Media industries

If pressed to identify the legs of our mass media elephant, we would be tempted to offer the various theoretical approaches to media industries as a possible answer. As the oldest and longest‐standing strand of critical media studies (dating back to the work of the Frankfurt School in 1923), approaches to media industries are often the base of the traditions that followed them, if only as implied and “incorrect” perspectives to which more recent traditions respond and critique. To say that these approaches are the base of critical media studies is not to imply that they are any more or less correct than the other approaches. Instead, approaches to media industries represent the first time that scholars and theorists took the mass media as a serious and important force in everyday life. As a result, these perspectives inaugurated the discipline of critical media studies and deserve to be called the base of contemporary critique and analysis. We divided the study of industries into three different approaches: Marxist analysis, Organizational analysis, and Pragmatic analysis.

Marxist analysis. We began with Marxist analysis, focusing on the role played by economic exchange and the profit‐motive in the structure of the media industry and the content that mass outlets produce. Following the canonical work of Karl Marx, Marxist scholars look at the ways in which the economic base of a society influences – or, in classic/vulgar Marxism, actually determines – the makeup of its cultural superstructure. Marxist media critics contend that those who control the means of media production (the Big Six corporations that own the vast majority of media outlets) shape the look and form of media content to secure their continued profit and economic domination. In addition to this ever‐present goal, carried out through strategies of profit maximization like joint ventures and the logic of safety, the capitalist profit‐motive and the media content it inspires have important consequences for our daily lives. Marxist scholars reveal how the economic logic of media industries in turn restricts the possibility of variation and diversity in media content. This is a vital connection between Marxist scholars and the ideological work of Cultural analysis (Chapter 6). Though Marxist critics disagree with their Cultural counterparts over the source and primacy of ideological power, or the ability to enforce one’s personal interpretation as the standard for “reality,” both camps agree that the concept of ideology is an important lens of interpretation when it comes to studying the mass media.

Organizational analysis. We then looked at Organizational analysis, or the ways that the matrix of hierarchies and relationships present in any media industry influences the production of its content. Organizational media scholars contend that the economy is only a single factor in a larger nexus of interconnected elements that make up a media industry. We undertook an in‐depth case study of contemporary news organizations as a way of understanding this perspective. The news, far from standing as an objective account of the most important events happening on any given day, is in fact shaped by the norms and practices of the organizations that produce it. The fact that a newspaper must fill its pages every day regardless of the day’s actual events, or that a journalist covers and reports on a particular beat even if nothing really happens in that sphere of society, begins to point to how issues of process and professionalization color the supposedly factual news. Organizational analysis is an important extension of Marxist analysis because it reveals how an industry, though based in economic necessity, can begin to run on its own cultural conventions, somewhat divorced from the capitalist profit‐motive.

Pragmatic analysis. We concluded the section on media industries with Pragmatic analysis, an original perspective by which to assess federal and self‐regulation of these industries. While many authors consider this very important area of analysis through the lenses of politics or history, we feel that the philosophy of pragmatism and its focus on consequences and contingencies is a more appropriate and fruitful means of assessment. By evaluating a media regulation through pragmatic standards of truth or “goodness” (be it the US Telecommunications Act of 1996 or the broadcast of indecent content), scholars can come to a better understanding of quality media control in contemporary life. This chapter also considered the always‐current debate over violence in the media as an important case study in Pragmatic analysis, especially because so much of the debate relies upon the perceived effect of mediated violence on children. Though the debate is far from over, we hope that other scholars find our particular application of Pragmatic philosophy to be a productive springboard for the way we understand media regulation in the years to come.

Media messages

The next content section, on media messages, could be likened to the body of our theoretical elephant. When people refer to “the mass media” in casual conversation, they are often referring to the variety and circulation of media messages and images: in a word, texts. Textual analysis has represented the bulk of critical media studies throughout its history in academic institutions around the world, but the project of understanding how the mass media paint reality is a complicated one, housing many different theoretical perspectives. Thus, while a close inspection of our creature’s hide reveals a rough, bumpy, and diverse surface, these peaks and valleys are unified in their approach to analyzing issues of media representation and its subsequent influence. We divided our study of messages into five different approaches: Rhetorical analysis, Cultural analysis, Psychoanalytic analysis, Feminist analysis, and Queer analysis.

