ABSTRACT
This chapter and the next one distil many of the insights that media activists based mainly in the United States, United Kingdom and Canada shared with us in a series of nearly 100 in-depth interviews conducted between 1998 and 2004. These conversations offer practitioners’ views of the problems and the promise of democratizing public communication. In this chapter, we focus on the problems: the obstacles and challenges that in many respects have consigned democratic media activism to the margins in the wider political field – the factors that activists identify as inhibiting the successful democratization of the media system, or more immediately, popular mobilization towards that goal. In the next chapter, we strike a more optimistic note, exploring sources and resources, including viable strategies and coalitions, for moving media democratization from the margins to the centre of political contention.
