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SPECIAL REPORT-MEDIA: Alternative and Influential?

Miren Gutierrez*

ROME, Oct 29 2004 (IPS) - When you hear “alternative media,” it is often alongside such words as “collective,” “citizen-oriented,” and “public.” But what does it have to do with journalism? And how influential are groups like Indymedia, which recently had some of its computers seized?

Within the “alt media” world there is as much diversity of opinion as there are mediums. What is obvious to all is that the so-called “alternatives” are now so prominent that some are becoming “mainstream.”

“Alternative media is the most inclusive definition,” says John DH Downing, director of the Global Media Research Centre at Southern Illinois University and one of the most renowned experts on the topic.

The term embraces “webzines, small-circulation religious bulletins, hobby listservs, cell-phone use in the demonstrations that brought down Philippines president Estrada in 2001, graffiti, as well as politically oriented national and international examples, such as ‘Il Manifesto’, global labour media, the Indymedia network and – at a radically different political location – neo-Nazi rock music or jihadist communiqués,” says Downing in an e-mail interview from Carbondale, Illinois.

The term came into popular use in the United States during the social unrest of the 1960s, when small publications appeared almost overnight, usually opposing the war in Vietnam and segregation, and pushing for things like expanded women’s rights. “Alternative media” was enshrined in the 1970s with the New International Order of Information and Communication – an initiative of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

But these new various forms of communication became a global phenomenon thanks to several international events: in 1994 in Mexico, against the backdrop of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Zapatista National Liberation Army emerged wielding an array of communication technologies it used to mobilise supporters.

The same techniques, such as instant messaging, were in place – and enhanced – during the anti-World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests in Seattle in 1999; at the World Social Forum (WSF), which started meeting annually in 2001; during protests against a meeting of the world’s richest countries (the G8) in Genoa in 2001, and at 2003’s World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS).

In Genoa “there were so many camcorders; they helped to raise the issue of violence by the riot police against protesters. The videos started to circulate in alternative websites, until also the mainstream media in Italy, for example, had to broadcast them and this led to a big debate,” says Stefania Milan, an IPS writer and researcher of “alternative media.”

“The G8 in Genoa was, for ‘alternative media’, much more important than their reporting on peaceful events like the Social Forum,” she adds.

In 2000, during the protests against the inauguration of Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori’s third five-year term, a network of small local radio stations, using the Internet, broke the control that Fujimori and his master spy Vladimiro Montesinos had on the country’s media.

Eventually Fujimori fled to Japan; Montesinos is in prison charged with corruption and human rights abuses.

In addition, “alternative media” played a key role in the 2001 downfall of Philippines President Joseph Estrada, who had been accused in an impeachment trial of corruption and bribery.

With their rise through internet and mobile telephone technology, the “alternative media” became more difficult to define.

“Alternative media is rapidly becoming an irrelevant term as the number and types of outlets for news constantly expands,” says Bill Kovach, founding director of the Washington-based Committee of Concerned Journalists, in an e-mail interview.

Clemencia Rodríguez, professor in the department of communication at the University of Oklahoma, concedes the term is now obsolete.

In 2001 Rodríguez published her own proposal in ‘Fissures in the Mediascape’, in which she coined the term “citizens’ media” as an “attempt to capture the fluid and complex nature of alternative media.”

In an effort to overcome “oppositional frameworks” traditionally used to theorise about “alternative media,” such as “that-which-is-not-mainstream-media,” Rodríguez began defining them in terms of the “transformative processes they bring about,” and also as a departure from the notion that the “mediascape” is inhabited by “the powerful (mainstream media) and the powerless (alternative media).”

She sees them as community media that have other priorities than profit; are connected to social movements; open to participation; employ few full-time personnel and many local volunteers; do not go by the motto “anything goes” but filter the contents; are associated with progressive movements; and respect diversity.

“A skinhead radio station may have an agenda, but doesn’t respect diversity; a fanatic leftist group doesn’t qualify either,” says Rodríguez in a telephone interview from Barranquilla, Colombia.

“Citizen’s media” is close to “public journalism,” often described as “bottom-up journalism,” which reports on public affairs from the public’s point of view.

“They include, for instance, communitarian radios in Southern Chile, whose main audience is civil society: indigenous groups, women activists, fishing associations, hip-hop groupings, who see the need to get together and learn about other organised groups,” Rodríguez adds.

Proponents of “alternative media” often argue that the mainstream media is biased, because of the political and commercial interests of the owners or due to government and party influence. While sources of “alternative media” are also frequently biased, the bias tends to be different, hence “alternative.”

So, are all these organisations, big and small, local and global, “doing” journalism?