Rhetorical analysis. We first considered Rhetorical analysis, the study of how the artful and purposeful combination of signs works to move audiences toward particular ends. In their most basic form, all texts can be conceived of as an association of signifying words and images. By understanding their specific combination, as well as noticing what signs are not present, Rhetorical critics reveal how a text functions to persuade audiences to feel certain ways or to undertake particular actions. Though this approach dates back to the ancient Greek art of oratory, the chapter on Rhetorical analysis presented a number of different ways to understand the association between signs: clusters, form, genre, narrative, and affect. The textual “building block” approach of Rhetorical analysis outlined in this chapter is its key contribution to other areas of media studies. Assessing original audience meanings in Reception analysis, for example, would not be possible without first understanding how a text comes to signify meaning at all.

Cultural analysis. One of the longest‐standing traditions of media analysis is the study of how texts embody and transmit ideology, the primary focus of Cultural analysis and the academic “interdiscipline” of Cultural studies. Ideology and the various forms it takes – myth, doxa, and hegemony – are implicit in any culture, and media texts are a primary site of ideological construction and reinforcement. Cultural studies scholars, in turn, deconstruct texts for the ways that they normalize relations of power between ideological subjects, which marks Cultural studies as the first of the many political approaches to media texts that we cover in this book. The chapter on Cultural analysis focused primarily on the media representation of class and race as a way of practically understanding this approach, but in reality Cultural studies is interested in media representations associated with any axis of social power: race, class, gender, sexuality, age, disability, and so on. In this way, the Cultural studies focus on the textual negotiation of power between social groups becomes a crucial framework in both Feminist and Queer analysis (Chapters 8 and 9, respectively). In addition, Cultural studies’ tendency to elevate subordinate groups also becomes an important way to center media audiences, a project fully developed in Reception analysis (Chapter 10). Because of these various connections with other traditions, Cultural analysis and Cultural studies are virtual juggernauts in the field of critical media studies.

Psychoanalytic analysis. The midpoint in our discussion of media messages delved into the seemingly esoteric world of psychoanalysis and its special convergence with film. Like Marxist analyses of the media, Psychoanalytic analysis adapts theory from an outside discipline to the realm of critical media studies. The developmental theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan help media scholars understand how issues of human drive and desire manifest in relation to the movie theater and the cinematic image, as well as to other forms of media in certain instances. Though perhaps the most theoretically obtuse of all the approaches discussed in this section, Psychoanalytic analysis provides a truly unique perspective on the role of desire and bodily pleasures in the consumption of media. As a result, this chapter diverged from other perspectives by de‐emphasizing the meaning of symbols and instead concentrating on the unconscious appeal of texts through notions of regression, scopophilia, and fantasy. We can certainly see echoes of psychoanalysis in Erotic analysis (Chapter 12) and its own focus on the audience’s very somatic response to the media.

Feminist analysis. The next approach we considered was Feminist analysis. A Feminist approach to media concentrates on how texts can frame ideological categories of gender as biological or natural constants. Feminists seek to disrupt systems of sexism and patriarchal power that reify gender roles and privilege the needs, desires, and interests of men in society to the detriment of women. “Feminism” is a historically fluid term that is often contested and demonized in the popular consciousness, but this chapter demonstrates the complexity of Feminist analysis through its consideration of stereotypical media representations of both femininity and masculinity, as well as the role of the postfeminist sensibility in contemporary media. These two concepts are important to a general Feminist analysis of media, but the various specific strands of feminist theory not discussed here (including womanism, ecofeminism, and power feminism, among others) provide an arsenal of critical tools for media scholars. Like Cultural analysis and Queer analysis (Chapters 6 and 9), Feminist analysis reminds us that mass‐mediated images are often partial or biased in some way. This is an important quality to remember when engaging in Sociological analysis (Chapter 11) or other approaches concerned with the actions audiences take on the basis of media representations.

