Opinion:  Come Celebrate Amherst Media’s 50th Anniversary and the Contribution of Independent Media to Sustaining Democracy

My colleague, Anthropologist Tom Patterson, used to say that a free press is the right of anyone who owns one.

Across the history of this country, media have been increasingly defined by corporate ownership, and that has certainly become more problematic as that ownership has become concentrated in the hands of a small collection of billionaires. Now, people like Rupert Murdoch, David Ellison, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg, have a frightening degree of control over what we know and what we think. While the advent of the internet offered a brief hope (or perhaps a delusion?) of expanding people’s access to what they could create and share, the false promise of social media was quickly exposed as an effective mechanism for reinforcing illiberal corporate hegemony.

But resistance to control of the media has always been a feature of the media ecosystem. There has always been work at the margins with people endeavoring to create and to inform outside the corporate-imposed constraints. Graffiti, leaflets, samizdat, zines, pirate radio,  independent media (including public access radio and television), and more recently, blogs, vlogs, and podcasts have offered people an outlet to make their voices heard, outside of corporate and government control.  

We now stand at a crossroads between democracy and fascism, at a point where the government and its corporate allies are aggressively trying to silence voices/ideas that they do not favor. The recent defunding of NPR/PBS, Trump’s successful lawsuits against television networks, and Trump’s campaign to censor American history and how it is taught and told are dramatic examples. The will to control is, of course, not new, but it is especially salient at this moment.

In these perilous times, independent media outlets like Amherst Media are essential to defending democracy and to preserving our right to free speech. Amherst Media offers us not only a vehicle to make our voices heard without fear of government or corporate retribution, but it also invites us to speak up. And it trains people, especially young people, in how the media works and how to use it, so that they will be more media literate, less likely to be thoughtless consumers of what the corporate media serve up, and will be better prepared to defend democracy.

Amherst Media is the oldest continuously operating public media organization in the United States. On May 2, the community will gather for a gala at the UMass Campus Center to celebrate Amherst Media’s  50^th anniversary. Come join us in celebrating that half-century of contributions to keeping Amherst informed and engaged, and the role the independent media plays in sustaining our democracy.  

There’s still time to register.  Get tix here.

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Amherst Media Celebrates 50 Years of Community Media Leadership (Amherst Indy)