Page 230 - Critical Political Economy of the Media

Media power, challenges and alternatives 209

between realised exchanges and the grassroots communication of world citi-
zenry. The publics emerging in cyberspace do establish some conditions for a
transnational public sphere, but they are not themselves fully democratic
(Hackett and Carroll 2006: 49). A related concern has been with the quality of
communications exchange in counterpublic spheres. In a study of Indymedia
Athens, Milioni (2009: 427) offers a qualified endorsement of exchanges that
nevertheless challenge normative ideals of public sphere deliberation; even
though debates ‘are often swarming with aggression and fail to reach consensus,
participants debate argumentatively about the issues under consideration and
define, autonomously and intersubjectively, the rules and terms of their own
discussion’.
The adoption of the Internet by civil society organisations over the last two
decades has brought about an expansion in scale and scope, made both alter-
native media and civil society networks more visible, and accessible, and
encouraged a flourishing of investigation that has helped move research from the
margins towards the mainstream. Even so, significant gaps remain in under-
standing ‘the norms, processes and discourses that are developed [in alternative
media], the activists who sustain them, the publics who use them, the reach of
their products within the general public, and the reception and interpretation of
their content’ (Milioni 2009: 413).

Citizen journalism
The deficiencies of adopting a simple opposition of mass and alternative media
are amply revealed by the practices labelled as ‘citizen journalism’. These range
from images captured by the public and offered (or sold) to mainstream media, to
online comments on professional published work, to blogs and web publishing,
through to unpaid or underpaid journalism. Citizen journalism has emerged as
the loose, indistinct term for diverse forms of participation and production ranging
from ordinary people (often witnesses to news ‘events’) supplying material to
mainstream media, to contributors to competitor news services such as the Huffington
Post, to those engaged in radical and oppositional media (Allan and Thorsen
2009). The category of blogger, in particular, is extremely fluid covering the
whole range (Bailey et al. 2008: 151, Hindman 2009).
News production has been dominated at a national level by corporate or state
institutions and globally by Western news corporations from the nineteenth to
the late twentieth century, but today a growing range and variety of non-Western
news formations produce subaltern contra-flows (Thussu 2006, 2007). New
technologies have aided the expansion of news and cultural flows within geo-
cultural and diasporic communities. The main resource-rich providers tend to be
commercial firms or state-sponsored providers (Russia Today, CCTV-9, France
24, Al Jazeera), but there are alternative providers, usually resource-poor,
financed by various sources, which may include state subsidies, advertising, sub-
scription and ‘free’ labour. There is no space to do adequate justice to these