Michael Myerson

Michael Myerson is an author and activist whose career in civil rights, peace advocacy, and political organizing connected him to the intellectual tradition that shaped early community media's understanding of itself. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1940, he came of age in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California Berkeley, where he served as president of SLATE, an early New Left organization, from 1961 to 1962. He became a prominent voice against the Vietnam War, organized the US Peace Council as its executive director in 1977, and wrote extensively on civil rights, labor, and political power, including Nothing Could Be Finer, a 1978 examination of racial and political repression in North Carolina, and Watergate: Crime in the Suites, published in 1973.

The NFLCP, the predecessor to the ACM, recognized Michael with the Dirk Koning-George Stoney Award for Humanistic Communication in 1988, placing his work alongside scholars and activists whose arguments gave community media its civic and democratic vocabulary. The award in those early years often went to people outside the station world whose thinking informed what the field believed about power, communication, and the public interest.

His work argued, across decades of writing and organizing, that who controls the means of communication determines whose stories get told, and that premise is the same one on which public access television was built.