In an article for Rabble.ca, Gary Engler contrasts this extravagance with the fact that media workers are losing severance pay, pensions, and jobs, shareholders are taking huge losses, and suppliers are receiving "a few cents on the dollar at best."
It is frustrating to know that those people who mismanaged the Canwest media empire are not bearing the brunt as much as media workers, shareholders, and suppliers. However, there is now an opportunity for less wasteful media outlets to chip away at Canwest's market share. Rather than let other domestic or foreign media conglomerates step in, we should help independent media use this waste of resources as an opportunity to become the cornerstone of our media ecology rather than just the alternative to big media.
What Is Independent Media?
Independent media is often referred to but rarely defined. It is structurally independent from the two most powerful institutions in our society: government and corporations. This autonomy allows independent media more freedom than big media to be openly critical of power, and it makes outlets more reliant and accountable to everyday people.
Independent media typically relies on support from some combination of donations/members, foundations, NGOs/unions, commercial advertising, and volunteers. Most independent media outlets also have an overt social mission that creates an orientation and ethos of public service rather than the narrow commercial interest found in many media corporations.
Independent media organizations are however, marginalized and in need of a reliable financing mechanism that maintains their ability to act autonomously. We know that our current media system creates an obstruction for an open public sphere, but the obstruction is not just the dominant corporate media system and its matrix of filters, it’s also our inability to create a mechanism to fund a public service independent media system.
Fixing our media system is not simply an issue of better networking of existing projects; we must develop a sustainable independent media infrastructure while also providing stable and reliable funding to individual projects. We can't continue to rely on individual independent media outlets that are scrambling for funds for the next story. To compete with big media, independent media needs to become the incubators of journalism experiments. While some are trying, it is very much an uphill battle when daily sustenance becomes a preoccupation.
Coming Together to Power Independent Media
The economic downturn has been hard on both independent and corporate media, yet there seems to be enough money to give particular corporate management personnel extravagant annual bonuses. It is quite obvious that Canada’s media-funding model needs to be reevaluated and remixed. In so doing, independent media should be prioritized by policy makers, citizens, and civil society.
A partial solution to funding independent media could be “community media trusts” (CMT) financed by labour organizations, citizens, foundations, institutions (churches, universities), government, and NGOs. A decentralized network of CMTs could be set up to provide service to particular geographical regions. For example, Vancouver-based NGOs, universities, churches, labour groups, foundations, citizens, and possibly local government, could pool their resources and create a Vancouver CMT, which could provide long-term funding for public service independent media in Vancouver.
Could this be the way forward for a democratically accountable independent media sector?
A Day to Focus
In the coming weeks, several cities will host public forums marking the tenth consecutive year of Media Democracy Day (MDD) on Nov. 7. According to SFU Professor Robert Hackett, the initial drive of MDD was to “build a greater sense of community for those fighting for media democracy.” This year we hope to see more collaboration and more pragmatic discussions focused on elevating, expanding and multiplying independent media in this country. There is a window of opportunity right now, and that window can and will close if we don't take this challenge seriously.
Marie Elliott is a fourth year SFU Communications student. She aspires to be a new media/music journalist and currently runs a music blog (http://remixourlives.blogspot.com)
Steve Anderson is the national coordinator for the Campaign for Democratic Media. He is a contributing author of Censored 2008 and Battleground: The Media, and has written for The Tyee, Toronto Star, Epoch Times, Common Ground, Rabble.ca and Adbusters.