Queer analysis. The final chapter in the section on media messages looked at the approach of Queer analysis. Like Feminists with gender, Queer theorists analyze the ways in which media texts represent and normalize issues of sexuality as a basis for critique and social transformation. The political project of Queer theory intentionally eschews easy definition. It is the embodiment of a disruptive and elusive ambiguity that shatters social binaries and the ideological powers they maintain; “queerness” is a radical rejection of categories in relation to sexuality. This chapter looked at the notion of queerness in two major ways. The first considered stereotypical representations of heterosexuality and other forms of sexuality in the media, looking at how even supposedly positive representations of queerness can in fact support systems of heteronormativity. The second considered the role of camp and the fourth persona in investing media texts with queer (though typically hidden) experiences. Taken together, these two sections give some form to a purposefully formless approach, and in them we can see the critical overlap between Queer analysis and other political projects (Cultural and Feminist analysis, most notably).

Media audiences

Recalling our elephant metaphor again, approaches to understanding media audiences would likely form the various appendages of our theoretical beast. Widespread, serious studies of the audience did not really begin in earnest until the 1970s, and in many ways these approaches represent the most shifting and mutable areas of study today. In fact, the final two chapters in this section represent our own syntheses of widely disparate theories into coherent traditions of audience studies. This indicates that approaches to media audiences are more fluid and ill‐defined than their industry or textual counterparts. At the same time, we contend that audience studies are more uniquely communicative than either industry‐ or message‐based approaches because they bring to the fore all of the classic aspects of human communication: signs and symbols, of course, but also feedback, perception, and environment. This is the reason we associate audience approaches with the ears, tail, and trunk of our elephant; these are the dynamic, shifting appendages that mark the elephant as a unique creature. We divided our study of audiences into four different approaches: Reception analysis, Sociological analysis, Erotic analysis, and Ecological analysis.

Reception analysis. Our first approach was Reception analysis, a tradition that takes the audience as the primary site of meaning‐making in relation to the media. Rather than analyze the economic underpinnings of a media text or investigate the power relations it reinscribes, Reception scholars seek to understand the meanings that actual individuals make out of the media texts they consume every day. They recognize that media producers may intend a text to mean something in particular, but they also point out that audiences may come to understand it in a radically different way. This chapter addressed many different theories of meaning – including the encoding/decoding process, polysemy/polyvalence, and interpretive communities – before looking at observational ethnography and memory as two primary means of gathering data regarding audience perception. Reception theorists and ethnographers both challenge the traditional understanding of the audiences as a passive, vulnerable mass at the whims of the media, and they lay a foundation for the type of work on individual pleasure central to Erotic analysis (Chapter 12).

Sociological analysis. Close in spirit to Reception analysis, our chapter on Sociological analysis considered not only the meanings that audiences create in relation to the mass media, but also how they utilize media to help manage interactions with others and negotiate aspects of their daily lives. These include dramaturgy (where media function as avenues of public presentation and offer different social roles to “try on”), frame analysis (where media offer selective interpretations of events that guide perceptions of collective experience), and equipment for living (where media provide tools for the symbolic resolution of guilt and other conflicts inherent to social interaction). Most importantly, the undercurrent of symbolic interactionism in Sociological analysis reminds us that people act toward a thing on the basis of meanings assigned to it, not on what the thing actually is. Audiences increasingly turn to the media in order to make meaning today, and as a result Sociological analysis illuminates how the ideological concerns of Marxist and Cultural analysis (Chapters 2 and 6) might be activated and enacted on a micro‐level.

