Purpose: to engage a diverse cross-sector audience in examining how corporate/right wing media bias and media policy hurt their communities and primary issue-organizing, and to come away with action steps for regional and national grassroots strategies to put our news and culture into the hands of our people.

The framework of Media Justice connects to the USSF’s crosscutting themes by seeing media work as inextricably bound up with the other movement sectors for justice. It’s grounded in a critique of power and the intersection of oppressions, and embodies an historical and internationalist framework.

Audience: Organizers from different justice sectors working on – or interested in working on - media bias/accountability and media policy in their regions

Participants will be engaged with multiple approaches: multi-media presentation, a theater game, small groups (by sector and region), a mini-panel, large group discussion, and pop-up 3-min presentations.

The workshop and handouts will be in English.

The biggest challenges our sector faces are a lack of inter-connection with other sectors, minimal sector infrastructure, and a lack of shared strategy. We propose collective egagement in an alliance of regional organizations and networks from across the country to address these very gaps.

Session Content Outline:

- Strong cultural opening about media and its impact on our historically marginalized communities;
- Overview presentation of the threat that corporate and right wing control of U.S. media poses to the world and our communities;
- Small groups by issue/sector to discuss how that threat impacts each of our communities and relates to our primary justice issues, report-back;
- Introduce media justice as a framework and present MAG-Net’s 10 point policy agenda for media justice;
- Large group, share and discuss case studies of successful strategies for media justice organizing from around the country;
- Small groups by region break out and facilitators use worksheet to:
a) get feedback on 10 point policy agenda,
b) Identify media justice opportunities/ strategies/ campaigns in that region
c) Identify priorities for a nationally-networked campaign;

- Regions report out to large group, map responses, ID next steps for building together