This essay is adapted from and expands on an earlier article by the same title published in the Fall 2024 issue of Justice Rising.
Media lie at the heart of many crises facing us today, from the rise of fascism to growing inequality to the ever-worsening climate crisis. Increasing numbers of people intuitively understand that our media institutions are failing democracy. This critical awareness can help create opportunities for structural reform. But too often our indictments focus on individuals—corporations and media owners—who consistently allow profit to trump democracy. This criticism is justified and necessary—after all, media and tech oligarchs are a key part of the problem. But it’s insufficient if our goal is to fundamentally change our media at a structural level.
To build the media we need will require a more systemic critique, one that acknowledges that capitalist logics—profit imperatives that exclude entire communities, extract our attention and personal information, and censor our news media—are at the root of the problems we are dealing with today. From news deserts to digital redlining, run-amok commercialism is a major cause of what ails our information and communication infrastructures. The market’s hidden hand is driving journalism into the ground and amplifying all manner of mis/disinformation throughout our media systems.
If we were to extend this structural critique to its logical conclusion, we would arrive at the foundational premise that a truly democratic and engaged journalism requires that people own and control the media they rely on. It also requires that journalism serves not just profit imperatives, but addresses people’s needs, tells their stories, and goes to where the silences are throughout society. In essence, this would be a media system that’s not only public in name, but actually of, by, and for the people.
This also reminds us that, while providing critical information is always a central normative mission for good journalism, local media is about much more than informing citizens, keeping a watchful eye on the powerful, and ringing alarm bells about social problems. As important as those essential services are, democratic journalism—especially participatory journalism—is also about building community and solidarity among diverse communities.
In the case of the US—a multiracial, class-riven democracy with a history of deep structural inequities—this mission requires a kind of adversarial journalism that identifies systemic problems, treats its readers as engaged participants of a democratic society, and proposes solutions to confront problems.
For this process to succeed, we need a media system that doesn’t just provide news about or even for diverse communities; it must also empower news production by the people themselves. Boundaries between journalists and the communities they serve should be removed for us to democratize our media. Taking a page from the Indymedia movement of the late 1990s/early 2000s, it’s not enough to simply hate the media: we must be the media.
But this also necessitates that we remove media from the market, by treating it as a public good and a public service, not a commodity whose sole aim is to enrich a small group of investors, owners, and advertisers—typically white, wealthy men. We must both decommercialize our media and radically democratize its institutions.
How might we do this? A wonky term I’ve proposed elsewhere is “non-reformist media reforms.” An adaptation of a strategic framework that first emerged during the New Left, this concept underscores the need for imagining long-term objectives and struggles while responding to immediate challenges. Most importantly, the framework differentiates between reforms that aim to ultimately shore up the existing media system—tempering it here and there, but always leaving the fundamental capitalist political economy in place—and a more radical program that seeks to utterly transform (restructure, democratize) our entire media system over time.
This approach acknowledges that we cannot simply smash the current system overnight. But it also acknowledges that the current status quo is unsustainable, and we therefore must aim for structural reforms that may seem unimaginable in the current conjuncture. First and foremost, it behooves us to maintain a crystal-clear view of a not-so-distant political horizon that envisions an entirely different media system, one that’s publicly owned, democratically controlled, and serves us all, not simply the privileged wealthy few.
None of this means that we should give up on pressuring mainstream news media to do better reporting when the stakes are so high. Nor does it mean that we no longer need institutions for professional norms to ensure good journalism. But it does mean that we remain clear-eyed about the constraints to any strategy that expects capitalist media to become more democratic. Instead, we should aim to transform media over the long term by radically shifting the underlying political economy and the incentives and logics that bend it towards predictably bad media practices, from clickbait to stenography reporting.
Inspired by the Urbana-Champaign IMC, an idea I’ve proposed elsewhere is to create “public media centers”—publicly-owned, multi-media hubs in every community that are federally guaranteed but locally governed and democratically operated. Such a model would establish new anchor institutions that are universally available to everyone—not unlike the ideal version of public schools and public libraries.
Another ambitious plan, put forward by the late Bob McChesney and John Nichols, is the “Local Journalism Initiative,” which would enable people to vote on public funds being allocated to their preferred local nonprofit news organizations. Such ambitious projects would require a Marshall Plan-style program to recreate our entire media system from the ground up along participatory democratic lines.
None of these far-reaching national plans will be actualized any time soon—certainly not during the Trump administration. But we can begin strategizing and experimenting at the state and local levels until there are opportunities to rebuild media systemically at a larger scale. What’s important is to begin imagining—and planning for—a radically different media system now.
Regardless of our precise plan for radical structural reform, our focus shouldn’t be simply to shame professional journalists in the commercial sector to do a better job. The aim should be to transform the current media system from the ground up. And the only way to achieve such a goal is to take our media out of the commercial market altogether and return it to public ownership.
Victor Pickard is the C. Edwin Baker Professor of Media Policy and Political Economy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he co-directs the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center.
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