Chicago Media Action formalized as a group in early 2003 on the cusp of the media activism movement achieving a breakthrough moment. That year, 2003, proved pivotal in retrospect as it represented the capstone of that year's media ownership fight, the subsequent uprising and victory, and the first National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR) as a noteworthy gathering for the movement for media reform.

That movement is unquestionably still around all these years later. Certainly, many of the players who were influential in the media ownership uprising of 2003 -- such groups as Free Press, FAIR, the Benton Foundation, the Prometheus Radio Project, Media Alliance, Public Knowledge, and the Union for Democratic Communications -- are still around. Indeed, many of these and other groups that have worked in media and policy long predate the media ownership uprising of 2003. What's more, the uprising would not have happened without the difficult work they and others took to build the organizational and intellectual foundation that nurtured the uprising.

Unfortunately, other participants of the movement have left the scene: efforts as MediaChannel, the Media Access Project, the Independent Media Center (to a great extent), and, you could also say, Chicago Media Action (these newsletters notwithstanding). The NCMR was first held 2003 and in the decade that followed was held five more times, the last being the 2013 NCMR in Denver. But the NCMR hasn't been held since 2013, now twelve years on. (I reached out to Free Press to ask directly why they haven't held an NCMR since 2013; as of this writing, they haven't responded back to my inquiry.)

But just because the NCMRs for whatever reason or reasons (and there may be sound reasons why they haven't been held), along with some groups dissolving or going defunct, doesn't mean that the work has stopped. What's more, political movements wiill ebb and flow. One recent article talks about the "moments of the whirlwind", where political movements that were carefully nurtured and organized sometimes grow quite suddenly and abruptly outside the control of those nurturers and organizers, but also help propel the movement to heights undreamt of. In the past, I referred to this phenomenon as a "Seattle" moment, referring to the protests in Seattle in late 1999 that forced a collapse of a ministerial of the World Trade Organization.

The media activist movement got its own "Seattle" moment in 2003. I would contend that the media reform movement got its "lucky" break, of all things, as a result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The run-up to the invasion was marked by enormous protest in Chicago and worldwide, but those protests got nary any coverage on the major media at the time -- broadcast television, cable television, and newspapers. On the contrary, the build-up towards war and its dubious case was a consistent, nonstop drumbeat that helped galvanize the support necessary for the war to take place. After the war launched, word spread that the already-rotten major media that successfully pushed for a bad war were about to get a lot worse because of the media ownership rule rewrite to come, and that energy against war policy channeled into opposition against media policy. If the war didn't happen, I think those media ownership policies would have stuck, the media would have changed dramatically, and history would have been different.

Thanks to that outpouring of outrage, the media ownership rule rewrite was stopped in 2003 and remained blocked for the next eight years thereafter. And with that dramatic win, more wins followed. The lessons from fed into the fight for net neutrality, which helped put that on the radar -- first with defeating the dismal COPE Act, and eventually winning a policy fight at the FCC. The efforts to increase the number of community radio stations won progress on the policy front as a direct consequence of the aftermath of media ownership fight, and was built on top an effort that was decades in the making which successfully defeated the commercial broadcast lobby. The first NCMR, which was anticipated at a "couple of hundred" attendees, grew to attendance in the thousands and would remain at that level throughout the decade. Nothing succeeds like success.

And yet, it can be difficult to sustain that grassroots energy, and that may be one key reason why there hasn't been any NCMRs in the past decade. Plus, the wins that were achieved in the past currently are now under threat for reversal. The media ownership fight endured a loss for the good guys at the Supreme Court. A lower court has put a block on network neutrality, perhaps indefinitely. The political rightwing in the United States has continued to build and invest in their own media infrastructure, organized well enough to push through a win in the 2024 election. The "major" media has shrunk in influence and funding, and has largely given way to the rise of the tech giants appropriately abbreviated as FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google). The media environment has changed considerably since 2003.

And yet, some things haven't changed. We are still mired in a capitalist hellscape, and so media themselves reflect and reinforce those existing capitalist relations. Corporations then as now dominate the media landscape, whether they be "old" media (television, radio, newspapers) in 2003, or "new" media (computers, internet) in 2025.

And yet, during all this time, we fight on, and we hope that we can catch and/or generate more "moments of the whirlwind". It can seem daunting, but that is no reason to stop. Plus, there remains the potential with lessons learned and experience gained to grow new possibilities. It looked hopeless in 2003, and yet we won in dramatic nobody-saw-this-coming fashion. It looks hopeless now; what victories await us with the right effort, the right mentality, and the right lucky break?

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