Theorizing Alternative And Mainstream Media Analysis

2 Theorizing Alternative and Mainstream Media
This chapter provides definitions of alternative and mainstream media and puts these two media categories into political context. It then explores different binary and convergent theoretical approaches to studying the alternative-mainstream media spectrum.

2.1 Defining Alternative and Mainstream Media
The contemporary U.S. media market can be virtually divided into two niches – the niche of alternative media and the niche of mainstream media. Alternative and mainstream media are hard to categorize (Downing, “Audiences and Readers” 625). According to Atton (“Alternative Media” 7), there is much heterogeneity of styles, contributions and perspectives even within a single area of alternative media.
He claims that ideological struggles work through a political strategy, whose aim is to bring the hegemony of the dominant political group to the end. Ideological struggles occur both when people try to contest the established ideological field in favor of an entirely new one and when they want to initiate disruptive changes of the existing ideologies by transforming their meanings. Gramsci recognizes the importance of popular culture and the media in the ideological process. As Atton (“Alternative Media” 45) puts it, only alternative media challenge hegemony. They do it either through their explicitly political platform, or through the transformation of the existing roles, routines, emblems and signs. Downing (“Radical Media” 38) describes alternative media along the same lines. He calls alternative media radical and suggests that they serve as a generally small-scale oppositional vision to the dominant hegemonic policies, priorities and perspectives. For Downing (“Radical Media” 3-12), the radicalism of alternative media consists of four components. First, radical media should never become a tool of a party or intelligentsia, but they may be partisan. Second, radical media tend to privilege movements over institutions. Third, radical media put a lot of emphasis on the prefigurative politics, or the attempts to embody personal and anti-hierarchical values into the political sphere.
A generalist model was put forward by Hegel and Marx. Hegel regards civil society as an integral part of the market, state and legal framework that balances between private and public interests. Marx follows the same conceptualization of civil society, but he suggests that there is no balance between the private-public interests. For Marx, the bourgeois elite controls state and legal system, which automatically leads to the superiority of private interests over the public ones (Alexander 211-38). A minimalist model was elaborated by Gramsci and Habermas. Gramsci separates civil society from market and state. He calls it a site, where hegemony could be challenged and contested and where alternative conceptualizations of the political-economic system could develop. For Gramsci, civil society is a place of struggle over hegemony. Habermas describes civil society in similar terms, but he adds that it can mobilize citizens for social change and counter-hegemony. For Habermas, although civil society is autonomous of state and market, it is a product of interaction between market and state. It is composed of the intimate sphere, the sphere of associations, social movements and communication forms (J. Cohen and Arato 117-176). Irrespective of the position that civil society holds relative to state and market, it is by no means a single actor. Civil society is marked by a high degree of