'The Paradox of Media Power'

1. Reading: Contesting media power: Alternative media in a networked world -
‘The Paradox of Media Power’
(Couldry, Nick; Curran, James - 2003)
KEYWORDS:
‘Paradox’ - A situation/statement that seems impossible or difficult to understand
because it contains two opposite facts of characteristics.
‘Alternative Media’ - Types of media that are different to the traditional ways of living;
E.g: Netflix is a way to stream movies online, threatening the film and television industry
for cinema branches.
‘Propaganda’ - Any form of information/ideas/opinions or images; usually giving one part
of an argument/spreading a one sided argument with the intention of influencing
people’s opinions.
-Media Power can sometimes be labelled as the ‘net result of organising a society’s resources,
so that the media sector has significant independent bargaining power against other key
sectors; including big businesses, political elites, cultural elites and so on.
-The Media depends on ‘content’ being generated by others - and to compete with the
spreading of celebrity news and reality coverage, the media have generated their own ‘content’
and treated it as if it was external reality.
-Media Power is a term we use to point how other powerful forces use the intermediate
mechanism of media; (press reports, television coverage, websites etc) in order to wage their
battles; (big business against labour, old professionals and class elites against new cultural
elites).
-Manuel Castell’s theory: ‘Network Society’. ‘In a space of accelerated information, people and
finance flows, the media portal is increasingly important for all social action and the media has
no such power (1997)
-Our priority (as researchers or social actors) may be to analyse competing forces outside of the
media but there is a conflict that is waged through the media coverage.
-The Media is an illusion and is only a central point for information to flow through; gaining its
power through what we publicise and speak about. (Melucci, 1996; Curran, 2002)
-Media Power is an emergent form of social power in society and its stability/infrastructure is
dependant on the increasingly fast circulation of information and images.
-Power itself is an emergent theme of social conflict in late modernity, as the mechanisms for
representing social conflict themselves multiply.
-The Internet, particularly through its linkages into traditional media, now gives any local actor
the potential to reach global audiences (Hardt and Negri, 2000)
-Social actors may start to compete for influence over those scale effects (the media power).
TWO IMAGES:

2. -On one hand, ‘media’ could be imagined as a Waterfall concept. Water that is pushed down the
Waterfall is the true force of power; (Information, Images, Media Exposure); which amplifies the
power that the media has on our society. The term ‘media power’ in traditional analysis is only a
figure of speech and for the media’s role as a ‘conduit’ (connector) for other forms of power,
much larger than the media.
-We can also imagine the media as a Processing Power Plant built near the Waterfall and
receiving all of the diverted water and turning it into something different. First; the energy and
the by-products of that energy, followed by Secondly; information on the amount of water farther
upstream.
-The alternative view is that media power invites us to think about the range of power sources
whose influence might be called upon to challenge those who are currently in charge of the
decision-making that run the imaginary processing plant.
-Part 2 (Examines a range of perspectives on how the state directly or indirectly
subsidizes challenges to existing configurations of media power)
-Part 3 (How media markets of a certain complexity can generate alternatives to existing
concentrations of media power)
-Part 4 (How particular elements of civil society have either become contestants for
media power themselves or subsidized others to challenge media power)
-Part 5 (The way new media represents both types of change, affecting the local bases of
media power and the scale on which it can effectively be contested)
ALTERNATIVE MEDIA:
-As social conflicts rise and subside, media power is frequently an incidental aspect of struggle.
In 1990’s there were protests against the long-standing conservative regime in Britain, which
created new press and video productions outside the mainstream (McKay, 1996)