When public health campaigners talk about the dangers of ultra-processed foods, they use a language that is increasingly familiar: engineered for addiction, stripped of nutrition, aggressively marketed to children, and disastrous for long-term wellbeing. The food industry’s reliance on ultra-processed products—loaded with sugars, salts, and fats—has created an environment where choice is illusionary and dependency is systemic.
Yet this is not just a problem for our bodies. It’s also a problem for our minds and our communities.
Junk Media Is the Civic Equivalent of Junk Food
The crisis in our information ecosystem shares a striking resemblance. If junk food is a public health emergency, then junk media is a civic health emergency.
Junk media—mass-produced content designed to manipulate, distract, and divide—is as omnipresent as ultra-processed snacks. It floods our screens with outrage, repetition, trivia, and half-truths. It monopolises our attention, shapes our social norms, and hollows out our capacity for independent thought, civic engagement, and meaningful dialogue.
Where junk food is sold under the guise of convenience and taste, junk media is presented as entertainment, freedom, or even democracy in action. But both are built on the same logic: over-consumption, dependency, and the extraction of value from people’s lives for profit.
Structural Harm, Not Just Personal Choice
Both systems are structurally exploitative. Both depend on sophisticated marketing to hook consumers early and often. Both prioritise short-term gratification over long-term wellbeing. And both displace richer, more sustaining alternatives—be that fresh, community-grown food or locally-rooted, participatory media.
This is not just about individual habits. It’s about the systems that limit our choices and undermine our ability to develop literacies—whether that’s in understanding what we eat or how we engage with media.
Learning From Public Health Responses
The response to the junk food crisis has been slow, but it is beginning to take shape. We are seeing:
- Taxes on sugar and salt
- Restrictions on advertising to children
- Removal of processed foods from school meals
- Investment in food education and local supply chains
We need a parallel response for media—rooted in the same recognition that people deserve better than what the market currently serves up.
Media Literacy Is Not Enough
Just as food literacy helps people make better nutritional choices, media literacy must help people critically assess and choose what kinds of stories, platforms, and discussions they engage with.
But literacy alone is insufficient if the environment remains saturated with harmful alternatives.
We need to go further: to create, support, and sustain civic media ecosystems that offer viable, trusted, and meaningful alternatives to junk media. These spaces must be inclusive, rooted in local experience, and governed by public and community values—not corporate shareholder interests.
The Role of Government and Public Policy
Government must act not as a censor, but as a steward of our shared communicative environments. This includes:
- Investing in independent, community-based journalism
- Regulating digital platforms and algorithmic harms
- Supporting digital public infrastructure
- Ensuring participatory access to the means of media production
These are not luxuries. They are the democratic equivalents of fresh food markets, public transport, and clean water. They sustain the capacity of communities to think, speak, and act together.
Join Us in Building a Better Media Diet
If you believe that healthier media ecosystems are essential to a more inclusive and democratic society, we invite you to be part of the change.
At Decentered Media, we’re building a network of people who care about shifting away from exploitative, junk media models and towards communication that values trust, participation, and social meaning.
Subscribe via Patreon to support our work and take part in our ongoing discussions, consultations, and knowledge-sharing sessions. Together, we can imagine and build media systems that nourish, rather than deplete, our civic lives.