Our Framework

Media Justice: An Affirmative Framework for Media Change

CMJ recognizes that we live and work in a changing media landscape characterized by unprecedented consolidation of ownership and increased influence of U.S. news and entertainment media around the globe. These conditions present a “double-bind” of threat and opportunity for youth and communities of color. Communities who have been historically marginalized from democratic process must continuously defend our rights to fair media access and accurate representation, while advancing strategic stories to transform the public narrative around race, age, and power.

Media justice is a participatory, relevant, and strategic framework that addresses this double-bind, and centers the leadership and participation of historically disenfranchised communities in the movement for media change.

Guided by a broad vision for social justice, this framework has five key assumptions:

• Media change of all kinds must expose and directly confront the mechanics of structural racism and systemic oppression.
• Leaders from historically marginalized communities must be developed as effective media activists and strategic movement communicators.
• Media policy advocacy and strategic communications are more effective when clearly relevant to the primary justice issues of the movement for racial justice, economic and gender equity, and youth rights.
• Compelling communications and media activism campaigns must be both rooted in critical issues and coordinated across issue, sector, and region for national impact.
• When justice sectors strengthen communications strategies, center the use of culture as a communications tool, employ winning frames and messages, and strengthen their influence over media rules and rights, the possibilities for transformative change skyrocket.

Traditional media reform and communications strategies are insufficient to address structural racism in public debate and policy and create a media environment in which campaigns for racial justice, economic and gender equity, and youth rights can thrive.

The Center for Media Justice is dedicated to building a strong and effective movement for media justice and supporting organizing groups to incorporate media as a tool to reclaim our stories, reframe our humanity, strengthen our campaigns, and determine our destinies.

Because the power to communicate, and, therefore, the power to transform society, belongs to everyone!