ACME

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The Action Coalition for Media Education:

ACME is a coalition of teachers, scholars, students, journalists, public health advocates and community organizers who believe that today’s media system is profoundly undemocratic.

The Framers of the U.S. Constitution gave special privileges and protections to the media—via subsidies and free speech laws—due to the media’s critical role in maintaining an open and robust democratic culture.

Many citizens—including journalists and media professionals—believe that today’s media system is failing our democracy in numerous ways:

  • With the media owned by some of the world’s most powerful corporations, independent and in-depth coverage of how power is exercised is rare (e.g., the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the digital spectrum give-away). With a truly democratic media, in-depth coverage of how power is exercised would be the norm, not the exception.
  • Sound-bite journalism and over-reliance on ‘official sources’ ensure that only a very narrow range of voices and perspectives is heard. These practices thus ensure that the interests of economic and political elites are largely unexamined and unchallenged. (e.g. the absence of Ralph Nader, Jim Hightower, labor voices, etc)
  • A media system dominated by advertising revenue pays attention to audiences favored by advertisers. As a result, poor and working-class citizens are largely ignored, unless they are subjects of crime or catastrophe.
  • A media system dominated by entertainment values trivializes achievement by its focus on celebrity, the sensational, and the superficial.
  • A media system obsessed with high-consumption lifestyles promotes behaviors that are harmful to the public health and to the health of the planet.

These weaknesses are understood consciously or intuitively by many citizens. The goal of ACME is to raise this growing awareness to a threshold of action in order to bring about democratic media reforms, including the creation of alternative media that are non-commercial, locally-controlled and locally-accountable.