Order ready-to-submit essays. No Plagiarism Guarantee!
Note: All our papers are written from scratch by human writers to ensure authenticity and originality.
Question:
Check your essay before you submit. See exactly what your professor sees.
See your AI and plagiarism results before your instructor does.Get the exact same report your professor uses. Trusted by 50,000+ students worldwide.
Compare the creation story of Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book I with Japanese and Judio-Christian stories as found in Kojiki and the Bible.
Write at least one page in length, cite at the end of the paper if you look up anything on the internet.
Bible (chapter 1&2 only):
Kojiki(part 1 only):
Ovid’s Metamorphoses:
see attachment
Journalism Studies, Volume 3, Number 4, 2002, pp. 491–505
News Cultures and New Social Movements: radical journalism and the mainstream media
CHRIS ATTON Napier University, UK
ABSTRACT Radical media can be viewed as an extremely democratic form of communication, where people normally denied access to the mainstream media are able to speak on issues that concern them. Radical media are especially important for new social movements, where “activist-journalists” seek to establish a counter-discourse to those typically found in mainstream media. One striking technique employed in radical media is “native reporting”, where Ž rst-person, activist accounts of events are preferred over more detached commentaries. Most accounts of radical media have treated such practices as unique and deŽning characteristics of radical media. Little attention has been paid to how these practices might be employed by mainstream media, or indeed to how radical media might borrow practices from the mainstream. This paper moves away from previous binary approaches to explore the relations between radical and mainstream media through a comparative analysis of the coverage of the protests at the G8 summit, held in Genoa in July 2001. The paper argues that borrowings and interdependency are most likely to come from papers that share a similar ideology; hence it compares a member of the UK radical press (SchNEWS) with a member of the liberal press (The Guardian). The analysis is hegemonic, and is particularly interested in how transfers of journalistic techniques, values and ideologies are transformed under differing conditions. Is a counter- hegemonic discourse inevitably diluted by the adoption of its primary features in the mainstream press? Is it possible to radicalise mainstream journalistic practices? The analysis focuses on the presence and nature of “witnessing” by activists, the stylistic construction of such witnessing and how such techniques are transformed in the liberal press. It also examines relationships and attitudes between radical and mainstream journalists. The paper Žnds that whilst there are distinctive journalistic techniques used in each paper, both radical and mainstream adopt elements from each other, whether in writing style or in news values and framing. The counter-discourse of radical media appears to gain strength from its borrowings. It is argued that the liberal press’s use of native reporting represents an accommodation with a radical technique. Finally, a hegemonic approach suggests a complexity of relations between radical and mainstream that previous binary models have not been able to identify.
KEY WORDS: Radical Media, Alternative Media, Liberal Press, Mainstream Media, Hegemony, Gramsci, Political Activism, News Cultures, Genoa
Introduction
The radical media of new social movements have been examined in terms of their signiŽcance for the mobilisation of campaigns through activist information, political education and the critique of dominant ideologies (for example, Atton, 2002; Downing, 2001; and Rodriguez, 2001). There has been little attempt, however, to assay a comparative analysis of the construction of news in radical media and in mainstream media. The present paper will attempt this by attending to the structural and
cultural characteristics of radical media, and will focus on the radicalising of journalistic practices through the “native reporter,” the signiŽcance of “active witnessing” and a con- sideration of the transformation of “social movement news” in dominant media culture.
DeŽning Radical Media
To deŽne radical media productively has proved to be a fraught undertaking throughout even their modest history as an aspect of media studies. John Downing, in what was until very
ISSN 1461-670X print/ISSN 1469-9699 online/02/040491-15 Ó 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1461670022000019209
492 CHRIS ATTON
recently the only deŽnitive approach to the subject (Downing, 1984), approached it in terms of organisational and political formations. In looking for their unique characteristics, Down- ing highlighted non-hierarchical, often collec- tive modes of organisation that were coupled with a radical political agenda. This agenda would often, he argued, be played out in a preŽgurative politics of communication, through which radically democratic aims (his focus is on leftist, progressive media, rather than what he has later termed the “repressive” media of the far right; Downing, 2001, p. 88) could be actualised within radical media formations.
