Echoing Justice Communications Strategies for Community Organizing in the 21st Century Stories Of Success And Innovation Echoing Justice is an action research project of the Echo Justice Communications Collaborative—a multi-year initiative to incubate, innovate, and implement movement building communications strategies that strengthen racial justice alliances and their impact. The Echoing Justice report team includes staff of the Center for Media Justice (CMJ), the Praxis Project, smartMeme, the Movement Strategy Center (MSC), Community Media Workshop, and UNITY Alliance. Lead writer: Julie Quiroz, Movement Strategy Center Lead researcher: Jen Soriano, Lionswrite Consulting Report editing and production: Karlos Schmieder, Center for Media Justice Design: Micah Bazant, micahbazant.com Resources for this report were provided by the Surdna Foundation, the Akonadi Foundation and the Frances Fund.
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“As racial justice advocates, we should remember that in a room of ten people there are likely to be three already on our side, three who are “down with the opposition,” and four who could go either way. Instead of wasting time and resources concentrating on the three people least likely to be convinced, our task must be much more focused: pull together those who are down with racial justice, then begin the work of chipping away at the middle.” —Fair Game, 2010
Impact: No merger, less problems All sectors of society participated in the campaign that successfully blocked one of the largest mergers in corporate history. In 2001, telecom giant AT&T (the nation’s second largest wireless carrier) announced its $39 billion bid to takeover the smaller cell phone company T-Mobile. National civil rights organizations initially praised the merger. Citing positions heard in earlier media debates on regulating the Internet, they claimed the merger would bring jobs to communities of color. Some unions joined the applause, asserting that because labor standards at AT&T were better than at T-Mobile, a merger would increase the numbers of unionized telecommunications workers. Following the merger announcement, media coverage was overwhelmingly supportive, with civil rights and union voices leading the way. The history of such mergers and their consistent failure to produce the outcomes lauded by these groups; the research foretelling price hikes and severely reduced service quality; and the challenges posed by the potential merger to competition in an already deregulated media environment were left out of the story.
Problem: Policy not just for telcos and nerds When the proposed merger of two giant telecommunications corporations created an important organizing battle and opportunity, organizers were constrained by the technocratic framing and inaccessible advocacy that plagued Internet policy discussion.
Movement Communications Approach: Culture is a cure Using a strategic, creative, cultural, and hyper-local communications and organizing strategy, organizers connected the proposed merger to social justice movements and the needs of local audiences.
The Media Action Grassroots Network A growing local-to-local network of community and cultural groups decided to partner with public interest allies in D.C. to fight back, taking the powerful official story of civil rights organizations, unions, and the telecommunications industry head on. The Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net), a network of 135 organizations and a project of the Center for Media Justice (CMJ), claimed the Internet had a purpose beyond the market, and the merger would place AT&T beyond the reach of
Echoing Justice
Building Progressive Majorities for Internet Policy, Niche by Niche
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regulation, with disproportionate harm to historically marginalized communities—communities of color and the poor—the most vulnerable populations of Internet and cell phone users. The resulting communications, cultural, and organizing strategy demonstrated that the often de-prioritized, technocratic issue of Internet policy can become both popular and progressive, when connected to social justice movements and the needs of local audiences.
Connecting the Issues Local audiences were confused. This was nothing new. Polling on Internet policy has shown that highly technical industry terms prevented everyday people’s comprehensive understanding of policy issues. Further content analysis demonstrated that the vast majority of stories related to the Internet were found in trade publications or the business sections of newspapers, creating the perception that discussions related to Internet and technology were not meant for
everyday people—but nothing could be further from the truth. As CMJ National Organizer Steven Renderos explains, “Our initial actions were hard. Our social justice allies didn’t see the merger as connected to their front-line issues, and Internet and cell phone users of color were motivated by the promise of jobs.” Instead of dismay at the clear failure of news coverage to expand the understanding of audiences, MAG-Net organizers turned audience ambivalence into outrage over potential price hikes. They revealed the proposed merger as an industry attempt to bypass Internet regulations and increase profits on the backs of the fastest growing population of mobile users— communities of color. Through MAG-Net, organizers joined with a broad range of partners to target aspirational and defensive frames on jobs, poverty, and racial impacts towards widening concentric circles of audiences.