“There are alternative sources on the internet and elsewhere that are simply peddling a party line or propaganda, so in many cases the alternative material is a classic example of ‘consumers beware’,” says Kovach.

“In their reporting of news events,” he adds, “I believe they should be held to the same standards of verification as any other media. What good would they be if they knowingly distributed lies or self-interested propaganda?”

As far as “citizen’s media” is concerned, Rodríguez says it has space for professional journalism, but its practitioners go beyond that – with the local community their main concern.

“I found an example of this in a village in Colombia that had been occupied by the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) at Christmas time,” she says.

“Instead of focusing on the violence around them, the local radio decided to cover how people had taken to the streets to sing carols, since they perceived that their community needed to hear about that instead of reports about violence.”

For Downing also, author of ‘Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements’, published in 2001, “alternative media” may include journalistic work, but is much wider in scope.

“The journalism they practice differs, from varying attempts to use news for direct mobilisation and agitation, to providing in-depth information centred on basic social justice issues for an already well-informed audience,” like ‘Le Monde Diplomatique’, Free Speech TV News in the United States or ‘Página Doce’ in Argentina, he says.

Milan and Arne Hintz say in a paper presented at Porto Alegre, Brazil recently: “Alternative media are ‘alternative’ in a structural sense, focusing on collective production, economic independence and a non-hierarchical organisational model, but especially they are ‘alternative’ in terms of content. Counter-information is their main objective.”

“I agree that counter-information is their goal, and I think a worthy one,” says Kovach, “so long as the information is based on factual information and not simply emotional opinion or self-interested propaganda.”

Downing thinks “the ‘counter-information’ model has validity, but a limited validity, because it implies there are two truths, a false one and an accurate one, and that all we need is fresh and accurate facts for the world to find a new and better axis on which to pivot. Historically, that’s naïve, unfortunately.”

Some observers might say that much of the “alternative media” is actually doing what the so-called “mainstream” was meant to do.

Kovach said recently: “A journalist is never more true to democracy, is never more engaged as a citizen, is never more patriotic, than when aggressively doing the job of independently verifying the news of the day.”

According to Downing, “Kovach puts it very well. I wish the brainless pseudo-nationalist voices proliferating in American talk-radio were capable of responding to what he says, but that would require both character and intelligence.”

“Having said that, it depends who defines what journalism is ‘supposed’ to be,” he adds. “Its corporate owners are sometimes more interested in profits than politics, and that has led in a number of cases to some very innovative and insightful journalism.”

“Where the owners’ agenda is explicitly ideological, then their journalists are ‘supposed’ to toe the line. Notions of the ‘fourth estate’ are okay if they serve to encourage journalists to think independently, but often they serve to lull them into extensive bouts of self-congratulation,” argues Downing.

As for “alt media’s” influence and impact, Kovach believes “we are seeing an important strengthening of ‘alternative’ media in the U.S. today, in the important role that internet bloggers (those who write logs on the world wide web, called “blogs”) have assumed in fact-checking the rhetoric of political campaigns and the failure of some mainstream media to adequately do that job.”

“The questions raised by bloggers about documents used to support a report on CBS-TV was a perfect example of how important alternative sources of information can be,” he adds.

CBS anchor Dan Rather admitted in September he was tricked into using dubious documents about U.S. President George W Bush’s service during the Vietnam War.

It was “a landmark moment for the balance between the ‘blogosphere’ and mainstream media,” said Orville Schell, dean of the School of Journalism at the University of California in Berkeley, quoted by CNN.

Influence and power can also be determined by negative reactions.

Two-dozen websites belonging to Indymedia, a “democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate and passionate tellings of truth,” and one of the most well-known “alternative media” organisations were shut down for six days recently.

“To date not ‘The New York Times’, the ‘Washington Post’ or the ‘Los Angeles Times’ have seen fit to comment upon it,” says Downing.

“In their cases, it is a classic instance of the selective ethics that permeate corporate mainstream media, and that give the blunt lie to their professions of ‘all the news that’s fit to print,’ the vital role of independence from the state, the scandals of censorship. Nauseating hypocrisy!” he adds.

As for the impact of Indymedia and their counterparts, “measurement of their effectiveness is too often stupidly conducted, comparing their operation with that of mainstream media,” says Downing.

“Alternative media, especially politically radical media, do not aim to communicate in the same way or with the same publics or for the same duration, as corporate or state media. Their audiences are typically large-scale or small-scale social movements, sometimes in full flood, sometimes in periods of relative quiescence, gathering their forces for the next upsurge,” he says.

“Impact?” says Rodríguez. “Well, think about it … A few years ago nobody knew about us; now I cannot possibly answer to all the requests for interviews and conferences I get.”

*Miren Gutierrez is IPS Editor-in-Chief.