Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World

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Description

Contesting Media Power explores the worldwide growth of alternative media that challenge the power concentration in large media corporations. Media scholars and political scientists analyze alternative media in Australia, Chile, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Sweden, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Topics include independent media centers, gay online networks and alternative web discussion forums; feminist film, political journalism and social networks; indigenous communication and church-sponsored media. This important book will help shape debates on the media's role in current global struggles. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Reviews

While mainstream corporate and state media are growing in power and reach, they are increasingly contested by a wide range of alternative media. Contesting Media Power contains a series of studies of alternative media and their funding, practices, and often contradictory effects. Covering a broad array of media and locations, the collection attests to growing anti-corporate globalization movements and a promising proliferation of alternative forms, strategies, practices, and movements. Written by scholars and activists from around the world, this book provides state-of-the-art reports on media activism and alternative media. -- Douglas Kellner, UCLA; author of Media Culture and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy
This collection helps move the discussion of alternative media away from abstract puffery toward concrete appraisals. Many of the essays are especially useful for bringing political assumptions to the surfaceand for exploring new media that originate in less developed parts of the world. All in all, a vigorous step forward. -- Todd Gitlin, Professor of culture, journalism and sociology, New York University
Edited collections that bring together examples of alternative media are far from new but this one is substantially different and merits praise on several grounds. Of particular importance is the attempt to provide a comparative look at how media power is challenged in different places under different political and social conditions. I liked this bookit lifts the spirits while retaining a sense of political realism and critical evaluation. May there be more like it. -- Natalie Fenton, Professor of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths University of London * European Journal Of Communication *

Author Bio

Nick Couldry is senior lecturer in media and communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. James Curran is professor of communications at Goldsmiths College, London.