For Downing these media formations are best realised in the activities of the new social move- ments. In contrast to earlier manifestations such as the labour or suffrage movements, new so- cial movements may be characterised by the absence of a single, rational outcome. The peace and ecology movements, for instance, tend to work “independently of what the state might concede” (Downing, 2001, p. 24); their aims are often diffuse, at times uncertain, or at least shifting. The current anti-capitalist movement is perhaps even less “rational” in this sense. It has drawn on previous movement philosophies (peace, ecology, anarchism, trade unionism to a degree): the result is a kaleidoscopic, collective vision built on a set of shifting coalitions be- tween socialists, greens, anarchists and other, non-aligned groups and individuals.
The media of new social movements are dis- tinctive in terms of their content and their or- ganisation: accounts of political struggle and the sociopolitical contextualisation of such ac- counts by those actively involved in them are presented through lateral, non-hierarchical modes of organisation, mostly run on a non- commercial basis. Downing’s 1984 deŽnition privileged media that are written and run by non-professionals, by groups that are primarily activist for progressive, social change. From a leftist perspective, Downing highlighted a gen- eral political perspective of social anarchism that informs and drives such media practices. Downing explicitly places the organisation of radical media and their journalistic practices in opposition to a construction of mainstream me-
dia that is largely monolithic, centred on proŽt making, hierarchical organisation and a prac- tice of journalism that, by dint of its routinisa- tion and codiŽcation as a profession, is implicitly exclusive. Against this he presents an ideal type of radical media, one that is radically democratic in terms of access and political aims, and that is some undeŽned way “purer” than the elitism of professional media.
Subsequently, Downing (2001) has acknowl- edged the limits of his earlier model. He is critical of polarities in his earlier work, of which he identiŽes two forms. The Žrst he terms an “antibinarism” (Downing, 2001, p. viii) towards the dominant media models of the time. That is, rather than Žnd hope in either the capitalist media of the West or the Soviet media, Down- ing’s earlier position was equally dismissive of both as unrepresentative and ideologically monolithic. The second form he terms “binarism”, that is, the polarity between radical and mainstream media. Such separation was, Downing now holds, necessary for him to bet- ter “hammer home the merits of alternative way of communicating politically, however picayune they might appear in the Žrst in- stance” (Downing, 2001, p. ix).
There is a widespread, implicit assertion that the organisational and professional routines of the mainstream media produce a media system that is monolithic and inexible, within which the representation of dissident, radical and otherwise “unofŽcial” voices is largely predict- able: if heard at all, such voices will be demonised and marginalised . Such an assertion can be found in critical media studies from the US, most notably in the propaganda model of Herman and Chomsky (1994), and from the UK in the ideological thrust of the work of the Glasgow University Media Group (for example, 1976 and 1980).
Although the present paper focuses on the UK, the issues it raises go beyond narrowly national practices. To study radical media is to critique the social construction of mass media news that is based on a complex of newsroom routines and rituals, conditions of production, notions of professionalism and objectivity, re- hearsed standards of writing and editing, as well as accident and opportunity (Allan, 1999).
493NEWS CULTURES AND NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
Radical media studies also explore the re- sponses of radical media to such constructions by constructing their own news, based on alternative values and frameworks of news gathering and access. These values proceed from a wish to present other interpretations of stories and to present stories not normally con- sidered as news that challenge the prevailing “hierarchy of access” (Glasgow University Media Group, 1976, p. 245) normally found in the mass media. In the latter, an elite of experts and pundits tends to have easier and more substantial access to a platform for their ideas than do dissidents, protesters, minority groups and “ordinary people”: “powerful groups and individuals have privileged and routine entry into the news itself and to the manner and the means of its production” (Glasgow University Media Group, 1980, p. 114). The primary aim of radical media is to provide access to the media for protest groups on those groups’ terms. This entails developing media to encourage and nor- malise such access, where people of low status (in terms of their relationship to elite groups of owners, managers and senior professionals) can make their own news, whether by appearing in it as signiŽcant actors or by creating news themselves that is relevant to their situation.
A Hegemonic Approach to Radical–Mainstream Media Relations
A comparative analysis of radical and main- stream media formations requires methodology that goes beyond Downing’s binary models. A hegemonic approach appears well suited for such an analysis and should encourage us to examine them not as discrete Želds of symbolic production, but as inhabiting a shared, negoti- ated Želd of relations, subject to “contradictory pressures and tendencies” (Bennett, 1986, p. 350). The classic features of hegemonic prac- tice—the notion of an unstable, non-unitary Želd of relations, where ideology is mobile and dynamic and where strategic compromises are continually negotiated (Gramsci, 1971)—might thus be applied to a study of the relations between these two media formations. Hege- monic analysis presents these two media for- mations not as independent, but as articulated
in terms of their cultural practices. That is, media practices may be viewed as movable; they may articulate to bourgeois (mainstream) values in one instance, but become joined with radical values in another.
Raymond Williams has written of the com- plexity of hegemony that it is not “singular” and “that its own internal structures are highly complex, and have continually to be renewed, recreated and defended; and by the same token, that they can be continually challenged and in certain respects modiŽed” (Williams, 1980, p. 38). His division of cultural practices into dominant, residual and emergent suggests how challenges and modiŽcations may be made. Against his theorisation of the dominant cul- ture as “selective” he Žrst places those existing practices “which cannot be veriŽed or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture” (p. 40) but which are still practised—he cites religious practices and the power of the rural past. These comprise a residue of cultural prac- tices, discarded by the dominant culture but still resonant throughout the wider culture. Emergent practices are those that are newly created: “new meanings and values, new prac- tices, new signiŽcances and experiences” (p. 41). It is tempting to assign radical media— at least as a symbolic practice of new social movements—to the latter, emergent culture. But that would be to ignore any residual traces within radical media; it would be to ignore the historical place of those media.
The present analysis is not about to reveal a benign transfer of practices between two sets of equally matched media practices; it is about struggle, the aim of which (in Gramsci’s terms) from the point of view of the bourgeoisie, is to contain and to incorporate dissident values of subordinate groups within an ideological space (Hebdige, 1979, p. 16). This ideological space must then appear permanent, natural and com- mon-sensical, even as it is continually con- tested. In media-analytic terms we can thus come to examine mainstream news texts to judge how they set out the limits of that “common sense” (Allan, 1999, p. 86). Similarly, we can examine radical media practices for examples of how naturalised media frames and ideological codes can be disrupted. We can look
494 CHRIS ATTON
for the movement of speciŽc practices across media, say of dissident practices into the main- stream, and ask to what extent such practices have been shorn of their ideological, counter- hegemonic power. For, as Williams reminds us, hegemony is a exible process, able to accom- modate and tolerate an immense range of alternative meanings and values, “even some alternative senses of the world” (Williams, 1980, p. 39). We must also be alert to counter- ow: are there examples of mainstream practice in radical media whose naturalising power has been similarly disrupted in their new setting? This is to suggest the possibility of a counter- hegemony arising from those residual and emergent cultural practices, an oppositional set of practices that, rather than preferring to exist alongside the dominant culture, seek to change society. What is at stake is how differing sets of media practices, each with their own routines, rules and ideological codes, socially construct reality. How and on what occasions they come together—whether through collision, incorpo- ration or dissidence—will in large part deter- mine this reality of social experience.
Using hegemony as the activating concept, this paper will explore the relationships and dynamics between radical and mainstream me- dia at two levels: the employment and develop- ment of particular styles and genres of journalism across these two media types, and the attitude of radical journalists to their main- stream counterparts. These relationships will be discovered Žrstly through attending to histori- cal trends and secondly through a contempor- ary, comparative study of media coverage of social-movement activism, that of the demon- strations against the G8 summit meeting held in Genoa in July 2001. Before turning to cases, we need to situate the news culture of social movements in a wider, historical context.
Understanding Radical News Culture
The publications that grew up around the British “DIY politics” and protest groups of the 1990s came largely from the radical environ- mental movement (Atton, 1999a; Searle, 1997). The movement’s embrace of autonomy, local activism and the absence of any centralised or
hierarchical organisation—preferring instead an anarchistic model of afŽnity groups, horizontal communication and the empowerment of local groups freed from a single ideology or strategy—resulted in hundreds of media forma- tions (Atton, 1999b). Many were short-lived, existing only during the life cycle of a particular protest or action or until funds ran out. Many were set up only as communication networks for activists: these focused on the committed activist; few of them sought to convince or mobilise an audience beyond those already in- volved. Some actively sought to broaden their audience, though of these only a few were explicitly aimed at civil society at large (includ- ing the mass media) and even then only on their own terms (such as Squall; see Atton, 2002).
What is the nature of this opposition, this refusal to compromise? How can it inform our understanding of the relationships between radical and mainstream? In the UK, SchNEWS is one of a number of nationally distributed radical papers that appeared or came to promi- nence in the 1990s (others include Counter Infor- mation, Do or Die, Green Anarchist and Squall). SchNEWS was Žrst published in 1994 and has since also become available online. As a weekly news-sheet it functions as a forum for issue- based journalism from a radical perspective. It has critically examined the role of industry, politicians, the military and right-wing pressure groups in anti-environmental campaigns. It has featured reports on squatting, animal rights, alternative urban communities, the creeping criminalisation of rave culture—indeed the criminalisation of civil protest itself. SchNEWS’s agenda can be seen as a model for many radical media. First, it offers a form of journalism in opposition to the mainstream, where topics un- touched by the mass media are examined and where activists, protesters and dissidents have a platform for their own voices. Second, follow- ing the arguments against consolidation made by Ben Bagdikian (1997) and Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1994), SchNEWS implic- itly argues that the political economy of the mass media prevents certain topics from being discussed for fear of invoking the wrath of proprietors, editors and advertisers. It is not
495NEWS CULTURES AND NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
only important for the paper to cover such topics but to establish itself in economic oppo- sition to such consolidation. The paper contains no advertising and has no cover price: it sur- vives precariously on donations of money and equipment from its readers and supporters. In essence SchNEWS’s agenda is the foundation for all radical journalism, easily as far back as the radical English press of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, if not before: we might also consider the writing and self-publishing of Abiezer Coppe during the English Revolution as radical journalism (Har- rison, 1974; Hill, 1975). Despite their differing aims and constituencies, we might Žnd a con- tinuation of such practices throughout the his- tory of radical media in the UK.
Atton (2002) has drawn on the history of the amateur journalist as evinced in the English radical press and in various twentieth-century versions of the activist as journalist, such as the proposal for worker-correspondents as an necessary part of radical trades union activity (Workers’ Life, 1928/1983) and the British Social- ist Workers’ Party’s experiments to include workers as writers in its paper Socialist Worker (Allen, 1985). Similar impulses underscore the development of the anarchist press in the UK (Quail, 1978), the peace movement media, the underground press of the late 1960s and early 1970s (Fountain, 1988 and Nelson, 1989) and the radical local press of the 1970s (Minority Press Group, 1980 and Whitaker, 1981). Such a history points to a deŽnition of radical media that has at its heart the transformation of “social relations, roles and responsibilities” (At- ton, 2002, p. 27) within journalistic practices. This accounts for radical organisational and political formations in such media, as well as the radical expansion of who is able to become a journalist; it enables an examination of the meaning and function of journalism in radical media.
Radical media may be characterised by their attempts to free themselves from the power of government, the state and other dominant insti- tutions and practices. In social-movement terms they can be thought of as instances of the “free spaces” theorised by Melucci (1995). In Melucci’s reading of social movements the role
of the network and that of radical media as activators of that network assume a key pos- ition. Organisational forms are the building blocks from which the network can be devel- oped. These forms, as Melucci asserts, tend away from the traditional, hierarchical and bu- reaucratic forms of social organisation. Just as collective action “eschews existing channels of resistance” (Welsh and McLeish, 1996, p. 30) and maintains “an informal and irreverent pos- ture towards the established norms and rituals of mainstream politics” (Scott, 1990, p. 34), so do radical media seek to transform the practice of journalism. In contrast to their mainstream counterparts radical media are characterised by loose internal structures and by autonomy be- tween the groups thus organised. Loose struc- tures are most commonly realised in social movements by the absence (or at least, the reduction) of hierarchy and by an anti-authori- tarian ethos. Job rotation is common, as is the sharing of jobs and skills. Such a philosophy and structure encourages journalistic practices that can achieve those primary aims of radical media already noted: to give a voice to the voiceless and to invert the “hierarchy of access” by developing media spaces where activists and “ordinary” people might present accounts of their own experiences and struggles.
Native Reporting in Radical Media
We can conceptualise this technique journalisti- cally as “native reporting”. Native reporters use their role as activists in order to represent from the inside the motives, experiences, feelings, needs and desires of the wider social move- ments they thus come to represent. Dealing with events and actions, their contributions su- perŽcially resemble eyewitness reports in main- stream media. “Native reporting” can usefully deŽne the activities of radical journalists work- ing within communities of interest to present news that is relevant to those communities, presented in a manner that is meaningful to them and with their collaboration and support.
This technique is not new, though its an- tecedents are arguably less “amateur” than its contemporary instances. In the twentieth cen- tury we might consider much of George
496 CHRIS ATTON
Orwell’s journalism as native reporting. Whether in his brief polemic pieces such as “How the Poor Die” (Orwell, 1965) or in his book-length works such as The Road to Wigan Pier (Orwell, 1989c), Orwell’s populist literary style was wedded to a practice of social re- search that found him living with his subjects. In Down and Out in Paris and London (Orwell, 1989a) and Homage to Catalonia (Orwell, 1989b) he spoke of his direct experiences as pauper and militiaman. His approach drew on that of Jack London, “following a literary model into actual experience”; “for a while he went native in his own country” (Crick, 1980, pp. 190 and 110). We must remember that throughout his career, despite his work at The Observer and the BBC, Orwell contributed essays and letters to numerous, small-circulation, radical journals. Indeed, we might consider his work and his attitude towards commercial media as precisely that of the radical media activist, wherein his
distinctively radical … populist stylistic devices and the political contempt for “big business” were quite at home precisely where he published them. (Crick, 1980, p. 116)
Robert Chesshyre has also used the term “native reporting” to describe the practices he sought to relearn in the 1980s upon his own return to Britain, following his posting as The Observer’s Washington correspondent (Chesshyre, 1987): “coming home, one had to learn again the native idiom” (p. 13). For Chesshyre, this meant relearning a method of reporting about local, everyday “situations with which readers can personally identify” (p. 31). He observes how such reports drew many positive responses from readers
who have something to say and want to join in […] They know more than their masters do of what it is like to have a child in a comprehensive school, or to be unemployed, to try to start a business. They are the reliable witnesses. (pp. 31–32)
Among others, we should also consider the work of John Pilger and Paul Foot as native reporting, particularly since much of their ear- lier, pioneering work was written for the popu-
