ABSTRACT
The history of the alternative local press over the past two decades illustrates, perhaps more poignantly than any other aspect of the local media, the power of the market in marginalizing ideological debate. As we have indicated earlier, the proposition which underlies the business-based corporate press is that the free market in the production, distribution and ownership of the news media necessarily leads to freedom of thought and expression and an ‘open society’. The fallacy of this general dispensation has often been laid bare elsewhere. James Curran, for example, has shown how newspapers with large circulations have been unable to survive because the relative poverty of their readers has prevented them from attracting sufficient advertising revenue to meet production and distribution costs. 1 Murphy has indicated that the pressures on the processes of producing news, in both the traditional and the alternative local press, militate against news coverage which does not reinforce versions of reality promulgated by actors in positions of power in established authority systems. 2 In the development of the radical alternative press, both of these processes have been at work.
