Given such alternative goals and practices, and
given the differences to mainstream media,
how is one to assess the democratic significance
of alternative media? One fruitful way of approaching
this question is to think of alternative
media as institutions of the public sphere and,
more precisely, as O’Donnell (2001, p. 41) suggests, to consider whether such media constitute
an alternative public sphere or, conversely,
a sphere of multiple alternative publics.