Core to our mission at Agency is to raise the profile of anarchist ideas and the anarchist movement, and to influence the way they are treated in public conversation. Understandably, anarchists have long questioned the value of talking to the corporate-controlled, mainstream media since they so often mischaracterize and misrepresent anarchists and anarchist ideas. So why talk to them?
The short answer is that the mainstream media is a large and available platform for communicating anarchist perspectives to the wider public: all of us who struggle to thrive under capitalism and the state. At Agency, we view the media as another terrain of struggle to act on.
There are many independent media outlets: in the streets, in our homes and community spaces, through social media and our own corners of the internet. All of these give us more control over how our message is crafted than outlets that are mediated by reporters, editors, and corporate media moguls. However, the mainstream corporate owned media still informs public discourse in a way independent outlets do not. Engaging with mainstream journalists, maintaining contacts with them, and doing so even when their coverage is lopsided, tone-deaf, patronizing, and (to be kind) inaccurate, is crucial to not ceding public discourse to state and market forces alone.
There are few ways to reach as large an audience as traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, cable TV, and radio. While more and more people get news from social media and sites like TikTok, the mainstream, corporate news media’s presence online gives it a bigger audience than it has ever had. (In January 2025, nytimes.com had nearly 500 million visits, and cnn.com had 399 million, more than the entire population of North America.)
When people tell you that the “legacy media” is dead, don’t believe it (and immediately ask yourself what side they are working for). One reason these news sources command so much attention is that, rightly or wrongly, people trust them more than right-wing sites like drudgereport.com (audience of 51.1 million) and newsmax.com (audience of 28.8 million). What’s more important for anarchists and other activists, the mainstream media still use actual reporters. Granted, the numbers are shrinking; nearly 8,000 US journalists were laid off between 2022-2024: 9% of the 89,330 people working as newspaper, broadcast, and online editors, reporters, and journalists in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Don’t expect the numbers to go up again soon, either, as the corporate media continue to consolidate in the interest of boosting profits.
But that only makes the remaining journalists more important. The sad fact is that most of the online outlets that people go to for news and first-hand analysis do not actually report news. Their business is to aggregate and comment on it, often in an extremely biased and distorted fashion. That means they depend upon a shrinking population of reporters and writers at the “legacy” outlets to supply them with the raw material from which they build their content. And that means that establishing relationships with those journalists and obtaining a voice in their coverage can amplify that voice throughout the many, many layers of information, misinformation, and occasional truth disseminated online.
Can does not, of course, mean that it will. And we wouldn’t go so far as to say that any coverage—even negative coverage—is better than none. The mainstream media have done tremendous damage to the work done by anarchists over the past 200-odd years by misreporting, misrepresenting, belittling, and demonizing us. But they have done just as much or more damage by not seeing us at all. As anarchists, we have a basic problem in that we operate outside the boundaries of what most mainstream journalists assume are subject areas or “beats” worth covering: government and mainstream politics, business and economics, religion, culture and art, and community in the de-politicized way they are taught to think of it. By insisting that humanity and the earth can be understood without reference to—even in opposition to—capitalism and the State, we place ourselves outside their accustomed system of value.
What is that system of value? Most of the time, it’s what their most important sources convince them it is.
Most reporters think of themselves as smart, savvy, wised-up people who understand the system and know how to work within it, which means knowing what it can tolerate and what it can’t. Most metro or city reporters rely on police and city officials for tips, stories, and quotes. National and foreign affairs reporters rely on politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and think-tank denizens (they also tend to be educated at the same Ivy League or equivalent universities as those people). Reporters covering business and economics depend on corporate execs and mainstream economists not only for news and data but to explain to them what it all means. So all of these reporters take on the ideological coloring of their most valued sources, often without knowing it.
None of which inclines them to be very comfortable with anarchists, because we overtly challenge the legitimacy and trustworthiness of all of those sources.
If we choose to talk to mainstream reporters, then, our job isn’t just to give them information in hopes they will report our activities and views accurately. It’s twofold: First, to understand what they are covering, how our work and our perspective can fit into it, and how to make ourselves valuable to them as sources. Second, to educate them about what anarchism means and why, what it aspires to, and what it is not. The same goes for op-ed editors, who consider opinion pieces submitted by outsiders; their bias is always in favor of people with the kind of professional credentials they are taught to respect and the demographic profile the ad sales team wants to reach.
Often this is a highly opportunistic matter; a protest, an occupation, an arrest, a successful cooperative initiative can suddenly make a reporter hungry for information and insight from us. We need to be there to offer it. But unless we can get the media to understand that anarchism is a valid tradition of thought and action with an intelligent point of view on the events of our day, they will continue to marginalize us and treat us as unserious, and do us harm in the process.
Getting a hardened reporter, marinated in the ideology of the State, to understand anarchism in this way is not easy, to say the least. And when we succeed, there is still the problem of the reporter’s editor, publisher, ad sales (who are hardly inclined to think that anarchism sells), and the outlet’s corporate owner. The odds, in other words, are long, and there are plenty of pitfalls; you can read about them—and how to avoid them—here.
So doing nothing is not an option. By no means does it make sense to devote too much time to this game, of course; we have other means of getting our message out, including through our own media and our own social networks, and plenty of other work to do. But the payoff, when we can reach vast audiences by offering direct insight and perspective that represents the anarchists and anarchist ideas clearly and truthfully, can be well worth the effort.
