National Progressive Media: Who's Left?

When it comes to the question of why most progressive national media outlets reach such a small persentage of their potential audience, progressive activists are conflicted. On the one hand, we're exhilarated when we reach large numbers -- whether it's the Independent Media Center website getting 1.5 million hits during the protests against the World Trade Organization, or the Chronicle running a rare cover story on an issue we care about. On the other hand, we insist that progressive media must hold firm to their progressive missions regardless of how large an audience they draw.

Nowhere has this conflict been sharper than in free speech activists' struggle against the right-wing assault on the Pacifica Radio Network. For the past several years, the Pacifica board of directors and national management have been forcing structural and programming changes in the network that they claim will increase audience size and diversity. Since many of these changes have led to a tempering of Pacifica's programming, community organizers and activists contend that the issue of audience size is a red herring -- what Pacifica managers are really trying to do is eviscerate the politics of the only progressive radio network in the United States. Free speech activists call for Pacifica to pursue its mission, rather than pursuing high audience ratings.

At other progressive media institutions, editors and producers offer their own excuses for their small audiences: when there is no mass social justice movement, they say, there will not be a socially conscious mass media outlet. But those who are active in social justice movements often see a different problem. Among ourselves, we criticize the left press -- from The Nation to Mother Jones to the Pacifica Network News -- for being boring, academic, homogenous, and out of touch with social justice activists.

Rarely, though, do activists or independent media producers go beyond the mainstream measurements of audience size and financial success to evaluate our own progressive media institutions. As we enter 2001 with apparently growing progressive political movements -- the anti-corporate globalization movement, the Green party, youth fighting against the prison industrial complex -- we owe it to ourselves to grapple with the difficult question of whether or not our national progressive media are serving the needs of our movements and helping promote social change.

Measuring Our Effectiveness

Laura Flanders has thought a lot about this question. Flanders did media criticism with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting for nearly ten years. She now hosts the only progressive talk show on AM radio at the Working Assets radio station in Boulder, Colorado. Flanders and Working Assets are trying to make in-roads in a medium that is dominated by the radical right. "My listeners were listening to Rush Limbaugh," Flanders says. "[Working in commercial AM radio] does bring me smack up against the failures of the alternative media movement. I put on what I think is a great show, and there are no calls."

By traditional measures of success, such as audience size and financial support, Flanders' show isn't doing well. (Nor are most national alternative media institutions, which not only reach small numbers of people but also consistently lose money.) But she measures her effectiveness in other ways. She considers listener response, call-ins, e-mails, the level of listener participation in activism, and whether or not her show has raised important issues. "I think I do a good job raising social justice issues. I just don't know if I raise them in a way that AM talk radio listeners can hear."

Flanders says that progressives should realize that it takes years to develop a large audience for a radio show, and that audience size should be but one factor in measuring effectiveness. "Apple gave itself seven tries at a successful computer before they got the iMac and G4," she points out.