The perspective on alternative media as a form of “institutionalised dissent” seems especially pertinent to the particular field of local media in Denmark and the successes and failures of a project like TV-Stop. A term originally proposed by alternative media scholar Chris Atton (2002), it refers to how state regulated local media forms a regularised environment for alternative culture. Since, as At- ton discusses, alternative media production has always been as much about the modes of production as about the content (content and context are seen as inseparable), radical community media in this state-subsidised and regularised format seems unilkely to ever effec- tively achieve goals such as establishing alternative public spheres. New constellations of production have also appeared as the media landscape is undergoing a major digitisation and re-structuring which also deeply affects the non-commercial local media. In the context of alternative media, the net is obviously the most important
8 Henriksen’s and Mazanti’s 1997 study found that 39% of TV-Stop’s previous members had found
employment and that 37% were in education (p.8). In total, two thirds of those who found employ- ment were working in the media-business or in media-education.
example of a digital medium offering new possibilities for small me- dia operations. Yet other conditions of production apply to the net, and one should be attentive to the hidden regularisation of this sphere – what we may think of as a transformation from institution- alised to “dissolutionised” forms of dissent where the regulations are less transparent and connected to neo-liberal cultural politics.
In 2002, after the shift in Denmark to a new right-wing govern- ment, subsidies to the non-commercial local media were severely cut and local media associations were starting to talk about “Ber- lusconi-times” (Thomsen et. al., 2006). After many complaints, a new support system with more subsidies was implemented in 2006, even though support was significantly lower than recommended by a report commissioned by the ministry of culture itself (Kulturmin- isteriet, 2006). At the same time, new regulations also sprung into action that imposed new rules on the non-commercial local- stations, stating that they would have to explain more in depth than before how they were rooted in their local community, geo- graphically speaking. Some organisations raised concerns that this could be interpreted as a way to actually diminish the more opin- ionated radio and TV-stations catering not so much to geographi- cally delimited localities as to special interest groups within politi- cal subcultures and minority groups. It would also become increas- ingly evident that this was also a scheme to further erode the exis- tence of the non-commercial branch of local-media in favour of commercial interests. The proposal for a new national media policy released in the summer of 2006 seemed to confirm these fears since, the non-commercial local media were now literally written out as constituting an autonomous sector. Gone was the paragraph specially catering to the non-commercial local-media, which were instead consistently grouped together with local media in general, including commercial license holders (Kulturministeriet, 2006).
The new media policies bore signs of a political agenda of cater- ing to the liberalisation of the media market in new ways. The non- commercial sector was now still able to obtain a special financial support but it would not enjoy the same privileging from the state when it came to license issuing. This development seems to fit per- fectly with the description from David Harvey (2006) of the poli-
tics of neoliberal restructuring. Under the mantle of decentralisa- tion and democratic ideals, the Danish cultural ministry was carry- ing out de-regulations leading to market friendly re-regulations such as: closing down all local-TV boards who previously issued the local licenses, reducing the financial support to almost nothing in order to be able to raise it marginally under paroles of “generos- ity” the following years, opening up the financial support to other actors than media broadcasters, bureaucratising even more the conditions for obtaining a license and at the same directing the regulations surrounding the license issuing in favour of commercial actors (Kulturministeriet, 2006).
In 2007, the Danish ministry of culture also pioneered a new kind of “media-license” fee which replaced the traditional radio- and television-license for ordinary citizens. The fee was thereby ex- panded to include all PC’s, certain mobile phones as well as other new media devices based on the convergence of media. The argu- ment behind this expanded media-license was that you could access the content of the Danish public service stations not only by the tra- ditional media such as television and radio but increasingly also through net-based technologies. By implementing the new media- license fee system, the Danish state was actually the first in the world to have introduced a taxation that also impacted Internet users. 9 Maybe this new form of financing of the state media would be a logical development if the Danish state had also been implementing a progressive politics on the development of the new media infra- structure. The proposal for the media policy 2007-10 however only got into such topics concerning the digitisation of analogue media, which will be the topic of the final part of this case-study.
It is in the shifting contexts for television and media production that the tv-tv project becomes interesting as an object of study, with a transversal approach that on the one hand points back to historical examples of the ties between artistic media activism and local media and on the other hand to the new types of networked cultural pro-
9 The license aimed to be ”neutral” towards technology (Kulturministeriet, 2006, p.7). This model is
now a more common practice in the European Union with countries like Germany and Sweden hav- ing adopted similar media licenses.
duction emerging in between analogue and digital technologies and associated modalities of organisation and production.