Niche Audience Targeting
finally: Audiences concerned with corporate regulation and public interest media rules. THIRD: Social justice allies with a statewide base
second: Local members of national civil rights groups, messaging to counter
FIRST: Local Internet and cell phone users within the organizations leading the Media Action Grassroots Network
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A Cultural Strategy When MAG-Net began its work against the merger, says Steven Renderos, National Organizer at CMJ, “we knew we couldn’t come into this saying something wonky like ‘stop consolidation.’” Instead MAG-Net shifted the debate through a campaign that deeply engaged individuals and organizations in poor communities of color. He continues, “We needed to build a connection to communities, to focus on the impact of the merger on people’s day to day lived experiences.” “We knew that we needed to talk about media policy in our own words,” asserts Renderos. Applying the hard-learned lessons from the earlier fight for Internet freedom was key. “When we were working on ‘net neutrality’,” he recalls, “the debate was totally shaped through a ‘neutrality’ lens which made it difficult to speak about marginalized communities.”
“When we were working on ‘net neutrality’,” Steven Renderos recalls, “the debate was totally shaped through a ‘neutrality’ lens which made it difficult to speak about marginalized communities.”
MAG-Net began by gathering facts on the merger’s impact in poor and people of color communities. They found, for example, that 15.9 million T-Mobile customers of color were expected to see a price increase for their mobile phone service if the merger was approved, and that 46 percent of blacks and 51 percent of Latinos access the Internet via mobile phones, versus 38 percent of the general population. Research by the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) found that T-Mobile had one of the largest work forces of color and that Latinos chose T-Mobile as a provider specifically for their affordable plans.
According to NHMC, “We’re looking at the number of people who are employed currently at T-Mobile, 48 percent of which we know are employees of color; and then the fact that, if the merger went through, as many as 20,000 people would potentially receive pink slips.” Translating these facts into messages, MAG-Net boldly asserted that the merger was a “real jobs and democracy killer.” MAG-Net distributed non-jargon fact sheets to MAG-Net member organizations all around the country, making sure that everyday people could understand the issue and bring their own experience and voice to the campaign. MAGNet specifically reached out to young people with a new song and video called “Mo’ Mergers Mo’ Problems” (based on Notorious B.I.G’s “Mo’ Money Mo’ Problems”), that proved extremely effective for local groups’ outreach and spread widely on YouTube. MAG-Net member organizations held popular education sessions where community members talked about the values and strengths in their communities and how technology and cell phones could either reinforce or undermine them. They reached out to organizations they didn’t already know, working in areas such as immigrant rights and housing. Given the chance
The resulting communications, cultural, and organizing strategy demonstrated that the often de-prioritized, technocratic issue of Internet policy can become both popular and progressive, when connected to social justice movements and the needs of local audiences. Translating these facts into messages, MAG-Net boldly asserted that the merger was a “real jobs and democracy killer.
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to look at the merger through the lens of their own community history, people in low-income communities of color came out ready to fight. According to Amalia Deloney of the Center for Media Justice “community members now understood the message of MAG-Net: ‘It’s 100 percent clear that this merger is a job-killer. This is a massive horizontal merger, and that’s the kind that always costs jobs.” MAG-Net found ways to elevate community voices through blogs and “radio roundups” where they would set up clusters of interviews with local leaders on numerous radio stations in a concentrated period of time. They also organized congressional visits in district offices, where community members could speak face to face with elected officials.
The Internet in Our Hands Through its hyper-local network process, explains Renderos, “the issue took on a more localized identity.” In Minnesota, for example, the Secretary of State was invited to a discussion following one of the popular education sessions. As grassroots leaders talked about corporations harming communities, the Secretary of State began to make the connection to his past work
in rural areas, fighting for small farmers against agribusiness. The lived experience of MAG-Net members resonated deeply with his own lived experience, transforming him into a key ally. Ultimately, MAG-Net’s deeply local strategy paid off. People from all around the country signed on to its official comments to the Federal Communications Commission. On August 31, 2011, the Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against the merger using language directly from comments filed by MAG-Net and CMJ. In November, the FCC called for a review of the merger, signaling to everyone that the deal was off.
Resources www.mag-net.org/content/att-and-t-mobilemerger-bad-deal-communities-color-and-poor www.mag-net.org/node/962 MAG-Net letter to FCC and DOJ www.scribd.com/doc/56195088/ ATT-T-Mobile-Merger-Opposition-Letter