Page 228 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media power, challenges and alternatives 207

operations; some re-producing hegemony, others clearly counter-hegemonic;
some reactionary, some reformist, some revolutionary, and others less
obviously political.

Contrary to the voluntarist notion of independence deployed by Bailey et al.,
alternative media do not operate entirely outside forces of state and market.
Many internal and external factors shape the performance and social influence
of alternative media but CPE gives particular attention to issues of financing and
resources. Most alternative media involve small-scale production, taking advantage
of cost-benefits from technology for production and/or distribution (such as
‘desk-top publishing’ and video technology in the 1980s). Sources of income
have included sales (music fanzines for instance) but also subsidies and support.
There is media produced directly by organisations and subsidised from income
generated elsewhere or included in costs of membership or services. There is
media funded wholly or partly by third-parties: grant-funding bodies, civil
society organisations, trade unions, political parties, states.
A key issue for contemporary debates is the relationship between technological
resources and financing: does digitalisation lessen problems of a lack of financial
resources, and problems of patronage and control by funders? Second, much
alternative media production has relied heavily on ‘free labour’, individuals
giving their labour and time. Such altruism is rightly celebrated at the heart of
Benkler and others’ visions for non-commodified Internet exchange. However,
that connects to the emergence of more critical readings of free labour as
exploitation and the limits imposed by capital and states on co-operation (Fuchs
2011). This links to a third key area for analysis: the distribution of resources for
alternative media. Entman and Steinman (2008) highlight the pressures that
draw working people away from contesting dominant power interests. Increasing
marketisation and the global recession has meant, in much of the West, a
weakening of the labour movement and socialist parties, shrinking state and non-
state funding for civil society organisations. In general, the traditional funding
resources for alternative media have declined. This increases the importance of
assessing how the affordances of digitalisation affect the capacity to generate
alternative media.

Internet and radical media

One of the most researched exemplars of radical media in recent years has been
Indymedia. This also serves to highlight some of the strengths and limitations of
radical media. Indymedia (www.indymedia.org) activist network grew out of a
collective that produced live information during the ‘Battle of Seattle’ against the
WTO meeting held there in 1999. By 2004 Indymedia had 142 affiliated sites in
54 countries, in 2013 it had around 150 (not all active). Indymedia has been a
celebrated experiment in democratic media as well as ‘globalisation from below’,
encouraging and empowering people to ‘be the media’, providing a focus for