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"'Be Opinionated, Fair, And Accurate': The Success Of Independent Media" |
Current rating: 0 |
by Danielle Chynoweth
Email: urbanaimc (nospam) yahoo.com (verified)
Phone: 217-344-8820 (IMC)
Address: IMC, 218 W. Main St, Urbana, IL 61801 |
08 Oct 2002
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This is a transcript of a talk by Danielle Chynoweth, co-founder of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, Oct 8, 2002 at the University YMCA. |
Stories kill. Stories save lives. Every single person in this room is full of stories. That is the simple thesis of my talk today.
As a global society, we are bloated by stories created by public relations firms and corporate media. As a global society we are starving for each others stories, but few of us share, because we don't see ourselves as story tellers. We don't realize the power of sharing stories and absolute necessity of seeking out other's stories.
We are a people who as a people, through our elected representatives, is about to declare war on another people. Our self appointed leader tells us that their self appointed leader has the capacity to build weapons that could destroy us. We are told that that leader is connected with a group that we are told is responsible for the killing of thousands of us a year ago. The dominant story tellers which are almost entirely owned by less than 10 massive corporations with budgets larger than most countries, speak about United States military forces as "we." This is the story that floods us every day - seeming like a diversity of voices, on different channels, in different words - but the same story.
People in Iraq are also speaking, but where are their words? They also have a story to tell, but we don't hear their story. They are saying "In the past 12 years, you have killed an entire quarter of our nation." They say "your country calls chlorine a chemical weapon so we can't import it to clean our water. Every month, 3000 of our children needlessly die for lack of clean water and medicine because of the sanctions." They say "You bomb us to control our oil which was nationalized to keep it out of your hands." They say "Your country has bombed us continuously for 12 years and no one has argued in your Congress about it. No one has called it war."
Who commands the microphone determines who lives and who dies.
Amy Goodman, hero journalist and host of Democracy Now, beseeches us to "go to where the silence is." This is why I have committed myself to passing around the microphone.
I was invited here to talk about independent media. But I don't really want to use these words - media - journalism. They are fine words, but in our minds they refer to someone else. Not most of you, or me. These words let us off the hook - and when I say "us," I don't mean just you and me, I mean us as a society. This one word "themedia" - gives us an excuse to be cynical, to stop reading, to chalk all news up to a bunch of lies. But as we, especially the young amongst us - withdraw from all story telling out of a sense of betrayal or indifference or a desire not to be duped, the decisions are still made and the bombs still fall.
Well I am going to spend my time up here giving the best case I can for thinking, asking questions, reading, writing, recording, and sharing. I know that I am standing next to the biggest cheerleader for reading and writing there is left in our society - the university. What I want to add to or perhaps counteract about this message is the importance of sharing - not waiting until you have your degree or know enough or have tenure, not always insisting on objectivity, or distance, or jargon. My call is a call for amateur hero journalists - you and me - that's what indymedia means to me.
I want to talk about independent media's agenda - yes, our critics are right - we do have an agenda.
Norm Stockwell, the station manager for Madison's community radio station - WORT - makes this distinction between corporate, public, and independent or community media.
Corporate media exists to sell ads - if it bleeds it leads. News is something taken off the wire about a rape and murder in a distant city that you are glad didn't happen to you and about which you can do nothing. That's news. "Corporate media has nothing to tell, only something to sell," as Amy Goodman puts it.
Public radio and public TV believe that the more stuff you know, the better person you will be. Kinda like Trivial Pursuit for the intelligencia. It helps you appear knowledgeable.
Independent, community media provides its audience information on issues that affects their lives then gives them the tools to make change. In fact, I would call this an obligation of independent media. When we sit around our editorial table discussing this week's stories, we ask ourselves "is this something people can change? What are the levers of change. How can we report on the levers as well." Our goal is to report on issues before they are decided in ways that empower listeners to get involved in the decisions.
This is the heart of the independent media movement. But let me flesh out further elements that make this heart beat. And I am quoting from Keith Rosendal, of KCSB in Santa Barbara. He says the role of the independent journalist is "to provide real images of yourself and others, create programs that promote cultural survival, build connections and understanding between disparate groups, demystify how decisions are made, expose motivations, and help people participate in the decisions that affect their lives." In short, the agenda of independent media is building the foundations for an expanding, sustainable democracy. It makes politics part of people's lives, it doesn't just "pour water on debate."
This agenda butts up against the arguments for "objectivity." Independent Media cracks open the ruse of objectivity and denies claims itself to objectivity. "Objectivity is when you don't know what you're standing on." says Frieda Werden, producer of Womens International News Gathering service. Indymedia replaces objectivity - which is so often used as a smokescreen for bias - with the values of fairness, honesty, accuracy, and opinion, to cite Amy Goodman's media credo. Good journalism does not claim objectivity, but is in hot pursuit of the "best available version of the truth," to quote David Goodman, a Boston journalist. It is becoming a venue for subjectivity that we become a venue for suppressed stories.
Now, I am going to describe how every single person in this room has the power to be such a story teller, but first I want to do what I was invited here to do - to describe the framework on indymedia.
