Why Are Civil Rights Groups Neglecting Media Policy?

By Seeta Pena Gangadharan, MediaChannel.org. Posted April 11, 2002.

With the awarding of three Academy Awards to African-American actors, hopes are high for a greater appreciation and presence of people of color in Hollywood.

Yet, while Oscar winners Halle Berry and Denzel Washington, as well as the lifetime achiever Sidney Poitier, set a positive tone, their success is no more than a symbolic statuette.

Thanks to recent deregulatory decisions that foreshadow more consolidation in the U.S. media industries, minorities will continue to be grossly underrepresented in all ranks of the business, from executive level down to creative staff and working journalists and actors. Unless those who celebrate the diversity of this year's Oscar recipients, particularly civil rights groups, enlist in the larger battle against media consolidation, the opportunity to compel real, institutionalized change in the media industry will be sorely missed.

Since the start of the year, consumer advocates have been decrying decisions made by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Congress and the federal courts that pave the way for more media mergers throughout the United States. Yet, while opponents of media consolidation predict a dismal future of multi-platform monoculture, organizations that have long fought for racial equality have been uncommonly quiet about the matter of media deregulation.

Searching through the Web site of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and after attempts to reach them for comment, I couldn't find any reference to media communications and policy issues. For an organization that has more than once threatened and then abandoned a boycott of network television for the industry's lack of inclusion of minorities, the lack of response or reaction was disquieting. While they have gotten involved in digital divide issues, media ownership policy is virtually absent from the range of concerns of Reverend Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, President John F. Kennedy's brainchild civil rights group, is conspicuously silent on media policy and law.

Among the leading U.S. civil rights organizations, only the Leadership Conference of Civil Rights (LCCR), whose position on media issues surfaces irregularly, has made an effort to speak out against deregulation and in favor of local media production and ownership. Yet, despite a cautionary statement from its executive director, Wade Henderson, member groups that comprise the LCCR network have not adopted a similar concern for deregulatory trends in the media business.

Quiet Minorities

If the major civil rights groups have been quiet about the matter, the more specialized minority media groups are even quieter.

Although born of the civil rights movement and specifically charged with bringing greater diversity to the media and communications fields, these groups are ignoring policy issues relevant to their very causes. Of the five principal minority professional associations -- the UNITY Foundation, National Asian-American Journalists Association, Native American Journalists' Association, National Association of Hispanic Journalists and National Association of Black Journalists -- only the latter responded to the latest upheavals on the policy front.

Given that these groups are historically tied to affirmative action and other workplace initiatives, the lack of concern, particularly of FCC prospects to weaken Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidelines for broadcasters, seems like a major blind spot. (The Federal Appeals Court asked the FCC to rewrite the biennial process that reviews whether broadcasters are fulfilling their EEOC requirements. Given the laissez-faire stance of Chair Michael Powell and the Republican-dominated FCC, diversity hiring practices are likely to be less scrutinized, leaving media companies even more unaccountable.)

Why aren't the Asian-American, Native American, Hispanic journalists' groups and other like-minded organizations at the forefront of this debate over media policy? We know the battle for media diversity is far from won, why aren't we talking together about the ramifications of these regulation issues?

Reflecting on the inaction of civil rights groups and of minority media associations in policymaking debates on the future of media, Dori Maynard, president of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, fears that the campaign to make policy issues resonate with civil rights groups may already be lost. "We need to remind people why regulation is an essential issue — for the media, for us and for or communities throughout this country," she says.

Strategies For Diversity

In 1997, Mark Lloyd, director of the Civil Rights Forum on Communication, urged civil rights organizations to consider a larger strategy to achieve a diversity of viewpoints and a plurality of media outlets that reflected the richness of a multifaceted, multicultural, multi-ethnic society. Challenging the market ideology and revaluing local media production was intrinsic to his argument. Wrote Lloyd, "The civil rights community will not be able to create sustainable reform if they do not protect the arena of public debate and empower ordinary Americans to participate."

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