Press relations for social movements: Why talk to traditional media?

There have been times in my life when I’ve been able to be an extremely active, engaged, busy participant in the revolutionary movement. As my free time contracts, and especially since becoming a parent, I’ve had to narrow my focus even more. Today, I am the press spokesperson for People Against Prisons Aotearoa, and this is now the majority of what I can contribute to the organisation. While I’m under no illusions that this is the most important work that we can do - after all, it’s the kind of work only one person can really do at a time per organisation - I do think that press relations can be really important. I wanted to write this short piece, which I hope will only be the first of a series, to talk about why social movements should engage with traditional media, in an era when social media is becoming ubiquitous.

In 2015, I was one of the people to put together a blockade of the Auckland Pride Parade to protest the inclusion of cops and prison officers in our parade. In the course of blocking the parade route and holding up a banner, I got dragged away by a security guard and bodily thrown onto the pavement, shattering my humerus into pieces. Then a cop grabbed me by the broken arm and handcuffed me - not an experience I can recommend, no matter how kinky you think you are. Was that how we should aim for our direct actions to go? In short, no. Not even close. However, my very public ownage provided a platform for our clique of radicals to communicate our critique of cops and prisons in the media. Over the following months and years, we morphed from a vague association of people into a formal prison abolitionist organisation. I have been communicating our organisation’s critique of cops and prisons ever since, as People Against Prisons Aotearoa’s elected press spokesperson. I’ve seen first-hand how important media work can be for community organisations, and have some ideas of how we can bungle it.

First, we should get clear on what I mean by media work. I’m talking specifically about the kind of formal public relations that suit-and-tie businesses and organisations engage in with the news media. Obviously, social media is only becoming more and more important, but for reasons that I’ll explain, I don’t think that the organised left can afford to neglect to work with news media. This includes, to give a broad overview, television news, newspapers, radio, and digital news - although, of course, many of these outlets will be produced by the same newsrooms of journalists. This, though, is the basic shape of modern news media. In its most basic form, press relations means that you say something to someone who works for the news and they publish it. The process will usually be much more complicated than that, but that’s the general outline of what we’re talking about doing when we say that community organisations should engage in media work. If this is the what, we should talk about the why. 

I’m not too proud to say that I’m a poster. I’ve been logged on, explaining why we need to do the damn thing to the bourgeoisie, since I was a teenager. For many people, especially people who are passionate about social change, social media is a primary way we express ourselves. So if social media is such a big part of our lives, and of how we stay up to date with what’s happening in the world, why do we need to step back backwards and start dealing with newsrooms and reporters? Can we not just do eerily coordinated group dances and go viral on Tiktok? Despite, and alongside the growing role that social media plays in the media ecology, I think that traditional media provides two really important things to community organisations. Firstly, traditional media gives us access to an audience that our own networks couldn’t reach, and secondly, it legitimises our organisations and perspectives in a way that talking to our bases wouldn’t do. 

We default to social media for most things. When I want to say something about prisons, my first instinct isn’t to type up a press release, it’s to slap it onto Twitter. Organisations should probably work the same way. Because social media streams over ordinary people all day, every day, it’s an effective way of drawing them into the orbit of social movements. First people get mad at injustice, then they get radicalised to the solutions, then they show up to a few events or meetings: that’s how you create an organiser. At every stage in this process though, there’s a self-selection mechanism at work. If I don’t think of myself as the kind of person who listens to what prison abolitionists have to say, for example, I’m probably not going to keep up with what that organisation has to say. Traditional media, because it is such an immense machine for producing and spreading stories, tends to shape the news landscape in a way that we just can’t. If you get a story placed with enough outlets at the same time, it isn’t just ‘a story posted several times at once,’ it’s current events. And the godawful thing about current events is that we’re all always stuck in them. 

