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Special Report No. 1
Overview
"Injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
The media is a powerful tool for democracy and civil society. By determining how we are seen, and who gets heard, newspapers, radio stations, television, cable companies, and increasingly online media are among the most important institutions in the nation.
The civil rights community has long recognized the important role the media plays in creating a more equitable and just society. As Mark Lloyd of the Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy writes:
In 1964, the national office of communications of the United Church of Christ began working with the local NAACP chapter of Jackson, Mississippi to see if something could be done about the local television stations there. It seems the local television stations, WLBT -- the NBC affiliate, and WJTV -- the ABC affiliate, were not providing coverage of local civil rights activity.
In fact, the local stations did not allow blacks to advertize. Nor did the stations allow blacks an opportunity to respond to views expressed by representatives of the White Citizens Council. In fact, when the national networks covered the civil rights movement and featured interviews with Dr. Martin Luther King, the national broadcasts were not shown by the local stations.
The local television viewers, 45 percent of them black, did not complain about this state of affairs. They had no reason to suspect they had a right to demand anything, neither did the local stations, neither did the Federal Communications Commission. In fact, while the FCC expressed some empathy for the viewers of Jackson, Mississippi, they supported the local stations. The church took the FCC to federal court, and won.
Though the civil rights community, particularly the United Church of Christ and the NAACP led the charge, the victor was democracy. Though the skirmish was over arcane rules of standing and license renewals, the battle was for control over the public arena. The citizens of Jackson, Mississippi, black and white, could finally see the full ugliness of white racism and brutality. They could see, through the power and immediacy of television, the firehose sprays and the charging police dogs and the angry crowds. They could hear the eloquence of King and Fannie Lou Hamer.
Mark Lloyd, Open Letter to Foundations: Communications Policy and Civil Rights
(Read a longer historical overview of civil rights and communications policy)
While those days are long gone, the civil rights community remains concerned with preserving avenues through which diverse viewpoints may be presented to the public. Among the chief concerns today are: how people of color are represented in the media; the dearth of media outlets owned by women and people of color; equal employment opportunity in the media industry; and ensuring that media outlets who are licensed by the federal government to serve local communities, fulfill their mission to do so.
Media Diversity Issues:
Programming: Overview History Update
Ownership: Overview History Update
Employment: Overview History Update
  
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