ABSTRACT
In this book’s Introduction we argued that mass media in the Anglo-American heartland are plagued by a chronic democratic deficit, to which media activism can be read as a critical response. The deficit is multifaceted; it derives not only from media’s failures in constituting a democratic public sphere, in sustaining healthy communities and political cultures, and in stimulating diversity in public communication, but also from media’s complicity in maintaining inequality, in diminishing the public commons of knowledge and in excluding the public from shaping the mandates of the cultural industries. In subsequent chapters, we detailed a range of media activist campaigns and projects as diverse as the component parts of the democratic deficit. Activists have taken up the struggle to democratize public communication in a great range of contexts that are coextensive with the vast terrain of the media field itself; they have framed their political projects in different ways and have adopted a variety of strategies and of organizational forms. The upshot is a fledgling and inchoate, yet rich, politics of communication, directed both at the institutions of corporate capitalism and at civil societies and everyday worlds.
