CounterSpin Interview
Malkia Cyril: “The Internet–as a platform–has become one of the most powerful ways to bypass the exclusionary and discriminatory mainstream media.”
There likely would have been media coverage of the Ferguson, Missouri, police killing of Michael Brown and the public protests that followed. But it’s hard to imagine that the tone of that coverage would be the same —with stories validating black people’s anger, questioning the militarization of police, and challenging media’s criminalization of people of color—were it not for the forceful intervention of black social media, where so-called “mainstream” perspectives weren’t just called out but circumvented.
Many people will tell you they didn’t learn what was happening in Ferguson—much less why it mattered—from the paper or the TV at all. The implications of that fact inform the work of Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice, which is also home to the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net). CounterSpin’s Janine Jackson talked to her by phone from the Bay Area.
CounterSpin: What’s happening in Ferguson isn’t a story about the Internet, of course, but it has put in high relief the need for black people to tell our own stories in our own voices, and not to wait until somebody else decides the story’s important. Before we talk about the threats to that space whose power we’re just discovering, let’s talk for a minute about that power. I was sort of tickled to see David Carr at the New York Times [8/18/14] credit Twitter, per se, for showing that something significant was underway in Ferguson. Let’s put a finer point on it: It was particular folks using Twitter and other tools to tell this story, wasn’t it?
Malkia Cyril: Yes, I mean, the lingo “Black Twitter” isn’t about the company at all. It’s about the hundreds of black blogs, independent black blogs and black bloggers, websites, individual pundits that used the social media platform to microblog and talk about what they see as the primary issues affecting black communities.
And one of the reasons that is so important is because these journalists—black journalists—have been slowly excluded and marginalized in mainstream media. The numbers of black journalists able to work in mainstream media has decreased over the last 10 years significantly.
Photos like this one of protests against the killing of Mike Brown were distributed via social media.
And what we find is that both these journalists, and the community journalists that we’re talking about on Twitter, have found social media to be an outlet, to be a way to share their work in a way that wasn’t able to happen on CNN, MSNBC or any of the other cable news outlets. Because cable is owned by mega-corporations and doesn’t allow for the kind of independent voice that a more social platform on the Internet allows for.
So Black Twitter—reminiscent of and reflecting the black blog, an independent black voice—that’s what really brought the story of Ferguson to the majority of black audiences.
CS: On the one hand, you want to say that it’s not the technology that’s key. I mean, media and other powers could have tried to listen to black people if they were writing on parchment, you know? But at the same time, the technology and the kind of communication that it makes possible is something different, isn’t it?
MC: Absolutely. The decentralized nature of the Internet allows for a level of democratized voice that we’ve never seen. I mean, the Internet—as a platform, as a vehicle for voice in black communities—has become one of the most powerful ways to bypass the exclusionary and discriminatory mainstream media. And because of that, because of its decentralized and democratized nature, black people are very conscious of the need to fight to maintain their online and digital voice.
The Civil Rights Act is 50 years old. These two pictures were taken 50 years apart. Behold our progress. #Ferguson pic.twitter.com/8PNn8eteO2
— Jackie Summers (@jackfrombkln) August 13, 2014
CS: Let’s talk about that fight. We know that for corporate media, this story is going to go away. Every racist act in corporate media is an anecdote. We’re told that things “raise questions” when they might more appropriately be said to answer them. We hear, “Gosh, this doesn’t look like America,” when it looks exactly like America.
And Ta-Nehisi Coates [Atlantic, 8/15/14] wrote recently about the “politics of changing the subject.” You know: Let’s talk about black folks killing each other.
All of this is why, even when decent coverage happens, it feels like reinventing the wheel, and it points up the need for a sustained space to have a conversation that doesn’t just serve as corrective of that dominant narrative and stop there, but moves forward. So what is the state of play on the fight to have the Internet be that sort of space?
MC: Right now, as the people of Ferguson are on the front lines demanding justice for yet another murder of a young black man—unarmed—black people are also on the front lines to maintain the right to speak online about the rampant police brutality in our communities.
And one of the front lines that black people are fighting on is the fight for the open Internet. Black communities across this country are saying loud and clear that they want to keep the Internet open. We understand that the only way, that the court in Verizon v. FCC said very clearly that the only way the Federal Communications Commission can enforce non-discrimination rules online is to reclassify broadband as a Title II common carrier service.
Now, let me explain that for a minute, because people say, “Well, what is Title II?” Title II simply means that the Internet should be treated as a public utility, it should be regulated like a public utility. Some organizations are concerned that if we regulate the Internet as a public utility, it’ll kill innovation. But what black communities know very well is, two things: One, public utilities—when they are truly public—are secure and reliable. So that’s number one. We want a reliable platform for independent voices, and treating it like a utility, regulating it as such, makes it a civil right that we can access publicly. So that’s number one.
Number two, some organizations and individuals have been concerned that if we treat the Internet like a public utility, that a future FCC, that a future Congress will come along and take that away. And to that, I think black communities are very clear.
When we fought against segregation in education, we did not accept anything less than the ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. There were rulings prior to that. There were court cases for more than a decade prior to that victory. We didn’t accept any piecemeal, half-baked legislation. We only took what was morally right and just. And that was an end to segregation in education. And that’s what we’re talking about right now.
Ultimately, reclassifying broadband would ensure no segregation online, that all voices would be able to join the public conversation, and that black voices in particular would be able to be raised around issues like police brutality, like the incident in Ferguson. And that’s what we’re fighting for.
CS: Used to be when you told someone that you were working with media policy, they would come back with, “Oh, well, I do real activism. I’m in the street,” and media is somehow an ancillary issue. That day’s over, isn’t it? I mean, not everyone can work on every issue, but the separation of media policy issues from other issues that we care about is not a meaningful separation.
MC: It was never a meaningful separation, and civil rights activists in the 1960s knew that very well when they took television news station WLBT to task for their failure to cover segregation in the South. And in fact, that case—the case of WLBT—became the defining case that allowed for public comment in media policy processes. So civil rights organizations have long been an advocate for media as a civil rights issue.
It’s only as media and telecommunications have become so lucrative, it’s only as telecommunications companies have used the buyouts of our communities as a public relations strategy, that these issues have become technocratic, wonky and separate from the core issues of social justice.
What we know, what Ferguson shows us, what it shows me, is that in fact there is no path to victory, to change, without the visibility and representation that media provides. And that as long as that media is owned, operated and controlled by the largest Internet service providers, the largest cable companies, the largest private families, the black voice is in jeopardy. And if the black voice is in jeopardy, black freedom is in jeopardy.
And that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re not fighting for some back-end, technical, technocratic issue. We’re fighting for the cause of black freedom. We’re fighting for the same cause that all the black newspapers right after slavery were fighting for. We’re fighting for an end to any kind of system that violates or limits our voice. And that is what we’re talking about here today. It’s not about media policy. It’s about real justice. n
Malkia Cyril’s recent article, “Thank You Black Internet for Bringing #Ferguson to Me,” appeared on the Huffington Post (8/15/14), among other outlets.