Resources:
Shaping Anarchist Narratives: Why it’s Important to Engage the Mainstream Media
Core to our mission at Agency is to raise the profile of anarchist ideas and the anarchist movement, and to influence the way they are treated in public conversation. Understandably, anarchists have long questioned the value of talking to the corporate-controlled, mainstream media since they so often mischaracterize and misrepresent anarchists and anarchist ideas. So why talk to them?
The short answer is that the mainstream media is a large and available platform for communicating anarchist perspectives to the wider public: all of us who struggle to thrive under capitalism and the state. At Agency, we view the media as another terrain of struggle to act on.
There are many independent media outlets: in the streets, in our homes and community spaces, through social media and our own corners of the internet. All of these give us more control over how our message is crafted than outlets that are mediated by reporters, editors, and corporate media moguls. However, the mainstream corporate owned media still informs public discourse in a way independent outlets do not. Engaging with mainstream journalists, maintaining contacts with them, and doing so even when their coverage is lopsided, tone-deaf, patronizing, and (to be kind) inaccurate, is crucial to not ceding public discourse to state and market forces alone.
There are few ways to reach as large an audience as traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, cable TV, and radio. While more and more people get news from social media and sites like TikTok, the mainstream, corporate news media’s presence online gives it a bigger audience than it has ever had. (In January 2025, nytimes.com had nearly 500 million visits, and cnn.com had 399 million, more than the entire population of North America.)
When people tell you that the “legacy media” is dead, don’t believe it (and immediately ask yourself what side they are working for). One reason these news sources command so much attention is that, rightly or wrongly, people trust them more than right-wing sites like drudgereport.com (audience of 51.1 million) and newsmax.com (audience of 28.8 million). What’s more important for anarchists and other activists, the mainstream media still use actual reporters. Granted, the numbers are shrinking; nearly 8,000 US journalists were laid off between 2022-2024: 9% of the 89,330 people working as newspaper, broadcast, and online editors, reporters, and journalists in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Don’t expect the numbers to go up again soon, either, as the corporate media continue to consolidate in the interest of boosting profits.
But that only makes the remaining journalists more important. The sad fact is that most of the online outlets that people go to for news and first-hand analysis do not actually report news. Their business is to aggregate and comment on it, often in an extremely biased and distorted fashion. That means they depend upon a shrinking population of reporters and writers at the “legacy” outlets to supply them with the raw material from which they build their content. And that means that establishing relationships with those journalists and obtaining a voice in their coverage can amplify that voice throughout the many, many layers of information, misinformation, and occasional truth disseminated online.
Can does not, of course, mean that it will. And we wouldn’t go so far as to say that any coverage—even negative coverage—is better than none. The mainstream media have done tremendous damage to the work done by anarchists over the past 200-odd years by misreporting, misrepresenting, belittling, and demonizing us. But they have done just as much or more damage by not seeing us at all. As anarchists, we have a basic problem in that we operate outside the boundaries of what most mainstream journalists assume are subject areas or “beats” worth covering: government and mainstream politics, business and economics, religion, culture and art, and community in the de-politicized way they are taught to think of it. By insisting that humanity and the earth can be understood without reference to—even in opposition to—capitalism and the State, we place ourselves outside their accustomed system of value.
What is that system of value? Most of the time, it’s what their most important sources convince them it is.
Most reporters think of themselves as smart, savvy, wised-up people who understand the system and know how to work within it, which means knowing what it can tolerate and what it can’t. Most metro or city reporters rely on police and city officials for tips, stories, and quotes. National and foreign affairs reporters rely on politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and think-tank denizens (they also tend to be educated at the same Ivy League or equivalent universities as those people). Reporters covering business and economics depend on corporate execs and mainstream economists not only for news and data but to explain to them what it all means. So all of these reporters take on the ideological coloring of their most valued sources, often without knowing it.
None of which inclines them to be very comfortable with anarchists, because we overtly challenge the legitimacy and trustworthiness of all of those sources.
If we choose to talk to mainstream reporters, then, our job isn’t just to give them information in hopes they will report our activities and views accurately. It’s twofold: First, to understand what they are covering, how our work and our perspective can fit into it, and how to make ourselves valuable to them as sources. Second, to educate them about what anarchism means and why, what it aspires to, and what it is not. The same goes for op-ed editors, who consider opinion pieces submitted by outsiders; their bias is always in favor of people with the kind of professional credentials they are taught to respect and the demographic profile the ad sales team wants to reach.
Often this is a highly opportunistic matter; a protest, an occupation, an arrest, a successful cooperative initiative can suddenly make a reporter hungry for information and insight from us. We need to be there to offer it. But unless we can get the media to understand that anarchism is a valid tradition of thought and action with an intelligent point of view on the events of our day, they will continue to marginalize us and treat us as unserious, and do us harm in the process.
Getting a hardened reporter, marinated in the ideology of the State, to understand anarchism in this way is not easy, to say the least. And when we succeed, there is still the problem of the reporter’s editor, publisher, ad sales (who are hardly inclined to think that anarchism sells), and the outlet’s corporate owner. The odds, in other words, are long, and there are plenty of pitfalls; you can read about them—and how to avoid them—here.
So doing nothing is not an option. By no means does it make sense to devote too much time to this game, of course; we have other means of getting our message out, including through our own media and our own social networks, and plenty of other work to do. But the payoff, when we can reach vast audiences by offering direct insight and perspective that represents the anarchists and anarchist ideas clearly and truthfully, can be well worth the effort.
Resources:
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