Rather Than Whining About the Media, We Should Fight to Win

On strategic persuasion in the 21st century.

In her interview with the political scientist Omar Wasow, Liberal Currents Executive Editor Samantha Hancox-Li asks whether we’re even capable of making productive use of the media today the way that the Civil Rights Movement did. “If the media is hostile to the kind of message that we want to be telling, if they’re kind of more sympathetic than we want them to be to Trump and his policies, how do we deal with that problem?”

There is a persistent myth that the Movement succeeded chiefly because of the sympathetic and monolithic media of the era, which helped structure a national consensus in favor of ending Jim Crow. By contrast, Wasow noted that “In the 1960s there was a pro-segregation faction of the press,” and even outside of the South, aside from the black press specifically, the press was “often indifferent to the interests of black Americans.” In most other countries throughout the 20th century, mass media was aligned with the interests of the state, rather than being independent watchdogs. …

Continue reading this article by Adam Gurri, “Rather Than Whining About the Media, We Should Fight to Win,” here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/rather-than-whining-about-the-media-we-should-fight-to-win/