First a little history -
I could go far back, but there isn't time. I suggest you go over to the post office, ask for the stamps called "Women Journalists" and look up information on the four women represented on those stamps. Read Mark Twain's media pieces. And George Orwell's essays. Learn about the power of Ida Tarbell's pen. Find out about Pacifica Network News - created in the twilight of the Cold War to be a voice of reason in the midst of warmongering - and recently recaptured from an attempted coup by corporate interests. Just in this country alone, there is a long history of these "unacknowledged legislators" as my professor Christopher Hitchens calls the rich and often forgotten lineage of investigative journalists, muckrakers, and truth seekers.
With a little bit of context - understanding that the existence of independent media superceded the World Trade Organization protests - and it much broader that the specific IMC movement that surged into being in 1999, I want to give some history of that specific movement. In November of 1999, there were massive protests of the World Trade Organization where over 100,000 people marched in the streets of Seattle in to protest an international organization powerful enough to overturn local labor, environmental, and humanitarian laws in the name of creating new markets for capital. Knowing full well that coverage of this historic convergence of global justice activists would be butchered by a threatened corporate media, activists decided to organize their own telling of the protests. They rented a temporary space, collectivized their personal equipment, built a website, and opened their doors to anyone who walked into the makeshift store to post a story, audio, photos, or video to the website. The Associated Press stayed with the permitted march. The Independent Media Center reporters were there at 6 AM with people locking down in the streets. The AP, arriving on the streets after the police began to riot, said that the police gassed and beat us because we were destroying property. The IMC reporters provided a stack of evidence in every medium that the police started gassing at 9 AM and windows were not broken until noon. The AP provided no context for the protest and tried to dismiss us as terrorists. The IMC reporters posted case study after case study of the devastation to the democratic process inflicted by the actions of the WTO. As a result, the WTO became a hated household name. That would have never happened if the substance behind the protests was not reported on.
Since these protests, 82 IMCs in 35 countries have been formed. There are Mexico, Chiapas, and Tijuana IMCs. There is IMC Jerusalem, IMC Israel, and IMC Palestine. South Africa. Brisbane. Vermont. Quebec City. Unlike our local IMC, most IMCs exist as websites without a physical location. In places like China, the IMC can only exist in the virtual realm. Its existence is illegal and therefore its site is mirrored in other countries in case its server is confiscated.
An IMC web site has at least 3 components: a newswire where anyone can post media, a features area with stories of local import chosen by a local editorial group via a consensus process, and links to all other IMC's what is referred to as the "global indymedia network." One of the goals of this network is to provide local independent coverage of major events and protests. During the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, I was able to go to the South Africa web site and read hour by hour updates and commentary on both the summit and its opponents - the 40 thousand from groups such as the anti-Privatisation Forum, the Landless People's Movement, and the Anti-Eviction Campaign whose existence was cited marginally and whose concerns were unacknowledged in the mainstream press.
Our local IMC had its humble beginning as a group of 10 meeting weekly in my living room starting September 24 in the year 2000. We decided to cover local solidarity protests with the anti-International Monetary Fund and World Bank protests in Praque. We decided that if we could find 10 "founding funders" who would donate $50/month for 12 months, we would rent a space in downtown. We found 25 such funders and an old printers shop - a storefront with reasonable rent. We are located at 218 W. Main Street in downtown Urbana, just west of Race Street. The UC-IMC, as we call ourselves, has a website with an open publishing system like other IMCs. We house a library of 500 books, 50 current periodicals, and 100 audio tapes, as well as video tapes - all available for check out by members. We produce a monthly newspaper with a run of 5000 called the public i and IMC Radio News, a weekly public affairs show on WEFT 90.1 FM Mondays at 5:30 PM. The IMC has a production room where members can check out media equipment and use computers to produce media, a large room for music and theater performances, and a gallery space recently named the "middle room gallery" re-opening with a show later this month. Each of these activities is organized and sustained by working groups. There working groups each send two representatives to a steering group that coordinates between the group. We have meeting of our entire membership twice a year to discuss large scale policy changes and future directions. We recently decided to try to buy our building so as to build equity in our space. All IMC groups operate by consensus.
In addition, we were the first IMC to gain 501c3 status. We are the fiscal sponsors for a number of IMCs including the global indymedia network, and the IMCs in NYC, DC, and Pittsburg. We support Palestine IMC, Nigeria IMC, and a mobile i caravan that travels around the world to report on major events and protests. We recently received our first grant to hire a radio news coordinator. We are taking applications over the next two weeks. Please talk to me if you are interested in applying.
OK, so those are some of the vital stats - so that you have a sense of all the things happening at the IMC. If you are interested in getting involved, we have membership forms and literature on the different groups over at that table. Kimberlie Kranich, one of our founding funders, can sign you up and answer your questions.
I am involved in the radio news production end of things at the IMC and want to share a few observations from that perspective. One of the things our IMC does is "carrier pigeon reporting." We find out who is traveling to a protest or overseas and we train them and outfit them with a minidisc recorder and a digital camera.
