The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

country’s mediascape. By utilizing the work of Habermas and Fraser, grassroots
documentary d/e practices and spaces can be understood as elements of established or
emerging counterpublics.
Embedded in Habermas’s notion of the public sphere is a desire for debate and
discussion between “private” individuals, free of influence of the state or industry. With
the rise of corporate power eclipsing that of many states, (Carey, 1997) such a public
sphere is now threatened by multinationals as well. There exist sets of powerful spheres
today that articulate the wish-fulfillment of profit-seeking entities that now dominate
most country’s media. (McChesney, 1999) Colin Leys names the effects of these spheres
on society and culture “market-driven politics” (Leys, 2001) and in his book by the same
title provides an illuminating quote describing a new kind of political involvement, given
the market domination of media: “In the more simplistic formulations of the role of the
media democracy is like a political supermarket in which customers wander from counter
to counter, assessing the relative attractions of the policies on offer before taking their
well-informed selection to the electoral checkout.” (Golding, quoted in Leys, 2001, pp.
109 & 110) This hyperbolic passage connects with a dominant discourse of “consumer-
choice activism” where it is posited that there is no real need to build counterpublics,
because consumers are ultimately in control of the market. Not without its share of
detractors, this theory has been dismantled from a news media lens by Herman and
Chomsky at great length in their book Manufacturing Consent (1988).
To this point, Elizabeth Van Couvering writes in agreement with R.V. Betting in
rejecting the idea “that the market alone should be the arbiter of the structure of the media
industry, as might be appropriate for other types of products. Instead, he [Betting] is
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