Erotic analysis. The third approach to the audience we considered, and one that is original to this book, was Erotic analysis. Erotic analysis takes the twin notions of pleasure and resistance as central components in attempting to understand how audiences consume media. Positioning themselves in opposition to Marxist approaches, scholars employing an Erotic perspective understand pleasure as a transient but powerful force on the part of media consumers. The chapter on Erotic analysis discussed two ways that transgressive pleasure may appear in relation to the media. The first was the transgressive text, where “writerly” and carnivalesque texts grant audiences experiences and abilities otherwise uncommon in mainstream media. The second was the transgressive practice of the audience, where audiences rework mainstream media texts to various degrees through interpretative play, user participation, and cultural production. Erotic engagements of the media provide a form of resistance that, while often highly individual and fleeting, allows users to escape the system of meaning and power outlined by all of the other critical perspectives. As such, Erotic analysis is a comment upon and important derivation from classic conceptions of the audience and the entire field of media studies.

Ecological analysis. We concluded the section on media audiences with a largely epochal perspective called Ecological analysis. More than an analysis of how the media function as important aspects of our contemporary environment, media ecology considers how the media are our environment, effectively creating the world in which people live. Work collectively known as medium theory (represented here by Innis, McLuhan, Ong, and Postman) reveals how changes in communication technology have historically altered the ways people interact and how they interpret reality. In contrast to previous ages ushered in by technologies of orality and literacy, today’s digital and electronic technologies have created a largely connected and interactive globe, one that endorses logics of association over linearity and contingency over absolutism. Moreover, the necessarily wide scope of Ecological analysis provides a novel way of reflecting on issues surrounding media industry and representation. While an Organizational scholar might claim, for example, that professional factors largely shape the look of the media, a media ecologist would counter that the structure of the profession is a result of the media technology of the age. Media, then, create the look and logic of each historical moment.

Media literacy

A difficult concept to pin down, media literacy broadly refers to any learning opportunity that increases an individual’s understanding of how the mass media function. W. James Potter frames media literacy as a source of individual empowerment:

Becoming more media literate gives you a much clearer perspective to see the border between your real world and the world manufactured by the media. When you are media literate, you have clear maps to help you navigate better in the media world so that you can get to those experiences and information you want without becoming distracted by those things that are harmful to you.³

To be media literate, then, is to possess the dual understandings of how the mass media function and how their modes of operation have bearing on one’s daily life. Monica Bulger and Patrick Davidson note that this capacity has become especially important in light of the “fake news” scandals of the 2016 US presidential election, which spurred renewed interest in formal media literacy programs across the country.⁴

In reviewing current literature in the field, two major themes or conceptions of media literacy become apparent. The first is an emphasis on media production as a way of learning about how mass media generate and circulate messages. This interpretation of media literacy often takes the form of adolescent educational programs that allow young adults to record their own media messages. In creating their own media texts, adolescents learn about the kinds of decisions that all media creators face: how to tell a story, how to represent an idea, how to attract an audience, and so on. Especially if supplemented with critical inquiry or reflection, the experience educates young people about the constraints of media production and its subsequent influence on representation and reception. A school’s morning announcements or radio station can serve as an important learning site for understanding how to prioritize newsworthy information or build a station identity. Classroom video or podcasting projects reveal to young creators how processes like editing change the ways audiences interpret messages.⁵ Whatever the medium, this type of media literacy encourages young people to view the media as an active, participatory social outlet rather than a distant, confusing network beyond their control. It also supplies them with a cursory understanding of how the media operate as a symbolic or cultural form.

Such an understanding of the symbolic codes, logics, and powers present in the media is central to the second major approach to media literacy. From this vantage, media literacy represents the acquisition of explicitly critical tools in relation to aspects of media production, circulation, and reception. This textbook is firmly in line with this second strand. By equipping you with different perspectives regarding power in the media (economic, ideological, or otherwise), it increases your ability to understand the media in all its various forms and functions. You are now, in some ways, media literate: congratulations! Moreover, you are probably reading this text because you are enrolled in a college class organized around the theme of the media. Classes like your own are becoming increasingly common around the world and show much success in teaching students to carefully discern the structures and effects of contemporary media.⁶ Likewise, studies consistently show that audience instruction in these critical perspectives can influence perceptions of race and gender stereotypes, as well as impressions of violence and attitudes toward advertising.⁷ In short, then, this type of media literacy, inside or outside of the classroom, focuses on teaching the ideas one might conceive of as the “critical media tradition” in higher education.

