Alternative Media in Canada

• Published in: Canadian journal of communication 2013, Vol.38 (2), p.255-258
• Main Author: Mowbray, Mike Paul
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: Case studies; Communication; Communities; Democracy; Economics; Educational television; Essays; Ethnic factors; Interpersonal relations; Kozolanka, Kirsten; Mazepa, Patricia; Media; Nonfiction; Participation; Politics; Public service; Radio; Reinforcement; Resource centres; Shading; Skinner, David; Sustainability; Television
• ISSN: 0705-3657; 1499-6642
• DOI: 10.22230/cjc.2013v38n2a2679

While sometimes shading towards an encyclopaedic flavour, overviews of different niches within the alternative mediascape cover a great deal of recent historical and (social) geographic ground, paying mind to the genesis and current fortunes of forms such as community radio and television, "educasting" (public service educational broadcasting), and subfields such as indigenous and "ethnic" media. At their best, these offer added emphasis to common themes (e.g., the importance of supports contra the interests of media conglomerates institutionalized in Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission [CRTC] regulation), illustrate innovative efforts to mobilize existing resources, and present some direction for action. In this regard, Michael Lithgow's chapter on community television (Chapter 6) is exemplary. Lithgow presents analysis insisting upon the pressing need to secure independent management of funds earmarked under CRTC mandate for community programming and ensure accountability from the cable companies that are compelled to provide that funding. The chapter further describes vital examples of what forms such programming could take, even under difficult conditions (e.g., Vancouver's "Fearless TV," focused on selfrepresentations of a resident community in the economically deprived Downtown Eastside, which is otherwise faced with a dearth of positive media portrayals not unconnected with advancing gentrificatìon) before finally holding out the prospect of creating "a network of community-media resource centres" (p. 137) envisioned as infrastructure for "subsidized cultural access" (p. 143). As the editors suggest, departing from Mattelart's statement that "the totality of relations of production and social relations" (p. 1) are intimately integrated in the legitimating functions of the corporate media industries, efforts to reconfigure the media system along democratic lines "must include changes in media structures, participation, and activism together" in order to "confront power in the many modes of its production and reproduction that support its inequalities" (p. 1). The examples described and elaborated upon in Alternative Media in Canada are indeed "as diverse as the publics they express, bring together, and activate" (p. 3), yet the collection does succeed to a significant degree in attaining a certain thematic unity under this framework. As the first book to focus a wide-angle lens upon "alternative media" within the borders of the Ca