‘We need a media consumers union’

These nascent coalitions grew throughout the 20th century, reaching an apex in the 1960s with the advocacy of lawyer and political activist Ralph Nader. 

He lent his weight to actions such as the Nestlé boycott, launched in 1977 to challenge aggressive formula marketing in the Global South – an effort that led to the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes. 

He also contributed to the enactment of the Freedom of Information Act, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Clean Water Act, the Consumer Product Safety Act, and the Whistleblower Protection Act.

And when he observed how ineffective the Federal Trade Commission had become—a regulator established to protect consumers—he organised a team of volunteer law students, known as “Nader’s Raiders”, to investigate. Their work directly spurred major reforms to what had been a discredited body.

Progressives

During the 1970s, he built on his rising public influence to found several advocacy and watchdog organisations, including the Public Interest Research Group, which continues to work to reduce the influence of big money on government policy. He explained his rationale:

“The struggle for economic justice is best done by those who are victims. They are the ones who have the greatest stake in improving the system; they are the ones who want to make government defend victims, not represent perpetrators. And that’s why I think that the cardinal economic movement in this country is the consumer movement.”

On this side of the Atlantic and beyond, we need to emulate Nader’s Raiders in arousing government attention to ineffective regulation.

We progressives have lost sight of strength in numbers. We need to come together and turn our attention, en masse, to the modern snake-oil salesmen of the billionaire press and their complicit regulator, IPSO.

We need to confront the corruption precipitated by the deregulatory regime of the 1980s—when neoliberalism not only emasculated the unions, it also set about capturing regulators across all industries. 

Democracy

John O’Toole, then chairman of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, spoke in the ’80s of “a period of abuse [when] an advertiser would have his product tested by a sort of in-house or set-up”, essentially allowing companies to mark their own homework. 

This can now be seen as part of the playbook of our unvalidated regulator of the press, IPSO, which is overseen by the very editors it is supposed to scrutinise. It has not issued a single sanction in its entire existence. It is a fig leaf.

Also regarding advertising—but equally applicable to media consumption—Michael Pertschuk, former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, said in 1985:

“Consumers have to organise. They have to organise at the grassroots, and they have to organise in the kind of coalitions with other groups who are really seeking […] democracy.”

The examples above illustrate that a consumer union has the potential to be for consumers what a trade union is for workers.

Accountability

It would be a permanent, organised structure capable of calling consumer strikes, coordinating disciplined boycotts, and escalating action over time. 

Between campaigns, it can conduct research, build strategy, recruit members, and sustain organisers through dues—allowing momentum to accumulate rather than dissipate. While campaign groups can win isolated victories, a consumer union can build a durable movement.

Media Revolution was conceived and established as just such a coordinator of coalitions. Next year we will launch our media consumer union, Touch Paper. 

It is the natural evolution of our work—a vehicle to transform scattered individuals into a coordinated force capable of confronting the propaganda machinery of our own malignant press. 

Inspired by the spirit of the National Consumers League, Nader’s Raiders, and others, Touch Paper will demand a system of quality control for press and broadcasters alike: one rooted in honesty, accountability, and independence from vested interests. Only then can we award a genuine chartermark for trustworthiness.

Safeguarding

Our economic leverage comes not from withdrawing our labour but from withdrawing our consent. When we act together, we can still shape markets and politics—directing our power in ways that impose real, material consequences on corporations. 

And while political strikes by workers remain illegal under the UK’s anti-union laws, consumer strikes are (so far) fully lawful, giving people a potent and accessible means of resistance.

Media is the root system from which all other systems draw their power. It is the front line in the battle for democracy. 

As Edward Snowden observes: “We cannot change who owns the means of production unless we change who owns the means of communication.” 

Yet today’s media landscape is held in place by three concentrated forces—press barons, state broadcasters, and big-tech oligarchs—whose dominance fuels an attention economy built on fear, division, myth, disinformation, and addictive emotional manipulation.

Taking on a malign media is the frontline battle in safeguarding the truth that real democracy depends on.

This Author

Tom Hardy has over 40 years’ experience in education as an editor, writer, and consultant. He has written for the Times Educational Supplement and the International Journal of Art and Design Education and advised the Department for Education. He now works with Media Revolution.