Though this second approach to literacy is perhaps more cerebral or scholarly than the concurrent, “hands‐on” focus of the production route, both interpretations represent the real‐world application of critical media theories in appropriate contexts. The original generation of media content and the creation of college media courses are both productive responses to theoretical understandings of the media. Both represent important nodes of convergence between knowledge of the media and the dissemination of knowledge of the media. Overall, it may be best to understand media literacy projects as the distillation of abstract theory into concrete, localized activities and seminars, educating individuals on why the media matters (or should matter) to them.

Culture jamming

Near the end of his most widely known work, Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord makes a curious statement on the role of plagiarism in contemporary culture:

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the involvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of his [sic] expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.⁸

Debord’s interpretation of plagiarism as the appropriation and refashioning of pre‐existing signs into the “right idea” is at the heart of our second area of media application: culture jamming. Culture jamming is the use of familiar media symbols and channels to reveal and overturn the consumerist or capitalist ideologies they embody. Like media literacy, culture jamming is difficult to describe succinctly, and many scholars conceive of it in different ways. For example, Michael R. Solomon positions it as a strategy “that aims to disrupt efforts by the corporate world to dominate our cultural landscape.”⁹ Tim Jordan calls jamming “an attempt to reverse and transgress the meaning of cultural codes whose primary aim is to persuade us to buy something or be someone,” a sort of “semiotic terrorism.”¹⁰ In all cases, culture jamming refers to the individual or organized effort to turn mass media messages against the media themselves.

The Canada‐based organization Adbusters is a particularly visible example of culture jamming. A self‐proclaimed “international collective of artists, designers, poets, punks, writers, directors, musicians, philosophers, drop outs, and wild hearts” whose aim is in part to “wake up a thoughtless, complacent culture,”¹¹ Adbusters culture jams primarily through advertisement parody. For example, in the “Spoof Ads” section on the organization’s website, users can browse a variety of images that call into question the social importance or benevolence of corporations. One features a runner in fluorescent Nike apparel sipping on a large convenience‐store soda. The accompanying tagline, following the curve of a huge Nike “swoosh,” reads, “Just Douche It.” Another ad depicts a hospital operating room with a patient open on the table. In the foreground of the ad, a heart monitor reveals the familiar McDonald’s Golden Arches imbedded in the jagged cardiac line. These “subvertisments,” as the organization sometimes calls them, refashion familiar media codes and symbols to criticize big business practices.

In her 2004 article, “Pranking Rhetoric: ‘Culture Jamming’ as Media Activism,” however, Christine Harold questions the effectiveness of parody as a jamming form.¹² Pointing out that parody “perpetuates a commitment to rhetorical binaries [and] the hierarchical form it supposedly wants to upset,”¹³ she instead proposes “pranking” as an effective form of culture jamming. Media pranking, or actions that “playfully and provocatively [fold] existing cultural forms in on themselves,”¹⁴ disrupts the original/commentary dichotomy that parody relies upon and inspires a deeper reflection in those who witness it. Harold cites the famous Barbie/G.I. Joe computer chip switch as an example of pranking. Just before the winter holiday shopping season of 1989, media pranksters referring to themselves as the Barbie Liberation Organization (BLO) purchased hundreds of electronic “talking” Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls and switched their chips so that the Barbie dolls played messages of death and destruction while the G.I. Joes discussed shopping and fashion. They then returned every doll to the stores, causing a very confusing Christmas morning for thousands of American children. To make sure their prank reached the largest possible audience, the BLO included messages inside the packaging of each returned doll that urged consumers to contact their local media about the switch. The organization also prepared news packages about their work and intentions, and disseminated them to local news outlets when the prank broke. Harold contends that this kind of pranking, whose coherent message only comes later and with much reflection, serves to subvert media resources far more effectively than exercises in parody.

