Fwd: Chaining The Watchdog - Part 3

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Medialens Media Alerts

Chaining The Watchdog - Part 3

 

MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

 

May 7, 2003

 

 

MEDIA ALERT: CHAINING THE WATCHDOG – PART 3

 

Mainstream Credibility Is Dead – Long Live The ‘Netizens’!

 

 

“In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim

high.” (Thoreau)

 

 

Friendly Fascism

 

In the first two parts of this 3-part series, we showed how systemic media bias

constitutes one of many " dangerous ideas " excluded from the media as a result of

" collusion between the press and the powerful " . We suggested that watered down

versions of dissent are used to give the impression of open and honest debate on

media bias where in fact there is almost none.

 

The destruction of freedom of speech in the media is not just another issue. The

mass media is not simply a window on the world; it is the means by which

information relating to problems and solutions is communicated to the public for

consideration. If these means are biased to ignore problems that conflict with

the needs of established interests, then society will be unable to solve or even

recognise such problems.

 

Global society may, for example, thrust its collective hand into the flame of

climate change and, thanks to the systemic bias of the corporate mass media and

corporate politics, leave it there. Last year the US National Academy of

Sciences, America's most august scientific body, warned of a global climate

holocaust, perhaps within the next ten years. Barely a flicker of concern

registered across the media – the story was mentioned in passing and forgotten.

Vast fortunes can be built on the back of responses to Iraqi and Korean missile

‘threats’, but not in response to global warming - the media knows which

problems to emphasise.

 

The same impassivity in the face of catastrophe has of course long been a

feature of the media response to Western abuses of humanity in the Third World.

Jeremy Vine recently suggested on the BBC’s Politics Show that the

Anglo-American failure to discover any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would

be “toe-curlingly embarrassing for the politicians” (The Politics Show, BBC1,

May 4, 2003). To have launched an illegal invasion, conquest, occupation and

devastation of a defenceless Third World country, killing thousands, on a

completely false pretext would be merely “embarrassing”, according to the BBC.

The Politics Show may be broadcast from a bright, high-tech studio – with Vine

looking relaxed in dress-down smart-casual - but this is exactly what Bertram

Gross had in mind when he talked of “friendly fascism”.

 

Given the reality of systemic media bias, the ban on discussing the problem, and

the role of this bias in facilitating vast crimes and catastrophes in the world,

to what extent should honest journalists be willing to participate in this

system? Would we have participated in the Nazi press? Would we have been willing

to write for the Soviet state newspaper, Pravda? Should we be willing to

participate in a system that has, for example, buried the truth of genocidal

Western sanctions responsible for the deaths of one million Iraqi civilians?

 

With his usual honesty, Tolstoy discussed the bad consequences of good people

participating in bad systems – here, government, but his comments apply equally

to the modern mass media:

 

“It is harmful because enlightened, good, and honest people by entering the

ranks of the government give it a moral authority which, but for them, it would

not possess. If the government were made up entirely of that coarse element –

the violators, self-seekers, and flatterers – who form its core, it could not

continue to exist. The fact that honest and enlightened people are found who

participate in the affairs of the government gives government whatever it

possesses of moral prestige.” (Tolstoy, Writings On Civil Disobedience and

Non-Violence, New Society, 1987, p.192)

 

While it might be reasonable for honest journalists to enter the ranks of the

media, it is surely not reasonable for them to do so without drawing attention

to the lethal corruption of the system employing them. As Tolstoy goes on to

write, the danger is that such journalists “only say what they are allowed to

say, and – by that very silence about what is most important – convey to the

public distorted views which just suit the government”, or the media system.

 

We have often admired the work of, for example, George Monbiot, Robert Fisk and

Greg Palast (Fisk, in particular, has been an inspiration throughout the Iraq

crisis), but their failure to subject the media – including the media entities

hosting their work – to sustained systemic criticism is deeply damaging, we

believe, for the reasons identified by Tolstoy. The problem is that the public

identify these writers as being ‘about as good as it gets’ - if even they are

silent on systemic media corruption, how much of a problem can it be?

 

Assuming that it is vital to challenge the mainstream media system, and assuming

that this system will not itself host such a critique, what options are open to

people determined to make such a challenge?

 

 

Every Citizen A Reporter - OhmyNews Shows The Way

 

It seems to us that there is growing evidence to show that dissidents may be in

a position, perhaps for the first time, to mount a serious challenge to the

stranglehold of state-corporate power on the public mind.

 

From the early days of the nineteenth century, business and government have been

resolutely determined to stamp out the free expression of ideas. The first

resort were the seditious libel and blasphemy laws, which essentially outlawed

all challenges to the status quo. When these failed to have the desired effect,

elites turned to newspaper stamp duty and taxes on paper and advertisements to

price radical journals out of the market. Between 1789 and 1815, stamp duty was

increased by 266 per cent, helping to ensure, as Lord Castlereagh put it, that

“persons exercising the power of the press” would be “men of some respectability

and property” (Quoted, James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without

Responsibility - The Press And Broadcasting in Britain, p.13). The point being

that these more “respectable” owners of the press “would conduct them in a more

respectable manner than was likely to be the result of pauper management”, as

Cresset Pelham observed at the time.(Ibid)

 

This state-orchestrated financial war on the radical working class press was

reinforced by the natural refusal of advertisers to support radicalism. In 1817,

for example, Cobbett’s popular Political Register received a total of three

advertisements, although its advertising rates were less than one-hundredth of

that of “respectable” rival periodicals.