Much of IMC's success comes from everyday people realizing that in a vacuum of diverse information, their eyes and ears are valuable. Tourism can be transformed into valuable journalism with a few pieces of equipment. Personal travel diaries are radical in that they are free from the standard corporate agenda fare. The mainstream media, with their silence and refusal to pay for investigative and on-the-ground reporting actually create quite an opportunity for us to fill the silence.
When you travel to another country and come back with stories, it usually doesn't occur to you to tape your dinner conversation and broadcast it. The Indymedia movement has put a frame around that kind of storytelling and said "this is important" "this has power."
Our local IMC has outfitted people traveling to Palestine, the FTAA protests in Quebec, the anti-war rallies in D.C. this past April, World Social Forums in Brasil, Guatemala, Mexico. If you are traveling oversees, call us and we provide you equipment, training, and will get your stories on the air.
There is also much to report here locally. More and more, local news has global import and visa versa. In our own backyards is the Caterpillar factory producing the bulldozers rampaging Jenin right now. We joke that we are mired in a corn field and yet let's look a that corn. We are actually mired in Pepsi. Much of this corn is corn syrup. And we are in the heart of battle over genetically modified organisms. Recently the News Gazette reported about how our local corn is going overseas to fight malnutrition. The President of Zimbabwe turned down a shipment of corn - most likely from here - because it was genetically modified. Cancer rates in Champaign county are higher than state and national averages. Now who is investigating the root of that? Monsanto is just around the corner near St. Louis. They are directly responsible for the firing and supression of Fox journalists who did investigative work on Bovine Growth Hormone - one of Monsanto's major products.
Have I peaked your interest? Well, I will leave you with a proposal. Consider yourself an independent journalist. Just try on that hat for a week or two to see how you filter your experiences differently. Do you notice things you could share? Are there questions you've always had but never had an excuse to ask them? I will tell you the best thing about this role. It is an excuse to talk to anyone about anything. If you want to learn about Yoga, investigate it like a story and then produce that story. If you want to understand what happens to all the money that comes into town because of the Bears games, play the reporter and put it in print. Come get press credentials from us if that helps you feel more official. Becoming a citizen reporter is the key to lifelong learning. If you read an interesting story in the paper and want to know more, call up a contact from the story and ask her questions on tape. Get that tape to the Radio group. That's why our motto is, "don't just hate the media, become the media."
Thank you for your time. |
See also:
http://www.iraqjournal.org
http://www.democracynow.org
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Comments
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Noble Goals Fall Very Short At Palestine IMC |
by ?
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
08 Oct 2002
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Today the P-IMC has sunken to record depths. It has now become so completely ridden with hateful commentary that legitimate Palestinian-related discussions is a rel rarity.
Now that IMC Palestine is a smoldering ruin, are you going to do anything to prevent the flames from spreading?
All I ask you to do is look and see for yourself: don't be ignorant, and don't fool yourself about how destructive the Trolls can be.
http://jerusalem.indymedia.org |
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FYI Re IMCP |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
08 Oct 2002
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I have to agree that IMC-Palestine is in a sorry state. They are riven by internal problems and are being exploited by those whose primary purpose is to peddle hate while trying to assoicate the Palestinian resistance with neo-nazi ideas for their own evil purposes.
However, all IMC are autonomous organizations. UC IMC has no responsibility for IMCP editorial policies or lack thereof. We have been as vocal as any IMC about the issues afflicting IMCP in many ways, not all of which are obvious to the casual reader here. For that, we have been ridiculously accused of being CIA and/or Mossad agents.
Most of the material that probably distresses you is the work of one person, using multiple screen names, who styles himself as an IMCP activist, when he actually has next to nothing to do with IMCP and lives in California. His favorite tactic is to post this objectionable material and then to claim that it is all the work of Zionists. He equates Nazism with Zionism, a charge that usually indicates that the person doing so has a neo-Nazi mindset themselves.
I would suggest that you take your concerns there and respond to the crap that you object to on IMCP by posting comments to it reflecting those concerns. IndyMedia is a two-way street. The reader doesn't just have to silently accept what is posted. Rather, you are encouraged to share your own viewpoint.
One caveat is that this material is often posted as a way to stir people up on the part of the person doing so, who gets his jollies by upsetting people. But whether you choose to respond or ignore these obvious provocations is your choice, not mine to make for you.
You can also send your email complaints to the IMCP email lists, which you can find at:
http://lists.indymedia.org/
If you want to see what UC IMC does about this sort of editorial excrement, you are invited to visit our Hidden Files via the link at the bottom of the Newswire. Part of the price of having open publishing is that any idiot can walk through the door and try to disrupt and discredit the site. We have chosen not to tolerate this kind of pointless nonsense. I share your wish that IMCP gets its shit together and starts to deal with this behavior also. |
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What Can I Do? |
by Mark Taylor
mjt10 (nospam) st-andrews.ac.uk (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
08 Oct 2002
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I am a 20-year old student at St-Andrews, what can I do to help? |
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