Community media versus the mainstream media

Unlike corporate media which is controlled by commercial enterprises, the control as well as the ownership of community media belongs to the local community to which their media

content is targeted. Community media is energised by ‘social objectives’ and “empower people rather than treat them as passive consumers and they nurture local knowledge rather than replace it with standard solutions” (Howley, 2005:2).

The interest of corporate media in focusing on the society’s mainstream issues can largely be explained through the lens of Political Economic Theory of media which sees media as “a part of the economic system” whose main objective is to help the “economic interests” of the big businesses by helping them to establish and expand their markets. This being the case, the media should engage in producing material and content that help the businesses achieve their main business objective which is maximising profit. According to this Theory, maximum profit can be made in urban centres where there are more people living and hence where there is a bigger consumer demand and more spending power. Therefore, as vehicles for the businesses to help sell their products, media should aim at producing mainstream media content that would help attract big audiences who could then be put at the disposal of the big businesses to advertise their products. By favouring the wealthy, the larger communities who have the potential to yield more revenue and hence the potential to be a better market for the advertisers, the theory marginalises the interests and information needs of smaller communities (McQuail, 1983:61). Community media was thus born because of the inability of the mainstream public service media to accommodate the interests of the small and diverse communities (Mc Quail, 1983:98-102). Thus, as an answer to the “profound dissatisfaction with mainstream media form… content… and promoting community solidarity” (Howley, 2005:2), community media became the “vital alternative” to the mainstream commercial corporate media which are more focused and motivated towards making a profit (Dagron, 2004:48).

With the need to serve the mainstream communities, ‘mainstream’ media’s focus on disseminating more general news and programmes also meant that small and diverse local communities had little or no choice but to listen to news and information that never addressed interests of their community affairs, subsequently making the small communities tired of listening about everything happening elsewhere and being unable to know much

about what was happening among their communities. Thus, no matter how much interest there was among the local community to know what was happening in their own “backyard” (Forde, Meadows & Foxwell, 2003:232), this opportunity was never present in the mainstream or commercial media that standardised the unique characteristics and values of small communities in favour of creating a single “community media…that underlines local cultural expression” (Howley, 2010:4).

The local community media is therefore, about the local community communicating “with one another without the intervention” of corporate media or government media or “multinational global media” (Opel, 2004:3). Community media, therefore, became the protective “antibodies” (Lewis, 1993) that helped the local community find “their way out of the hegemonic media system building their own capacity to communicate” (Dagron, 2004: 48) and giving them the joy of experiencing their own community life and culture (Hendy, 2000) - the very thing they wanted but which was until the arrival of community media, marginalised and neglected by the mainstream media (Lewis (1993). Thus, it was the inability or the inadequacy of mainstream media to give ample access to address the realities that necessitated the local communities to come up with an alternative community media solution that could redress the communication gap between the national level and the community level and help the community to stay in tune with their own communities (Hendy, 2000).

Discussing the role of mainstream public media, Downing (2001:39) also suggests that the mainstream media focuses on the interests of the main government which are seen as ‘foreign’ when seen through the eyes of small local communities or communities of interest which have nothing in common with the mainstream media. The small community media operations are as Downing suggests simply efforts of local community members who as media producers aim at “consciousness raising” in their communities to mitigate the hegemony of mainstream media (Downing, 2001:16).

media that is operated by small communities who do not possess a strong financial backing. The community media functions with “relatively small paid staffs, relying instead on volunteers to perform the tasks and functions associated with media production, distribution and”…it encourages “participatory decision-making structures” (Howley, 2010:4) that are ‘horizontally structured’ and hence does not give an ‘organisational stability’. Moreover, by focusing on “non dominant discourses and representations” that do not give the community media any financial resources (Bailey, Cammaerts and Carpentier, 2008:20) or attract any advertising revenue, the community media has to depend on its community, for survival. Hence, by relying on “donations, underwritings, and limited advertising, grant funding, in- kind contributions, and other non-commercial forms of support”, the community media is able to perform with an independence that is not seen in corporate controlled media. Although this independence comes at a cost, it does provide protective shielding “from the direct and indirect influence advertisers exert over media form and content” (Howley, 2010:4).

From the discussion above, mainstream media, if seen through the eyes of a local community, can be viewed from two perspectives. One is, the local communities are sick and tired of seeing media used by governments in the guise of public service media to disseminate information of their choice rather than what the communities want. The other is, the communities are sick and tired of the powerful and rich elitist media corporations that impose a corporate media hegemony over others, bringing media mergers nationally and internationally to a level that has imposed standardised music, programmes and news that cut across borders making the world a global village in terms of media, threatening the world of multiple cultures and communities. Media theorists have described these two perspectives in the following terms: media democratisation and media globalisation.