From Imagining the (Un)thinkable

In 2007, the Funding Exchange Media Justice Fund published a journal, entitled “Imagining the (Un)thinkable” which as the website explains:

“This collection of essays pushes the boundaries of current research on media policy and provides critical information on the potential power of the internet, radio, and community-access TV to enhance social justice movements. Written from perspectives of people of color, low-income people, women and other marginalized communities, the report offers useful tools and strategies for media justice advocates.”

In their chapter on “Owning the Airwaves through Community-Access TV,” authors Lyell Davies and Betty Yu write about how community access TV centers can support social justice organizations through “effective outreach and assistance” to ensure that marginalized communities, such as “LGBTQ, low-income, immigrant, youth, differently-abled, or communities of color,” are not excluded from the “first-come-first-serve” model of community access television.

Through this process, community access TV centers - as “community media centers” - can help connect social justice organizations to the “media multi-purposing” possibilities that Internet distribution tools, like blogs and podcasts, provide in helping them reach “multiple audiences in multiple ways” about their work in the community:

“To meet the needs of this expanding communications arena, community-access TV centers need to reinvent themselves as ‘community media centers’ and provide services supporting the varied media platforms now in use. This may mean engaging in conventional cable-access TV production, but it may also mean assisting in the production of a short video for web vlogging or in the creation of an interactive website . . .

Also, local community-access TV centers have a role to play in building a ‘physical’ community; while the Internet has led to the creation of new ‘virtual’ communities, the kind of intimate networks fostered by local TV making and viewing—and the presence of a ‘bricks-and-mortar’ meeting center like an access TV station—are still central to many political struggles, community empowerment efforts, and campaigns for social justice.”

To download the full report, visit the Funding Exchange Media Justice Fund.