ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how people against all odds have produced and shared their own alternative news accounts relevant to their own programme. It sets out the possibility of evolving journalism along trajectories away from the blind application of its time-honoured ideology of professional practice that produces news discourses that are predictably alienating and marginalising to the majority poor. The chapter proposes an approach to reading the media that is critically sceptical and questioning of the opaque means by which journalism embeds strategic silences in that which they make manifest in ways that legitimate domination and social inequality along axes of difference and privilege. A critical media literacy entails a reading of the media that is contextual, informed by a scepticism about the genre’s claims of objectivity and self-proclaimed ideological innocence and emptiness. The critical media literacy being proposed approaches the news as a knowledge genre which is unavoidably implicated in the social manufacture of ignorance.
