The Fairfax Media workers' strike on August 28-31 signalled growing troubles in the Australian media industry.
The strike followed the Nine Network's dumping of key television news programming, including Sunday and Nightline, and the scrapping in January of the Australian Consolidated Press-owned Bulletin magazine.
While much of the mainstream media's analysis of these cuts blamed the downturn in the economy, bigger issues are at play in the media industry.
If one thing can be relied upon today, it is the media's blatant self-censorship of talk about its own industry. You will only hear the industry discussed in the media when the comments are aimed at a competing network, or when journalists have found other avenues to vent their frustrations, such as at conferences and in "tell-all" books.
Even the head of the journalists' union, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), Chris Warren, tried to deflect critical analysis of the industry as a whole during the Fairfax strike by trying to play off one media boss against another. "What's [Rupert] Murdoch doing? He's not engaged in these sorts of cost-cutting measures. He's investing in journalism", he told ABC News.
Those seeking to understand the media crisis need only look at the United States. Over recent months, thousands of jobs have been shed from US newsrooms in a cost-cutting spree by big media. Walkley Magazine, the MEAA journal, dubbed this the "midsummer massacre".
Media companies' profits have declined so much that many in the business are advising sell-offs or at least severe cutbacks. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the online social networking tool Ning, told a business audience including Rupert Murdoch at the Sun Valley Media Conference: "If you have old media, you should sell. If you own newspapers, sell. If you own TV stations, sell. If you own a movie studio, sell."
Central to this thinking is the advent of new communication technologies like the internet, which can involve more people and communities than ever before in the dissemination of news and information.
The new technologies, especially the internet, have made a convergence of different media forms and content possible, in an interactive format. They also allow greater possibilities to transmit information further into communities, and to report on events and ideas excluded from traditional, mainstream media sources.
This convergence of media forms allows for more diverse ways of reporting information, including greater public participation in the process, which feeds into community development.
Big media's response to the new situation, and their falling profits, has been almost universally to merge newsrooms, sack staff, increase media workers' workload and merge companies, tightening the stranglehold of a few owners in the industry.
However, little is said about the huge amounts of money still being made by media companies, or about the underdevelopment of the new technologies due to minimal corporate investment in these less profitable forms.
This big media owners' "massacre" response has been aided by the previous federal government's cross-media ownership laws, which were introduced last year and are unlikely to be repealed by the new Labor government. The laws allow a company to buy into multiple media forms in single markets, so a single company is now more able to control all major media in a particular city or cities.
Fairfax has enthusiastically embraced the new laws. Only days after they came into effect, Fairfax Media and Macquarie Radio Network carved up Southern Cross Broadcasting. This followed Fairfax's purchase the previous year of Rural Press.
Fairfax is now building a $110 million complex in Melbourne to house the Age newspaper and its newly acquired 3AW radio station.
For an alternative media
A much more rational — not to mention socially useful — response to the advent of the new media platforms would be, instead of sacking workers, to use the technological developments to shift the industry from a business- and profit-centred approach to journalism to a genuinely "free press".
This would involve retraining journalists and increasing staffing in order to adapt to and use the new technologies to increase community involvement and give a voice to the voiceless.
This would not only bring about a genuine "community media", but also begin to redeem the reputation of journalists. In most polls today, journalists rank below politicians and used-car salespeople in the popularity stakes.
Given the current state of the industry, journalists are often the victims of chronic staff shortages and ever-shortening production schedules. This keeps them firmly stuck on the treadmill of putting official, institutional — and readily available — discourse at the centre of their stories, with little choice but to demote alternative sources to near-insignificance.
Journalists who do manage to find the time to step outside the official discourse risk being marginalised by editors and management. This is not to say that progressive views cannot get mainstream media coverage, or that progressive people cannot work in the industry, but it is always on their terms, not ours.
Today, the mainstream media is owned by multinational corporations for which media is only one part of their portfolio. Alternative media sources are always at a huge economic and political disadvantage compared to the corporate media.
As Robert W. McChesney explains in his 2003 book Our Media, Not Theirs: "Our media is not the legitimate result of free market competition. It is the legitimate result of relentless lobbying from big business interests that have won explicit government policies and subsidies permitting them to scrap public interest obligations and increase commercialization and conglomeration …
"It is untenable to accept such massive subsidies for the wealthy, and to content ourselves with the 'freedom' to forge alternatives that only exist on the margins."
It is no wonder that many people, including activists in the progressive movements, believe that they cannot effect social change in or through the media. Media is not considered a space that could be reclaimed and made accountable by the people.
Even Australia's public broadcasting services — ABC and SBS — are increasingly run on the same lines as commercial broadcasters. In 2006, SBS management agreed to broadcast commercial advertising, after very little public consultation. While these stations do still broadcast some important material that would probably be rejected by commercial media as unprofitable or too controversial, the idea of supporting community, which is written into the ABC and SBS charters, seems to have been lost entirely.
There is a huge need for media-aware communities to organise against big-business media bias and control, and against governments that legislate in favour of the corporate media.
Like all big struggles in our time, people fighting for media democracy need to see their own media forms as just one part of a wider movement for social change. For progressive journalists, this means finding ways to join up with community movements that are contesting corporate power.