Left voices and the corporate media

Yet we need to remain alive to the severe limits of such access. In the longer term, for the sake of genuine public debate, a concerted effort to build alternative media networks is necessary. The best options are radio and online publishing, though magazines are also possible. Television is expensive and state regulated, newspapers are in a steady decline.

It is only in substantial alternative media that real debates with original voices (those not constrained to simply respond to or dilute a reactionary agenda) can take place. Only here can we speak of building public institutions, citizenship, ideological contests, the disastrous implications of imperial interventions and neoliberalism, and the need for self-determination and wider social democracy.

Such debates have to escape the Australian left’s sectarianism, and constrained “lines”. Decent and wide ranging public debate is essential for the articulation of progressive agendas.

Another advantage of strengthened alternative media networks is that they will help build confidence in campaigns to attack and bring down select organs of the corporate media - those most passionate in their support of imperial war, privatisation and the destruction of civil rights. Boycotts, exposures and public shaming should be used to hold socially accountable and destroy these monsters. If the war criminals and the grossly corrupt deserve condemnation, what about their propagandists?