Abstract
The results of the 2016 US presidential election, and the broader ascent of neo-fascist populism across the globe, have prompted widespread concern regarding journalism’s present and its future. During the last decade, the press have taken their share of punches coming from multiple directions. Advertisers have abandoned print and have sought alternative marketing venues, while owners have cut newsroom budgets demanding high profits. Alongside an expanding global security apparatus, governments have cracked down on whistle-blower sources to protect state secrecy. The technological fracturing of our public sphere has bred a distrust that dovetails with the persistent ideological assault on the ‘liberal’, ‘establishment’ or ‘mainstream’ media. If there is anything that the divided public might agree on, it’s that journalism (and, by extension, journalism studies) needs a reboot.
In this context, Adrienne Russell’s Journalism as Activism: Recoding Media Power compels us to think about how progressive forces, globally, might continue struggles for justice and democracy in the digital environment. Reflecting the changes that are happening on the ground in activism and media-making, Russell puts forward a provocative framework for considering the nature of journalism in the 21st century. Rather than understanding media as a set of institutions or of representations, Russell shows how journalistic and activist practices work to construct discursive space. Through detailed examples, she shows how journalism today is being transformed by a new ‘media vanguard’ who embrace ‘hacktivist sensibilities’. Russell’s multiple succinct, yet detailed, studies help explain how contemporary activists are using the digital environment to pursue the essential work of journalism – truth-telling – and how journalists are becoming increasingly open to relying on activists as sources.
Russell shows these transformations taking place through chapters on networks, tools and practice. In Chapter 2, she argues that activists in the digital age have moved away from trying to win favourable coverage by mainstream journalists, as a ‘logic of aggregation’ allows activists to ‘mobilize, frame and counter-frame, critique and retaliate’ in more efficient, less expensive ways and enables movements to ‘share power over messaging’ with the press, as ‘networked publics … [expand] the sphere of legitimate debate through an examination of the relationships between sources and popular voices via online linking in coverage of Occupy, climate justice and Internet freedom movements’ (pp. 33–34). Relying on innovative data visualizations, Russell demonstrates that the network environment is moving us away from ‘a codified set of forces’ of the mass media era that determine content.
These transformations are being compounded by activists, as discussed in Chapter 3, who are exploiting mainstream and niche technologies, as ‘techno-political action tends to reproduce the myth of techno-liberation’, even as commercial platforms such as Facebook fall under greater scrutiny due to their active role in state and corporate surveillance (p. 72). Thus, activists are favouring and developing tools that embed values of community and transparency, constructing the architecture for a more democratic journalism. While commercial social networking platforms ‘symbolize both tethering and liberation’, Russell argues their ‘ease and widespread use … outweigh the constraints and drawbacks in the minds of many activists’ (p. 91). By creating alternative tools that enhance access and security, coordinating and sharing resources, and reporting, activists ‘facilitate collaboration and collective storytelling, help harness local expertise, and promote new and sophisticated forms of investigation’ (p. 105).
Russell argues in Chapter 4 that these transformations mark journalism as a contested space, as new normative understandings of what journalism should offer the public emerge. While legacy media expand ventures in data journalism, with new commitments to transparency and cooperation, activist-journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Bill McKibben, Tim Pool and Juliana Rotich are all engaged in ‘boundary work … expanding on the ground notions about who is a journalist and where the work of journalism takes place’. Perhaps one of Russell’s most important observations is that these activist-journalists have traded ‘objectivity’ in ‘to engage in advocacy on behalf of facts’ (p. 138). In this way, today’s ‘media vanguard’ are resuscitating professional journalism’s ethos even as they fundamentally question many of their structures and practices.
For Russell, these shifting boundaries are not only changing the relationship between journalism and activism but they also demand that media scholars rethink their conceptualization of media and, in particular, media power. While ‘activist media have long delivered alternative readings of the events of the day’, media-makers today ‘also shape the norms and values’ of media space. Elaborating upon Silverstone’s notion of a ‘mediapolis’, Russell argues that a focus on practice highlights ‘the intense struggle underway between the old and the new, between the controlled and the free or open, and between conceptions and appreciations of things amateur and professional’ (p. 152).
Undoubtedly, our journalistic environment is in dramatic flux and Russell offers an excellent treatment of the ways in which the Left are transforming that environment. Thus, Journalism as Activism is a valuable contribution to the literature on media activism in the digital age. To her credit, Russell leaves the outcome open – the struggle is underway and the result is not inevitable. ‘States and corporations are using tools for control and surveillance, while networked publics are pushing back technologically and by sharing their points of view with mass audiences’, she notes (p. 106). Furthermore, Russell concedes that the ‘media vanguard’ are primarily US-educated White men, ‘reflecting and amplifying offline inequities’ (pp. 141–142). And, she suggests that a democratic ‘front end’ that is incongruous with undemocratic back-end architecture may work to produce a ‘Spectacle 2.0’ with limited political impact (pp. 107–108).
Having today – 13 December 2016 – watched Tweeted videos of embattled rebels and desperate civilians as Aleppo fell, this certainly seems like a distinct possibility. Indeed, the last months have demonstrated that the opening up of journalistic space and the move away from professional norms have expanded propaganda’s reach as much as they have emboldened new forms of truth-telling. The era of mass media may be behind us, but it is unclear whether we are on the brink of the Renaissance or the Dark Ages. Russell’s work shows us how such uncertainty and openness in our media, our politics and our technology may help us wield new forms of power to build a more just and equitable world.