Radical Media widens “media” beyond newspapers, television and broadcasting to include murals, street theatre, song, dance, posters, photomontage, pirate radio, performance and the internal communication systems of political movements.

Downing moves from John Heartfield’s anti-fascist image-making and Brechtian agitprop to ACT UP, culture jamming, community media and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, asking how oppositional ideas become public without being filtered through institutions built to neutralise them.

The book’s sharper argument is that radical media cannot be judged only by whether its message is politically correct, its the organisation matters too. Downing contrasts the Leninist transmission model, where party leadership sends doctrine downward, with anarchist, feminist and self-managed forms that try to make the production of media resemble the social relations they advocate. It also refuses the comforting assumption that all marginal media is emancipatory, examining racist, authoritarian and religious extremism as rebellious communication with radically different ends. A substantial history of media as political infrastructure, not merely content.

SAGE paperback, first edition, first printing, 2001. Very good condition with light shelf wear.