It’s just money. Really.
Yes, every year I post about where I am planning on donating money and encourage you to donate as well. Here’s my post from last year, where I talk about what the financial impact to social movements would be if people gave away just 1% of their income.
Today, I would like to reference, again, this quote from activist and media scholar Sut Jhally , which while it talks about independent media, can obviously be applied to broader social movements as well:
“Independent media have been severely under-funded relative to how much individuals give to the corporate media. If you have cable, and I include myself in this when I think about where I spend my money, my media money, if you have cable or satellite TV or a connection to the internet, you are directly funding corporate media. People think nothing of spending $100 or more a month on cable and the internet. And yet independent media has to beg to get a few scraps. I just did the math on this. It’s sometimes really good to fantasize—fantasy is always a prerequisite for social change—Let’s presume you could get a million people on the Left to take media issues seriously. That’s actually, given that MoveOn has three and a half million members and a lot of other sites have membership in the millions, that is not an unreasonable thing. Let’s say you could get a million people to rethink their media consumption and their media expenditures. Let’s say you could get a million people to spend $100 a month on independent media. If you don’t have a calculator, I’ll do the math for you. That is 1.2 billion dollars. If we act together and if we make the media something that is central to how we think about politics, think of what that would make possible, and how we would aid progressive forces in this country. Why don’t we do that? Because media issues are still seen as secondary.”
We need to start taking the issue of funding seriously. Now.
So, here’s who I will be giving money to this year:
