide. How is it possible to link all groups both locally and globally when computer technologies, software, and technological literacy are so unequally distributed, especially in poor communities and between the North and the South? Part of this analysis should include exploring the impact of the Open Source Movement, which offers free software and helps people get "connected." Cultural workers need to investigate why many well-established NGOs refuse to support the dissemination of open source social network technologies. We should also pay close attention to how the race to commercialize the Net is impacting politics–both real and virtual. As part of this effort, a great deal more investigation is necessary into the corporate and government bodies currently trying to colonize cyberspace. This is a particularly urgent mission in a post-9/11 world where the threat of "terrorism" is being used as the pretext for curbing online rights, privacy, and access to information. What victories have been won by groups are fighting against this repression–groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org), the Center for Democracy and Technology (www.cdt.org), and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (www.cpsr.org)?

¹⁰Video games are also an interesting form of interactive media that can reinforce or challenge existing oppressive ideologies around identity construction.