The actual situation ('conventional paradigm')

Vision ('new paradigm')

Alternatives

What is the responsibility of the individual for the media’s power – and what is our capacity to live into being positive, transformative media?

Yes Magazine, Winter 2003, pages 32-36
Several examples of alternative media groups. For example, Third World Majority (TWM), “a collective made up of women of color who provide training in new media and access to equipment.” 33

‘Fair Use’
The ‘Fair Use Doctrine’ makes it possible for non-profits to distribute previously published material.

Pirate and web radio stations
“Most pirate stations are now moving to the Web, out of FCC jurisdiction. Radio For All, at www.radio4all.org, maintains a directory of these stations.” Making Sense of Media, Rodman, 198

Improving public access media
“Public-access television in the digital age can encompass a wide variety of old- and new-media services, including broadband Internet access. For examples of what savvy negotiations and community activism can produce, take a look at Grand Rapids, Michigan’s Grandnet, www.grandnet.org, and Chicago Access Network Television, www.cantv.org, whose public access broadcast, media training, and online resources are triumphs of public-interest media.” Yes Magazine, Winter 2003, 36.
Improve media policy
This is the subject of Our Media, Not Theirs, Robert McChesney – and I’m sure there are some excellent selections in it!

Existing alternatives
Yes Magazine
On Yes Magazine: “Many of their articles are written not by journalists, but by people living their philosophy, and often among the most prominent in their fields. I cannot overstate how important I think this magazine is in these cynical days, with a mass media consistently ignoring and trivializing the truly important issues.”

Education and self-improvement
!!! “In the 1920s “the most popular [radio] stations were noncommercial, operated by universities, states, municipalities, and school districts. Millions of Americans were tuning in to university lectures, taking correspondence courses by radio, and listening to drama, music, and debates in their communities.” The Media Monopoly, Bagdikian, 138
Television had a similar serious beginning: The Media Monopoly, Bagdikian, 140

Entertainment, commercialization. “There is already speculation that traditional education as a public service is collapsing, and a hybrid of educational high technology and commercial entertainment will eventually become the primary means of ‘educating’ American kinds—as prospective workers and potential consumers.” Rich Media, Poor Democracy, McChesney, 47

Challenges

Give a voice to those who are not being heard
“The result is the rapidly growing exclusion in standard American newspapers and broadcast operations of the activities and interests of the less affluent and the older people who live in the circulation area of the standard media. Excluding coverage and news of interest to the non-affluent and elderly is growing more rapidly....” The Media Monopoly, Bagdikian, 232

Restoring advertising to a decent respect for human needs
“Change, and an end to ecological debt, demands that we ‘untell’ the stories told every day on behalf of the car in a thousand newspaper and magazine adverts. These adverts are, for the car industry, the equivalent in propaganda to Stalin’s state propaganda posters, newsreels and artwork of happy smiling workers. They hide a brutal reality.” Andrew Simms, Resurgence, Sept 2005.