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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Indymedia and Mainstream Journalism |
Current rating: 0 |
by arthur
Email: artneslen (nospam) hotmail.com (unverified!) |
15 Jun 2001
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The National Union of Journalists' (Great Britain) official magazine, 'The Journalist' has just published two articles supporting Indymedia, and condemning media coverage of the Mayday demo. |
>Whose media are they?<
Derided by mainstream media, activists have started their own. Arthur Neslen surveys the Idymedia.
Plans by a sinister paramilitary-style network called The Wombles to launch ‘a holocaust’ on the streets of London last Mayday were narrowly averted, according to sources close to Special Branch. Actually, they weren’t. But if you wanted to get a story about last month’s anti-capitalist protests into the nationals before April 30, this was the type of news lead you had to run with. If you didn’t, it’d get tacked on anyway.
Those churning out the stuff sometimes professed amazement that activists would not talk to them. But there was one newswire that activists talked to, trusted, and indeed relied upon during the Mayday madness: Indymedia.
The Independent Media Centre (IMC) phenomenon began during the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organisation in 1999. An activist-run internet news agency, it combined up-to-the-minute reports, debate and opinion-postings with audio and video footage. As martial law was declared, Seattle Indymedia fulfilled that most primary role of a news outlet: it told people what was going on. And the word spread.
Today, there are IMCs in Brazil and Barcelona, Chicago and the Congo. No anti-capitalism demonstration is complete without an Indymedia press centre of activists working as journalists, and vice-versa. But Indymedia’s DIY philosophy has led journalists to complain of bias, inaccuracy and amateurishness on its wires.
‘It makes me despair about the future of journalism in this country’ one hack railed on Jeff Gaulin’s Canadian Journalism website after the Quebec anti-FTAA protests. ‘We\'re seeing a whole new group of activists who masquerade as journalists and believe their message is the only message. Anyone who dares disagree with them is a tool of the corporate power brokers.’
This might seem paranoid, coming from someone enjoying the authority of mainstream media, attacking theose who conspicuously lack it. But professional journalists’ self-perceptions are worlds apart from the way new media activists see us.
‘Journalists are slaves to the media corporations they work for,’ Marcus, an IMC activist asserted. ‘They are dependent on getting paid, regardless of how their articles gets re-written, distorted or manipulated.’
The UK Indymedia site is very popular. Marcus claims it received 1.4 million individual visitors on Mayday. Postings, however, often included insulting and abusive wires, apparently from police officers.
‘It’s the downside of being an open-source, uncensored newswire,’ Marcus said. ‘The only things we take offline are adverts and death threats.’ So some hate mail is still being posted.
Indymedia has broken more stories than most web news agencies, from buried EU reports on the Kosovan Racak massacre, to hacked documents on world leaders’ travel plans at the WEF Forum in Davos. Uniquely, it has tens of thousands of ‘journalists’ ready to write and publish stories the second they get them. It’s as much a movement as a media, and it’s increasingly drawing fire from the authorities.
After last years’ S26 Prague protests, the Czech interior minister Stanislav Gross announced a police investigation into a ‘foreign media agency’ which ‘prepared media outlets abroad to denounce the Czech Republic and Czech police.’
Then in April, the FBI served a court order on Seattle Indymedia, demanding all user connection logs from a web server during the weekend of the Quebec demonstrations. Internal documents, purportedly retrieved from a looted police car, had been posted on the Montreal Indymedia site revealing that the Quebec force reached level four in a five-tiered response strategy to the protests. Level five was ‘deadly force’.
Most recently, in May, the FBI served a court order on the owner of Ohio Valley Indymedia, directing him to hand over server log information on the posting of a ‘death threat’ to Steven Roach, the Cincinatti police officer who shot a black youth and sparked days of rioting.
‘Since Bush got in, there seems to have been a campaign almost to shut us down,’ said Marcus. ‘But any attack on us is an attack on the free press as a whole. Journalists may disagree with our ethos but they should scream loud when we get taken out in Seattle or Ohio.’
It might mean fewer tip-offs from Scotland Yard next May 1st, but by defending the ‘amateurs’, the ‘professionals’ could begin to recover some of the credibility they lost in the run-up to Mayday.
>May Day of Shame<
The media made fools of themselves over the May 1 protests in London says Martin Cloake, and it\'s serious.
Almost without exception, print and broadcast media played along with efforts to whip up hysteria and deter atendance in the days leading up to the May Day London demonstration. When the day itself passed, the sense of diappointment that there was no mass disorder to play itself out before the massed ranks of cameras was almost tangible.
One of the issues the demonstrators were raising was the lack of participation in our democracy. Many people feel their views are not represented by any political parties and that anything which veers from support for agressive neo-liberalism is pushed to the sidelines.
That feeling fuels the large numbers who have demonstrated across the planet in recent years on a whole range of issues which can be grouped loosely under the anti-capitalist banner.
The media have an important role to play but they are failing to fulfil it. When people feel let down by the political process, they look to the media to reflect their disquiet. What they see instead are media owned by the same corporations which own governments, seeking to demonise and marginalise any opposition.
They also see journalists who appear to disseminate corporate propaganda, rather than report the issues. With few honourable exceptions, the media participated in a campaign of scaremongering designed to minimise support for the days actions and justify the use of opressive policing tactics. On the day, the demonsrators\' arguments were reported in a sneering tone, if at all, while police statements - often contradicted by what was unfolding on camera - went unchallenged.
As the day drew to a close, the few minutes of violence that did occur were edited to create the impression of widespread mayhem. The use of loaded terminology was rife: the demonstrators didn\'t for example, simply leave Oxford St. They \'disappeared into the night\' in one report. Much ofthe coverage would have been laughable if it wasn\'t such a serious matter.
It\'s not hard to understand why the media are seen as a willing tool of the establishment. This is dangerous for several reasons. Genuinely independent media can provide a voice for those who feel disenfranchised - not by taking sides but by reporting evenly.
If people feel they can\'t make their voice heard through the established political process or through the media, more extreme methods become more attractive. And those extreme methods often include assaults on journalists.
The reporting of London\'s May Day marked another low in the conduct of the British press, and we should ensure it does not happen again. When propaganda about the alleged undermining of democracy poses as reporting, and when journalists are untroubled by this, then democracy really is undermined.
Martin Cloake is chair of the NUJ Central London branch |
See also:
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=46828&group=webcast
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May Day London |
by Dermot
resist4change (nospam) yahoo.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
15 Jun 2001
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Ive found an eye-witness report of the London May Day protests on www.marxist.com (scroll down a bit), & its a well-documented piece of what truly happened in Oxford Circus....
cheers,
dermot. |
See also:
www.marxist.com
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