In a recent interview on Triggernometry, writer Richard Miniter offered a refreshing shift in the way we think about politics, institutions, and civic life. Moving beyond the tired axes of left and right, he proposed a far more incisive lens: the division between accountable and unaccountable interests. This distinction is not only apt for political analysis—it’s crucial for understanding the drift of media and communication institutions away from public service and into inertia or self-preservation.
The accountable class, as Miniter suggests, consists of those whose actions have direct and tangible consequences. If they fail, they lose customers, clients, or jobs. If they succeed, they build reputations, livelihoods, and communities. Think of small business owners, freelance creators, grassroots organisers, or volunteers running a local radio show. Their work lives or dies on its relevance, responsiveness, and real-world impact.
The unaccountable class, by contrast, operates in institutions where consequences are either delayed, diffused, or deflected. Bureaucrats, tenured administrators, executives at legacy media organisations, or compliance-bound regulators often exist in structures where feedback is procedural, not practical. These are systems that reward continuity over responsiveness, credentials over contribution, and loyalty over initiative.
This split maps cleanly onto the contemporary media landscape. Corporate media—centralised, risk-averse, and largely insulated from the communities it claims to serve—exemplifies unaccountability. Protected by scale, brand identity, and regulatory privilege, it too often treats audiences not as civic participants but as consumers to be managed or data points to be monetised. These structures persist not because they are effective, but because they are entrenched.
By contrast, community media is the very embodiment of accountability. Local radio stations, volunteer-run podcasts, grassroots newsletters, and cooperative news projects depend on their listeners, supporters, and participants. Their feedback is immediate. If content is irrelevant or tone-deaf, the audience walks away. If it resonates, people show up, contribute, and share.
This difference isn’t just a technical matter—it’s a moral and political one. If media is to be the lifeblood of democratic life, it must be rooted in accountability. That means we urgently need to reconsider the way media is structured and supported.
Miniter’s test for accountability is deceptively simple: do you live by the results of your own decisions? It’s a standard we should apply across the media landscape. Who bears the consequences of editorial failure or institutional drift? Who benefits from responsiveness and innovation? Who gets heard, and who is gatekept?
We believe that this framing offers a powerful tool for evaluating the civic function of media institutions. And it raises a further set of challenges:
What happens when the flow of public funding, advertising revenue, and political capital is disrupted—redirected away from unproductive, unaccountable media institutions and towards independent, agile, and community-rooted producers?
What new media ecosystems could flourish if resources were distributed not by bureaucratic insiders, but according to a framework of demonstrated accountability, transparency, and contribution?
What would civic dialogue look like if the loudest voices were no longer those who are shielded from consequence, but those who are exposed to it every day?
What happens when citizens themselves become co-producers of media—not just passive recipients—and start shaping the platforms, narratives, and dialogues that affect their lives?
What if, instead of subsidising inertia, we reward integrity, creativity, and responsiveness?
These are not hypothetical questions. They go to the heart of what it means to live in a democratic society. Community media, because of its structure and ethos, is well-positioned to lead this shift—but only if we create a policy and funding environment that recognises and supports its value.
That means abandoning legacy assumptions about scale, credentials, and prestige. It means resisting the seduction of centralisation, and investing instead in distributed, local, voluntary, and donor-supported models that are embedded in place, relationship, and accountability.
At Decentered Media, we believe this isn’t just desirable—it’s necessary. If we are to build a foundational social economy where communication serves people rather than profits gathered by protectionism and extraction, then it begins by asking: who is accountable? And what are we going to do about it?