Review article
AMERICAN NON-COMERCIAL RADIO: MAINSTREAM (PUBLIC) VS. COMMUNITY RADIO
Goran Ivanović
Abstract
The majority of the mass media in the USA are oligopolistic corporations, which
offer perspectives, priorities and presentation of reality that differ largely from the actual
situation in the community. The need to communicate in a community is totally
different from business perspectives and interests. As opposed to the commercial media,
profit should not dictate the programme of the non-commerical media, as it has
done during the last several years. In such circumstances we can clearly recognize a
progressive part of noncommercial radio in teh USA – community radio, which takes
on a different role from the American public radio broadcasting system and keeps the
democratic communications policy in a community alive despite the enormous pressure
from corporations.
The community radio in the USA gives the grassroots citizen easier access to the
station’s airwaves and resources and often involves the most disenfranchised segments
of the population. As a medium of the two-step democratic communication, the community
radio offers opposition to both the corporative (commercial) and public (state)
controlled media. Despite the critical difference between the mainstream “local” public
radio and the community radio, the latter still remains, by law, the marginal part of
the public radio system. We need to recognize its place as the third way of American
broadcasting.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
23373
URI
Publication date:
20.5.2000.
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