More recent work on culture jamming underscores Harold’s emphasis on ephemeral play as a significant source of political subversion. In her 2017 study of flash mobs, for example, Rebecca Walker contends that the activity importantly “reminds us that we actually have a choice” in an increasingly consumption‐driven society that attempts to govern citizens’ every move and thought.¹⁵ A flash mob is a group of strangers who coordinate via digital platforms to arrive at a particular location at a specific time in order to perform some brief, predetermined, and disruptive behavior. Examples that Walker cites include a mob that appeared at a Whole Foods in 2009 in order to protest CEO John Mackey’s disparaging remarks about universal healthcare and one that convened inside a Target in 2010 to oppose the company’s financial support of a conservative political candidate. In both cases, mob participants arrived at the locations, sang popular songs with refashioned lyrics that expressed their opposition, executed elaborate choreography, and then dissipated, all in under 10 minutes – much to the confusion and delight of the stores’ customers and employees. Walker argues that politically‐oriented flash mobs like these engage in culture jamming not because they parody the well‐known signifiers of these companies, but instead because they assume and rework the actual spaces of corporate culture in order to educate onlookers.

Regardless of whether the power of culture jamming ultimately comes from parody or play, what is important to glean from these examples for the purposes of this chapter is the very active nature of jamming itself. If approaches to media theory provide the ability to critique mass media industries, texts, and reception practices, then culture jamming is the messy and living fusion of all these perspectives into real‐world activism and action. Culture‐jamming efforts, especially ones like the Barbie prank and flash mobs that reach many people, extend the highly academic work of media scholars into the public sphere and daily life. Though far less organized or sanctioned (or in some cases, even legal) than media literacy programs, culture jamming is also far more visible, dynamic, and exciting in most instances. Culture jamming is an important link between the realm of ideas and the realm of action, and it represents some of the most vibrant phenomena in media studies today.

Media reform

The summer of 2003 will go down in history as host to one of the most significant examples of widespread citizen involvement in governmental media policy ever.¹⁶ Alarmed by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) deregulatory policies and galvanized by watchdog groups like Free Press and MoveOn.org (in addition to publicly dissenting members of the FCC itself), millions of Americans opposed what they saw as reckless and dangerous moves by the FCC to promote increased monopoly ownership of media industries. Journalists and Hollywood union members also voiced their discontent with the FCC’s free‐market logic, claiming that journalistic integrity and media content suffer when fewer companies own more media outlets. In many cases, the FCC, which had anticipated an easy fight for deregulation against a largely apathetic public, found istelf ducking out of public meetings and avoiding an increasingly angry citizenry. Responding to this sudden spike in policy interests among everyday individuals, the Senate overturned the FCC’s rules changes in September 2003 by a 55 : 40 vote. In late June 2004, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia reinforced the Senate’s position when it soundly rejected the FCC’s attempts to deregulate the industry.¹⁷

The events of 2003 represent a modern example of a growing citizen interest in media reform. Media reform refers to any efforts by citizens and citizens’ interest groups to effect change in the structure and operation of mass‐media industries. Though the issues involved in media reform are wide, they usually concentrate on increased transparency of media operation and increased accountability of industries to matters of public interest (see Chapter 4 for a discussion of the role of public interest in the media). In the words of Robert W. McChesney, President of Free Press and vehement supporter of media reform, once people understand “media as a policy issue … all bets are off. Organized people can defeat organized money.”¹⁸ Thus, media reform represents something of a median between practices of media literacy and culture jamming. It blends together the structured and organized channels of media literacy with the radical zeal and spirit of culture jamming.

One of the most apparent manifestations of contemporary media reform is the blossoming of citizen journalism or “information democratization,” which David Tewksbury and Jason Rittenberg define as “the increasing involvement of private citizens in the creation, distribution, exhibition, and curation of civically relevant information.”¹⁹ Largely fueled by the rise of internet technology like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, citizen journalism opposes traditional models of mass‐media information dissemination by placing the responsibility for generating and circulating news in the hands of everyday individuals. Though some professional journalists have expressed reservations about this transformation, suggesting that the mode encourages salacious content divorced from relevant context or thoughtful editorial decision‐making,²⁰ the challenge that it provides to classic notions of public interest in the media is important to consider.

