Alternative Media and Alternative Economic Sources

By Harsha Man Maharjan
2009 is ending very soon. And I am getting mails from Alternative media: Open Democracy, The Center for Media and Democracy, FAIR etc for donation. This is no news. It happens every December. Donation is an alternative economic source of mass media. Usually advertisement is main economic source of media.

In his article What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream Noam Chomsky says that mainstream media sells its audiences to advertisers. Michael Albert has written an article titled What Makes Alternative Media Alternative? Here he has focused on alternatives finance apart from others characteristics.

Open Democracy, The Center for Media and Democracy, and FAIR are alternative media so they are using alternative source of economy. FAIR watches media biases and censorship. Center for Media and Democracy counters PR and Propaganda in media. In Nepal we can’t say which media is alternative and which is mainstream. For example what is different between so-called community radio and commercial radio? When Radio Sagarmatha came into existence it declared that it would air no commercial ads. But this declaration remained for few months. We don’t have audience-supported media.

Links
about FAIR
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=100

about The Center for Media and Democracy
http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/index.html

What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/12757

What Makes Alternative Media Alternative?
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/viewArticle/12660