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It is fitting and necessary that we reflect upon the founding of Freedom’s Journal and the ideals of its founders Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm. Their oft-quoted line about the need to “plead our own cause” to combat a “publick” so long “deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly” are all well remembered during these times when the fluctuations in media and journalism do little to ameliorate the inequality suffered by black America.
As the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell once pointed out, the “evangelists of social media” are convinced that previous revolutionary struggles only lacked a Twitter account or Instagram. Had the revolutionaries and activists been “wired,” he contended, we’d now all be free. However, it takes little more than some studied observation to note the worsening conditions of labor, immigrant populations and black America run concurrent with the rise of the Internet. Put differently, the largest movements for revolutionary change all pre-date the modern technological age.
So as we launch our own online journalism review, as journalists and communication scholars seeking also to redefine our relevance amid a shifting media terrain, let this also be a moment where we revisit the questions of how we develop a more radical black public sphere; a space where the real exchange of information and ideas will promote the political organization necessary for radical change; and whether or how the development of such a space can take place online.
Among the current crises of corporate consolidation, journalist layoffs and wild disagreements over the value of journalism education is still the concern best described recently by Todd Steven Burroughs, co-author with Herb Boyd of “Civil Rights: Yesterday and Today” (2010), “From the outset, all looks great,” says Burroughs.
“Black people have the ability to create news sites and be their own agenda-setters. Looking below the surface, though, what you see is a sophisticated version of Mordecai Noah denying Russwurm and Cornish space in The New York Enquirer. White corporations have created black news and infotainment websites, while black activists and scholars are relegated to email blasts, blogs and small black political websites, with the Black masses relegated to a kind of non-stop digital
conversation on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. So the agenda-setting power that Russwurm and Cornish seized and used to connect and educate the black community in the 19th century has been seized by corporations in the 21st, leaving counter-hegemonic black journalism in the Web's margins.”
Margins indeed. The Internet, and access to it, remains a highly stratified and segregated space under the aegis of the wealthiest corporations. Where are we to find the kind of journalism required for massive social change amid what Matthew Hindman, author of “The Myth of Digital Democracy” (2008) describes as a “Googlearchy” where 25 percent of all Internet traffic is porn, email, and search engines; only 3-4 percent goes to news; only 1.2 percent goes to political blogs; and where major newspapers online at 30
g Dr. Jared A. Ball
CONTROL THE MEDIUM,
The Struggle to Plead One’s Cause in the Digital Age
CONTROL THE MESSAGE: