REVIEW: How ‘alternative’ media can again be mainstream

Abstract

Review of Challenging the News: The Journalism of Alternative and Community Media, by Susan Forde. London: Palgrave Macmillan. 2011, 214pp. ISBN 978 0230243576 (pbk)

Ironically, alternative and independent media were not always marginalised. Less than two centuries ago, they were the ‘mainstream’. They being the radical and working class media of Europe and the new world colonies. This is a central point made in Susan Forde’s Challenging The News in her search to find a refocused critique of the Fourth Estate notions that make sense of the contemporary alternative media’s role. An essential element, she concludes, is the ‘key importance that someone is watching the watchers; that media power itself must be monitored, assessed, critiqued, and challenged. Alternative journalists provide that critique’ (p. 169).