MLK’s Media Lesson for America

Posted January 19th, 2009 by Jordan Berg

Three months after his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was frustrated by the government’s inaction on civil rights. Worried about President Lyndon Johnson’s unwillingness to move on the issue, he is said to have told fellow Southern Christian Leadership Conference minister Rev.Walter Fauntroy, “We are still a 10-day nation, Walter.”

King was frustrated that the media – and by default the nation – had an attention span of only 10 days.

As we commemorate King’s birthday, we are once again reminded not just of the moral vision he set for this country, but the power of the news media to alter, manipulate and relay important stories to the public. King’s skepticism of the news media is still relevant today. With only a few corporations controlling our media, we have not progressed to a media system that values depth in its news cycle.

Hundreds of stories have been buried or unreported this year alone as the media spews out content that is cheap, easy to produce, and doesn’t upset stakeholders. These lost stories include the massacres in Darfur and Liberia, the detainment of human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, the ongoing civil wars in Colombia and the Congo, the Tsunami in southeast Asia, the recovery effort in the Gulf Coast following Katrina, and the failure to care for our returned men and women in the armed services — just to name a very few.

But even in King’s day, the news media was still giving the public hard-hitting news stories and gripping images of the civil rights struggle. What would the civil rights moment have been if we had not seen King’s speech on the National Mall in its full 17 minutes? Would it be as powerful in the 30 second soundbites we get today? Would the Birmingham boycotts, the desegregation of lunch counters and bus terminals, and the fight for voting equality have succeed if not for these printed and broadcast images: dogs attacking people, cops spraying protesters with water hoses, and the faces of the murdered innocent Americans fighting for their freedom?

The drive to increase profits and decrease any possibility of offending the all-mighty advertising dollars would have silenced any of the stories that gave credence to the civil rights struggle; they wouldn’t even make it onto the airwaves and pages of today’s news media.

Because of the power of King’s message and the eloquence with which he declared it, we often forget how long and tirelessly many Americans worked to achieve his vision. King understood the power of the media to transmit and translate the Black American struggle, but he was worried that the press’ short attention span held back the movement.

How many equally important movements and issues are being held back by an even more sensationalistic and less substantive corporate media?

In today’s media consolidated America, the next fight for progress must be the media, because through reforming our information system, we can transform our democracy.

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