Traditional media can make a story into the thing that everyone is talking about. This is the first reason that traditional media is so important to social movements: its reach isn’t limited by self-selection in the way that our social media presence is. If I do the best thread ever on Twitter - and I’m good at Twitter - occasionally someone who is very logged on will mention that they know me from that website. But last week my doctor told me that she thought I had made a good point in an interview for the evening news. The level of reach and penetration that traditional media can provide to social movements is incomparable to social media. Social media is a good way of radicalising our base and communicating with the people who we know are already on-side, but traditional media lets us speak to society as a whole. When we do media work, we reach all kinds of audiences that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to get to. When we consider racial, class, and generational differences in how different populations use social media, traditional media can help us speak directly to the people who need to hear our messages. This is overwhelmingly true of Māori media in particular, where the journalists are typically as left-wing as we are. Provided that we can get a story through the editorial process and published - another topic I’ll return to in a later piece - traditional media can give us a platform, and an audience, that we wouldn’t be able to get any other way. Even if it means having an awkward conversation while half-dressed in your doctor’s office. 

Many people, of course, probably think that what we have to say on the evening news is nonsense. Sometimes I joke that my job as press spokesperson is to get called a stupid bitch, but it’s sort of true. This is the second reason that we should engage in media work: by putting our analysis of capitalism in front of so many people, even ones who disagree with us, traditional media helps to normalise our opinions. If we reach a wide audience, even if some of those people are unimpressed or actively hostile, many more will at least passively accept that we have a point. Our ideas become part of the range of ideas that are expressible. For instance, during two terms of the neoliberal Ardern government, welfare policy continued to be brutally austere. Because Auckland Action Against Poverty, a beneficiaries’ rights organisation, had an effective media strategy, newsrooms typically went to AAAP rather than only to the National Party for criticism of state policy. This normalised a radical critique of welfare from the left, establishing that this is one way in which people can think about welfare policy. The effects of normalisation are hard to measure. Nonetheless, as a press spokesperson for an organisation with a position well outside of those espoused by the bourgeois electoral parties, strangers often tell me that my press work helped them to come to a radical critique of bourgeois institutions. We are helping to fertilise the soil, preparing people to understand the situation we are in. 

Beyond the normalisation of our ideas, working through traditional media can also help to legitimise our organisations. When People Against Prisons Aotearoa was founded we were, as far as decision-makers were considered, essentially a random group of people. We could have been literally whoever. By being a structured organisation (have you noticed that even the anarchists are doing this now, by the way?) and engaging in repeated, competent press relations, we became a known quantity - a legitimate part of the landscape when it comes to criminal justice issues. This same calculus is a large part of why I’m completing a PhD, too: when you speak with an authoritative voice, drawing on a range of sources of legitimacy, people start to listen to you. This opens doors for our organisations that might otherwise have remained closed, and helps us to form sympathetic contacts in positions of (often only minor) power that we can draw on when we need to. The campaign against armed police patrol trials was able to draw on a range of allies and co-conspirators, at least in part because those people had seen us presenting ourselves well in trustworthy and reliable media outlets. 

I do not mean to suggest that the media landscape, as it currently exists, is an uncomplicated ally of the revolutionary movement. Time Warner are not going to start running guns any time soon. What I do suggest, though, is that traditional media provides unique opportunities for the organised left that we have the means to exploit. Traditional media is the basis of the news cycle, and the decisions of large newsrooms and their editorial staff largely determine what affairs can become current affairs. Traditional media reaches people on a scale that the organised left can’t, given that we still lack the kind of centralised and democratic political apparatuses necessary for our own ‘party’ media. By propagating our messages through traditional media, we build the legitimacy of the revolutionary perspective, helping these ideas to seep into the mainstream. We also legitimise ourselves organisationally, helping to build the kind of revolutionary institutions that we will need when the time comes for political confrontation with the ruling class. By the same token, clumsy and ineffective press relations - coupled with unstable organisational structures and disorganised strategy - can completely destroy revolutionary projects. Media work may only be a small part of it, but it is nevertheless, part of the great work. 

Emmy Rākete (Ngāpuhi) is a communist and community organiser based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She helped to start People Against Prisons Aotearoa back in 2015.