Pleading our own cause: people of color are leading an effort to define media justice as a movement not for content-neutral reforms but a vision of racial justice.(framed!)

Drawing its inspiration from the environmental justice movement and their efforts to advance a different analysis from the "mainstream" environmental movement, media justice proponents are developing race, class, and gender conscious frameworks that advance new visions for media content and structure. There are even plans for a Media Justice Summit in late spring 2004, the first gathering of its kind.

Says co-convener and technology expert Art McGee, "We're modeling the Media Justice Summit on the historic Environmental Justice Summit that occurred over a decade ago, in which people of color and the poor came together and made explicit their environmental issues and concerns, which had not been a part of the mainstream agendas of mostly white groups like the Sierra Club or Greenpeace. We're about to do something very similar."

Of-course, media justice is not new. It is the logical outgrowth of the larger movement for justice. It is the microphone that helps us touch others when we are advocates, the mirror that reflects our dreams and fears when we are consumers, and the vehicle through which we actualize our stories when we are producers.

For media scholar and long-time advocate Mark Lloyd, the movement that calls itself media justice today is just getting back to these civil rights roots. "I think what is considered the media justice movement is less rooted in the consumer or public interest movement than it is properly rooted in a movement that began with the traditional issues and concerns of civil rights; a movement that is concerned with equality, with political representation, the impact of culture on institutions like media and schools."

Lloyd observes that this historical context is key to understanding the need for groups to create a media justice "space" outside of the traditional media "consumer" or democracy movement. "We have institutions like the New York Times, or The Nation, or foundations that are dominated by people who tend not to be people of color, and they do not see people of color as integral to this movement, but they see this 'public interest stuff' as separate or important and maybe see this 'civil rights stuff' as passe."

The failure to make these connections has dogged the "media democracy movement" for years. With Thomas Jefferson among their pantheon of heroes and the flag as the backdrop, it has been hard for many people of color to comfortably join their ranks. Add to that the movement's commitment to "content neutral" reforms and its focus on important but distant technological issues like set top (the little digital box on your cable TV), ...