The focus on media policy, however, is still central to many media reform movements. Rather than attempt to catalog all of the important policy battles in the last 30 years, we will briefly consider the fight over low‐power radio (low‐power FM, LPFM) as a representative case study of this kind of work. Throughout the 1990s, the broadcast of (sometimes pirate) community‐based radio programs over short distances on LPFM frequencies became a point of tension between individual citizens and the commercial radio industry, especially after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 increased industry control over radio.²¹ In an effort to diffuse this tension and reduce the amount of unlicensed broadcasting by citizens, William Kennard, the chair of the FCC, approved a program in January 2000 that would extend broadcasting licenses for 1000 LPFM stations to nonprofit groups throughout the nation. Many community broadcasters jumped at this opportunity, and more than 3000 had applied for LPFM licensure by the fall of 2003.²²

Unfortunately, commercial‐radio heavyweights like Clear Channel Communications quickly lobbied Congress to block this emerging LPFM movement, claiming that such a proliferation of community radio signals would jam their own high‐power signals. Congress responded to these concerns sympathetically and passed the Radio Preservation Act of 2000. The act limited the FCC’s ability to license LPFM stations by reducing the number of available frequencies; under the law, no LPFM station could legally broadcast within three frequencies of a high‐power station. Though a Congressional study found that industry claims of signal jamming were questionable, and despite the lobbying efforts of grassroots media campaigns like the Prometheus Radio Project of Philadelphia,²³ commercial interests ultimately prevailed here, blocking most of the FM spectrum from community use over the following decade. Additionally, FCC content restrictions on the few LPFM stations that remained – such as a ban on supporting political candidates and a 36‐hour‐per‐week broadcast requirement – forced the structure of community radio “into highly rationalized forms” that in many ways further preserved the “commercial dominance of radio broadcasting.”²⁴ In short, rather than adapting to the needs and preferences of their local audiences, those LPFM stations that survived Congressional intervention ended up looking much like their higher‐powered, national counterparts.

These legislative setbacks, however, did not stop lobbying efforts from continuing to fight for citizens’ access to LPFM, and throughout the 2000s, Congressional representatives sponsored at least three bills attempting to relax restrictions on the format. These efforts finally paid off when President Barack Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act into law in December 2010.²⁵ The act stipulated that the FCC should again make LPFM licenses available to nonprofit and other community groups, and it allowed the FCC to modify the existing three‐frequency‐distance rule in order to open more of the FM broadcast spectrum to low‐power stations. In response to the passage of the act, and for the first time in a decade, the FCC began accepting applications for LPFM broadcast licenses in late 2013. According to the Pew Research Center, in 2016, more than 1500 LPFM stations were licensed to operate in the United States as a result of the new applications.²⁶

The struggle over LPFM reveals that media reform movements in the name of citizen access or public interest often face heavy opposition from industry representatives, but by no means is the goal of reform impossible. By inaugurating alternative media or challenging entrenched media policies through legal battles and awareness campaigns, media reformers represent perhaps the most ambitious application of critical media theory. The efforts of media reformers teach us all that the media are not some overwhelming system impossible to comprehend, but rather a complex field of interests and needs that we can engage creatively and persistently in order to build a better tomorrow. Drawing upon media education programs and the “semiotic terrorism” of culture jammers, media reformers are applying their nuanced understanding of media to utterly transform the mediated world in which all of us live. Theirs is a battle over symbols and the wires that transmit them, representations and the laws that shape them.

As a result, we can see in media reform the point that underlies any application of media theory (and, indeed, the purpose of this concluding chapter): everything in a mediated world is deeply, profoundly interconnected. Knowledge, activism, understanding, and participation are all facets of living in an image‐saturated world that cannot afford to ignore one another. Only by understanding the links that exist between nodes in the mediascape, as well as the intersections that can be made with the proper training, can any of us hope to begin to talk about this creature we call the media. Only by understanding each part of our elephant as necessarily incomplete but ultimately important can we train it to serve our needs throughout the 21st century.