Echoing similar views, Ignacio Ramonet, former director of Le Monde Diplomatique said the great private groups have been weakened by the economic crisis. Neo-liberalism has received a deathly stroke and the power of the media, specially the written media, is weakening. He added: "The decay of the big media has been caused due to its alliance with the financial circles and the fact that they also used similar methods of functioning."

The speakers reflected on the coverage of the meltdown and found grave lapses in reporting facts. Bernardo Kucinski from the University of Sao Paulo said the media portrayed the crisis with an alarmist tendency and chose to hide the truth. "Banks in Brazil had created economic analysis departments which cultivated certain journalists and fed information only to them. This group of people, in collaboration with the journalists, tried to divert attention from the economic chaos to other issues. Ironically, the best coverage of the crisis came in US newspapers, which even covered the political links of the crisis", said Kucinski.

The discussion looked critically at funding which is crucial for sustaining free media organisations, apart from the challenges posed by corporates and governments from time to time. Most of the free and alternative media organizations thrive online as well as in the form of community radio stations. Jonas Valente from Intervozes said that free media is a necessity in the present world order because it promotes human rights and provides a diversity of voices to its consumers. "In Brazil, the commercial media is just six networks which control over 90 per cent of the market. Those who produce their own information find it difficult to present their views to the people. The 180 million people of Brazil need a more democratic environment," lamented Valente.

Giving examples of harassment of the free media organizations, Jose Soter of the Brazilian Association of Community Radio (ABRACO) said that the authorities closed down eight community radio stations in Belem, where the WSF is being organised with help from the government, on the grounds that the spectrum had to be cleaned.

Similarly, highlighting the hurdles that the corporate media create for smaller organizations, Renato Rovai from the Revista Forum said: "Someone complained that community radio stations can knock down planes from the sky. The mainstream media calls bloggers monkeys. Then we had a Sao Paulo newspaper accusing us of taking public sector advertisements to run our establishment. The fact is that the mainstream media also cannot survive without government advertisements. Basically, they do not want us to access finances. Therefore we need to have new avenues for financing."

The discussion on funds for the free media had the most divergent views among the free media activists. Some wanted government money to be tapped while others did not agree; some felt only people's money should be used and others debated if newer models of funding could be created. Ivana Bentes from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro strongly felt that the alternative media organisations should look beyond the state as a provider.

Maria Pia Matta, head of the Latin American branch of AMARC, the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters, urged governments to advance the right to communication as a human right. She said: "Bolivia and some other countries in Latin America have acknowledged that community radio is also a right to communication and have said so through their Constitution. Maybe we should form alliances with the governments and political parties so that the movement can be strengthened and advanced."

On the way forward, Joaquim Constanzo, the IPS Latin-America director said: "We should aspire to fight the big media in their own domain. However important the Internet may be, I do not think we can fight the big ones with small constructions. We need both the technology and the content to fight the big media."

Agreeing with Constanzo, Borges added that if the free media movement has to take on the big media, it will need good quality professionals and also urge the government to define public policies that allow alternative and free media to flourish.

Matta advocated that if the governments treated frequency as a common heritage, it would radically alter the community radio movement. Experts were in favour of using digital networks, already being used by over a billion users, to further widened the free media movement