To conceptualize the idea behind alternative media, of which community media are often taken to be a part, it is necessary to ask the question: do media possess power? If so, which kind of power? And why would it be important to contest this power? In this section I review the ideas behind the view of media as a powerful entity and an actor that shapes society. The discourse in and around a society constructs and shapes a society, and by extension, whatever
shapes that discourse, then, shapes that society. Media can be argued to be a shaper - or at the very least, a conveyor – of discourses, and in this way, acts to shape society in some ways and not in others. From Althusser who viewed the media as part of the ‘Ideological State Apparatus’ (ISAs) that shape the thinking in society and therefore shape society, to Hall who viewed the media as conduits of a hegemonic view, to Downing who views alternative media as radical media which challenge the status quo by offering an alternative voice, the underlying idea seems to be that whoever controls (and transmits) the discourse holds the power. But what kind of power is media power? Carpentier offers a suitable entry point in viewing the power of the media as discursive power, which shapes key ideas in society. He states “Discursive power functions within the world of ideas and has a close connection to notions of representation, ideology and hegemony.” (Carpentier 2014, 114). In reference to Althusser’s work, he states that “ideology offers overdetermined frameworks of knowledge that allow subjects to (actively) make sense of the social while, at the same time, pre-structuring the social and excluding other frameworks” (Carpentier 2014, 115). This idea of some frameworks or points of view being excluded is the niche that alternative media attempts to fill.
According to Fenton (2016), the question of power is central to defining alternative media, because the growth of the media industry has resulted in ever-bigger monopolies by fewer and fewer media players. That is, the power of multinational media corporations has been consolidated rather than dispersed, and in fact has been enhanced by digital technology, for instance. Commercial media advance private interests rather than the public interest, and the regulation enables this. Alternative media power should therefore be characterised by running counter to this neo-liberal power. Fenton hence argues for an approach to alternative media that focuses on context first (social, political, economic), and through “the lens of power”
(Fenton 2016, 11). Atton also points out the centrality of discursive power when considering media power:
The study of media power is concerned with discourse and how discourses are constructed. Discourses matter because it is through them that we understand the world; they are social processes and as such are subject to the same conditions as other social processes: they are produced by people working together in groups, communities, organisations and institutions. Discourses are simultaneously ways of living in the world and modes of representing the world. (Atton 2015, 1)
Consequently, he argues that alternative media offer the possibility for seeing and representing the world differently. Couldry (2015), partly drawing from Atton, defines alternative media as
“media whose operations challenge the concentration of resources (particularly the symbolic resource of making and circulating images and information) in large institutions” (Couldry 2015, 43). He makes an argument for the importance of voice as a key characteristic of alternative media.
At the same time, it is not only discursive power that is at work in any society, and moreso in the communities served by community radio. Apart from the discursive power at play through the content of radio programs, there is also financial power, held primarily by the donors to radio stations, as well as the station’s finance manager, and the station manager, there is regulatory power held by the organisations drawing up the legislature that governs community radio, that is, the Ministry of Information and the Communications Authority of Kenya. There is also what I term as collective/community power, which is wielded by the communities in which the community radios are located. As such, I find it useful to keep in mind concepts of power in general and media power specifically when considering community radio and its functions in the communities in which it is found.
2.8 Conclusion
By focusing on the link between societal structure and media roles especially in the Kenyan context, and on the concept of alternative media, this chapter has discussed the analytical concepts used in the rest of the thesis to examine community radio stations, their management, production practices, audiences and content.
Especially in community broadcasting, it is of interest to reflect on how cultural norms are expressed through involvement in community radio content and in community radio as an institution. Such norms can be identified by analysing the processes and contexts of newsmaking and general content produced. Thus, I discussed the concepts of journalistic culture, journalists and sources as interpretive communities and news as the result of purposive behaviour by promoters, assemblers and consumers, as analytical tools to delve into the daily work of community media workers.
Participation takes place in various social contexts, and at the same time influences what social formations come up. These social formations have various labels such as communities, publics, constituents and audiences. Therefore, the literature review has also focused on concepts associated with communities, audiences and publics. From these, the concepts of
social solidarity, publics, counterpublics and audiencing came out as useful for delving into which kinds of social formations are constituted through participatory processes in the Kenyan community broadcasting context.
Based on the literature reviewed about alternative media and community media, I have laid out my working definition of community radio. Important as a theme in the literature is the idea of community broadcasting as a means of distributing media power through giving voice to the non-elite. It offers the possibility to imagine another version of media operations, characterised by ordinary people undertaking media production and engaging in media content. The rest of the thesis explores this broad theme, questioning if and how Kenyan community radio is changing the Kenyan media landscape and community interactions with media institutions. In the following chapter, I outline my methodological considerations and tools.
3
METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS, CHALLENGES AND APPLICATIONS
3.1 Introduction
As set out in the introductory chapter, I selected three stations for in-depth research not only based on my operational definition of community radio, but also based on broadcast language that I could access without needing substantial translation, social context of the stations to account for diversity, and how long each station had been in existence, such that it had a stable operational structure. Additionally, at the beginning of the research, three stations represented approximately a quarter of the Kenyan community radio sector. In this chapter I discuss my methodological process and choices as the research evolved, starting from the pilot study to the main fieldwork and confirmatory fieldwork. I outline my rationale for selecting the three stations, and then proceed to a discussion of the design and execution of the quantitative methodology. This is followed by details of the qualitative methodology. The methods used are laid out per research objective.
A combination of both quantitative and qualitative methodology was used. For the qualitative section, I took a multi-site case study approach, selecting three specific radio stations to study in-depth, rather than making a general survey of all community radio stations in Kenya but not going in-depth into the relationships and factors at work in the life of the station. A case study is “a research approach that is used to generate an in-depth, multi-faceted understanding of a complex issue in its real-life context” (Crowe et al. 2011). In view of the fact that I was examining not only radio stations but also the communities around them, I found the case study approach appropriate because of the possibilities it offers to go in depth into specific cases. It also allows for a variety of data collection methods, as outlined by Jensen and Rosengren (2008):
Case studies of the cultural and communicative practices of specific communities represent an opportunity to examine in detail the kinds of micro and macro social contexts in which most media use takes place. Case studies also lend themselves specifically to the combination of several modes of empirical analysis. They thus offer excellent opportunities to complement the limitations naturally inherent in each and every single research tradition. (Jensen and Rosengren 2008, 346)
In addition, a key advantage of a multi-site case study is that the validity of case study data can be checked by comparing one data source to another on the same phenomena (G. R. Taylor 2000). For each station, I examined staff work patterns, content and community interactions.
To gather this data, ethnographic methods consisting of in-depth interviews, group interviews, observation, and textual review were employed.
To complement the qualitative data, I employed quantitative methodology in the form of three audience surveys, one at each station. The surveys were designed to get a picture of listenership patterns in the communities in which the three stations are located, in terms of demographics, listening times and preferred content. Statistics are useful for description, generalization, and measurement of relationships since they “describe information when we wish to portray a large body of data in terms of its essential inherent characteristics” (G. R. Taylor 2000, 6). They help to order large groups of information and are useful in generalizing knowledge about a large population based on limited observations of a portion of it. The above mixed methods approach allowed for the triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data, adding to the richness of information gathered.