Page 268 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Med a Reform |

confront the power of the media industries themselves. Clearly, from the lat-
ter perspective, corporate sponsorship of media literacy projects and curricula
means that the potential to confront corporate power will be severely dimin-
ished. Advocates of citizen-oriented media education argue that lessons in media
literacy created by the Time Warner corporation, for example, will never address
questions about the monopolization of the media environment by a small hand-
ful of profit-oriented firms and whether or not this is good for democracy.
see also Advertising and Persuasion; Children and Effects; Hypercommercial-
ism; Media and Citizenship; Media and the Crisis of Values; Media Reform;
Media Watch Groups; Public Access Television; Television in Schools; Violence
and Media.
Further reading: Auferheide, P. The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000; Giroux, H. A. Living Dangerously:
Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference. New York: Peter Lang, 1996; Jhally, S.
The Spectacle of Accumulation: Essays in Culture, Media, and Politics. New York: Peter
Lang, 2006; Kubey, R., ed. Media Literacy around the World. Piscataway, NJ: Transac-
tion Publishers, 2001; Macedo, D. P., and S. R. Steinberg, eds. International Handbook of
Media Literacy. New York: Peter Lang, 2007; Potter, J. W. Media Literacy, 3rd ed. Thou-
sand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005; Silverblatt, A. Media Literacy: Keys to Interpreting Media
Messages, 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001.

Bill Yousman

Media reForM

“Media reform” refers to a broad-based social movement that aims to im-
prove existing telecommunications laws, regulations, and policy in order to
bring about a more democratic media system. Issues that media reformers
are concerned with include media ownership; the regulation of the television,
cable, and radio industries; the quality of journalism; intellectual property; the
future of the Internet; and the ideological dominance of commercialism over
civic values of community, democracy, and communication rights.
The media reform movement is concerned with a broad range of issue areas
and is comprises a network of diverse local, regional, and national organizations
committed to a wide array of strategies and tactics. Since the advent of radio
technology, citizens and corporations have made organized efforts to influence
media laws, regulations, and policies. In general, the media reform movement
addresses the effects of a for-profit media system that increasingly fails to ful-
fill the communications needs of a democratic society. According to the media
reformers, media systems should supply the critical information that citizens
need to make decisions in a system of self-governance and representative gov-
ernment, and they should provide a forum for civil debate. The failure to meet
these requirements is sometimes referred to as the “democratic deficit” by
media critics and reformers. Media reform is also concerned with the increas-
ing concentration of media ownership; in the last 20 years, the number of major
corporations who own the vast majority of media companies has decreased