lar press and addressed a broader, less elite audience than did Chesshyre’s. However re- liable their witnesses may be, though, in the forum of mainstream journalism these wit- nesses need their Chesshyres, their Pilgers and their Foots. By contrast, native reporters in rad- ical media work as members of a community whose work enables that community to “analyse one’s historical situation, which trans- forms consciousness, and leads to the will to change a situation” (Traber, 1985, p. 3). Here, native reporters are at the centre of things as participants, and their work is precisely to feed discussion and debate from the perspective of the grassroots and to function as “information for action”. Native reporters seek to take back what is “their” news. This second interpretation is perhaps more powerful than Chesshyre’s, since it suggests the actualisation of his “reliable witnesses” as recorders of their own reality. But we can identify a historical linkage between the two types of native reporting through attending to Curran and Seaton’s (1997) examination of the factors that governed the demise of the English radical press. The reform campaign against the “taxes on knowl- edge”, they argue, succeeded where those press taxes failed (particularly through the wide- spread evasion of stamp duty). Neither was the radical press vanquished by prosecutions for seditious libel, it was fatally weakened by re- form by liberalisation of press ownership that led to the “industrialisation of the press, with its accompanying rise in publishing costs [and a] dependence on advertising” (Curran and Seaton, 1997, p. 41). Although the “native reporting” of the radical press continued precariously in a paper such as the Daily Herald, such writing continued longest, in a more etiolated form, in mass circulation papers such as the News of the World, “whose radicalism was the product more of commercial expedi- ency than of political commitment” (Curran and Seaton, 1997, p. 29). The adoption of the radical discourse of “a more socially anchored journalism of a community or movement” (Golding, 1999, p. 15) by mainstream publica- tions in the mid 1850s has been well argued by Peter Golding (1999). Throughout the twentieth century we have seen the persistence of a
497NEWS CULTURES AND NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
“professionalised” form of native reporting (as in the writing of Orwell, Foot and Pilger).
Those non-professional journalists who gather and present news as part of their own lives embody their own history, experience and opinions within a publication. They are “authorising” themselves to speak, validating their lives, making their voices public. Their voices may be thought of as examples of “witness activism”, whether the “witness video” activists of the British video magazine Undercurrents (Harding, 1997) or Nick Couldry’s (2000) “witnesses of the media age”, where “ordinary people” can in various ways disrupt the framing of the mass media, and denaturalise the dominant social processes of the media. It is to how these “ordinary people” witness political events in which they play an active, dissenting role and how they present their witnessing as native reporters working within radical media to which we now turn.
Witnessing in the Radical Press
The remainder of this paper examines the coverage of a single event, the G8 summit held in Genoa during July 2001, an event that drew tens of thousands of social movement activists from across the world and which at the time of writing is arguably the most prominent exam- ple of anti-capitalist protest mobilisation. The G8 summit was notable for the security sur- rounding the conference (the “ring of steel” in the city centre; the restriction of movement for protesters and residents; the unprecedented po- lice numbers on the streets; the severely restric- ted transport links) as well as for the police reaction to protesters, leaving one dead and dozens hospitalised. Genoa also saw a raid on the building housing both the Genoa Social Forum (one of the key organising committees for the protest) and its Independent Media Cen- tre (part of a worldwide, web-based radical media project known as Indymedia). For this analysis I shall compare the coverage of this event by SchNEWS and The Guardian (along with its sister Sunday paper, The Observer). SchNEWS is the most frequent of all new social movement publications in the UK, publishing weekly. Where others such as Squall (now only
publishing online and updated only irregu- larly) provide lengthier, analytical articles, SchNEWS’s publishing schedule allows it to respond more rapidly to contemporary events. Despite its brevity (typically two sides of A4, at times double that length) it offers a rich re- source for the study of media activism in the UK. In the 1990s, The Guardian developed its environmentalis t agenda largely through the work of two writers: the paper’s environment correspondent, John Vidal, and George Mon- biot, a writer with a very visible history as a professional campaigner, protester and public speaker (he is a member of the Steering Com- mittee of the Globalise Resistance coalition). Vidal wrote pioneering articles on the aims, philosophy and tactics of Earth First!; he was the paper’s key correspondent in the “McLibel” trial and published his journalism as a book (Vidal, 1997). This makes The Guardian a likely candidate for the extension of these sympathies into the framing of its news around activists as witnesses and native reporters. The extent to which it does so and the manner in which this is achieved is one of the aims of this analysis.
