What is social action and community media?
Social Action Media
Social action media is media that's produced in a creative way to both raise awareness to a cause and educate the viewer in an attempt to invoke social action. Its goal is to analyse social issues and problems whilst getting the public to focus their attention on it and take action.Community media
A community is a group of people with a shared interest, similar characteristics or who live in the same area.
The goal of community media is to provide an alternative to the corporate media which focuses on profits. They are driven by social objectives which can empower the community by providing local knowledge. It's common to find community media focusing on topics such as social justice, human rights and environmental issues where they provide a voice for causes and people who otherwise wouldn't necessarily have them.
The 53 minute documentary by the magazine company Vice is about life in Liberia after the civil war in the 90s. The journalist visits a small handful of ex generals/warlords and asks them about their role in the civil war and also how they spend their life now. The purpose of the video is to raise awareness to the situation in Liberia as like most cases once the initial fighting is over the media forgets what happened and moves on to more current things.
Shock tactics are used throughout the video to keep the viewers attention. An example of this would be where it shows old footage of a child soldier holding up a bloody, dirty human heart shouting to the reporter and those around him that he intends on eat the heart. Another scene shortly after shows the torture of the then leader of Liberia by rebel forces where he can be seen covered in blood and screaming "enough!". Footage like this is used to set the tone for the rest of the video, so throughout the documentary you can't forget how barbaric some of these people were/are.
'An Evil Scheme': Milonov Attacks Homosexuality - Channel 4
Jon Snow interviewed prolific Russian Homophobe Vitaly Milonov for channel 4. The intent of this video was to demonstrate how homophobic Vitaly is and raise awareness about the national issue which was Russia's anti-gay laws. An example of this was getting him to admit that he believed homosexuality and pedophilia go hand in hand. He asked closed, blunt questions to get precise answers from Vitaly without him having an opportunity to preach hate to the audience watching. Jon didn't ask developmental questions to make Vitaly feel at ease because of the nature of the interview. If Jon appeared to be soft on Vitaly there would be a chance that there would be a large amount of backlash from the interview including complaints to Ofcom. Jon tried to antagonise Vitaly by wearing a rainbow striped tie as rainbows are associated with the LGBT flag and LGBT pride/support. This made it obvious from the beginning of the video that he had no intentions of forming a rapport with Vitaly.
Food for Thought - Covent Garden
An example of local community action media would be the documentary "food for thought" which focuses on a lady called Vanessa Garrett who owns a vegetarian restaurant in Covent Garden. the purpose of the documentary is to "focus on one small story of London in the 21st century to tell a bigger, more threatening one". Throughout the documentary Vanessa discusses the heyday of her business and how its now closing due to the gentrification of her local area making the rent for her business unaffordable. The use of slow melodramatic music helps set the tone of the video and make the viewer feel sympathetic for the people effected. The purpose of the video is to raise awareness of gentrification.
