Community Media: muting the democratic media discourse?, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 17(1): 51-68 Carty, V. (2001) The Internet and Grassroots Politics: Nike, the Athletic Apparel Industry and the Anti-sweatshop Campaign, Tamara

When Community media (CM) emerged in the seventies and eighties, their discourse on the democratisation of the airwaves offered a promising alternative to the rather paternalistic state media discourse, in a period that state media could be described by what Williams called 'an authoritarian system with a conscience'. During the deregulation period most state broadcasting monopolies in Western Europe ended, opening the road for the commercialisation of the airwaves. Community media found themselves in a position of no longer being articulated as an alternative to the mainstream media discourse, but were reduced to the marginal. The attempts to articulate the CM as the 'third way '- explicit parts of civil society and as such independent from state and market- also largely failed. Their democratic media discourse, articulating the audience as active (both in production and reception) and the media organisation as open and participatory, was muted. This paper investigates how the antagonistic relation of the CM towards the identity of state and commercial media, contributed to the failure to hegemonise their democratic media discourse, within the general framework of Laclau and Mouffe's political identity theory. The Deleuzian approach of CM as rhizome allows to incorporate aspects of contingency, fluidity and elusiveness in the analysis of CM, thus creating room for the mutual constitution and destabalising/deterritorialising of these identities and for a more agonistic approach based on (media) pluralism