 

Liberal hyperbole notwithstanding, the question for those who govern us has

always been, not how to liberate the press, but how to contain it. The Lord

Chancellor put it succinctly in 1834:

 

“The only question to answer, and the only problem to solve, is how they [the

people] shall read in the best manner; how they shall be instructed politically,

and have political habits formed the most safe for the constitution of the

country.” (Ibid, p.25)

 

With the industrialisation of the press, and the associated rise in the cost of

setting up and distributing national newspapers, economic pressures ensured that

the radical press was quickly pushed to the margins. Ben Bagdikian notes that

when the first edition of his book, The Media Monopoly, was published in 1983,

50 giant firms dominated almost every mass medium - in 1990, this number had

shrunk to just 23.

 

Nevertheless, today, the internet appears to have raised the possibility that

mass media might at last be owned by people other than “men of some

respectability and property”.

 

In a recent article in The New York Times, Howard French reports of South Korea:

 

“For years, people will be debating what made this country go from conservative

to liberal, from gerontocracy to youth culture and from staunchly pro-American

to a deeply ambivalent ally - all seemingly overnight... But for many observers,

the most important agent of change has been the Internet.” (French, ‘Online

Newspaper Shakes Up Korean Politics’, The New York Times, March 6, 2003)

 

South Korea is “wired” – it has fast broadband connections in fully 70 percent

of all households. " The internet is so important here, " a Western diplomat in

Seoul says. " This is the most online country in the world. The younger

generation get all their information from the web. Some don't even bother with

TVs. They just download the programmes. " (Jonathan Watts, ‘World’s first

internet president logs on: Web already shaping policy of new South Korean

leader’, The Guardian, February 24, 2003)

 

As elections approached in South Korea last year, more and more people began to

get their information and political analysis from internet news services instead

of from the country's overwhelmingly conservative newspapers. The most

influential internet service, OhmyNews, registered 20 million page views per day

around election time last December. In March, the service still averaged around

14 million visits daily, in a country of 40 million people. OhmyNews was started

three years ago by Oh Yeon Ho, 38, who says:

 

" My goal was to say farewell to 20th-century Korean journalism, with the concept

that every citizen is a reporter... The professional news culture has eroded our

journalism, and I have always wanted to revitalize it. Since I had no money, I

decided to use the Internet, which has made this guerrilla strategy possible. "

 

French explains the strategy:

 

”Although the staff has grown to 41, from the beginning the electronic

newspaper's unusual concept has been to rely mostly on contributions from

ordinary readers all over the country, who send dispatches about everything from

local happenings and personal musings to national politics.”

 

Something comparable happened spontaneously to Media Lens on a much smaller

scale during the Iraq crisis – thousands of readers began posting and reading

the best and most current reporting on the crisis, together with their views and

local experiences, on the Media Lens message board. As a result, readers have

often been able to access accurate versions of a story before it appears in the

mainstream media, so effectively neutralising much mainstream propaganda. When

they see a story reported by the media, it is now reflexive for many readers to

check what they have read and seen on the internet – which often reveals key

details and perspectives omitted by the mainstream. For example, the famous

toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad on April 9 appeared to us,

from watching BBC and ITN news, to have been cheered by enormous crowds – we

quickly learned that this was not the case from our own message board.

 

Relying almost solely on ordinary readers in this way, OhmyNews helped generate

a huge national movement that resulted in the election of Roh Moo Hyun, a

reformist lawyer, last December. Before OhmyNews got involved, the new president

had been a relative unknown. After his election, he granted OhmyNews the first

interview he gave to any Korean news organization. “Netizens won,” Oh says of

the election. “Traditional media lost.” (Mark L. Clifford and Moon Ihlwan,

‘Korea: The Politics of Peril’, Business Week, February 24, 2003)

 

 

Creating A Commotion

 

This is a remarkable story of tremendous importance to anyone interested in

challenging the state-corporate control of what we know and think about the

world. The enormous success of OhmyNews, together with our own humble

experience, suggests that internet media relying “mostly on contributions from

ordinary readers all over the country” represent a truly potent democratising

force.

 

It seems clear to us that we should all – media consumers and progressive

journalists alike – be committing as much of our resources and energy as

possible to these kinds of projects. As readers, we casually hand over our money

to the corporate establishment, taking it for granted that honest, alternative

media should be freely available on the web and presumably need no funding. As

journalists, we happily plot our career paths through the least awful newspapers

and magazines, reaping the rewards, while averting our eyes from the problems

outlined by Tolstoy.

 

We need to start turning away from corporate mainstream media and towards

democratic citizens’ media en masse. Howard Zinn gives an idea of what is

required:

 

“Change will come through tumultuous movements around the country, movements

that are so strong that whatever party is holding power has to respond. The

future will be determined by whether citizens organise and mobilise and create a

commotion.” (Zinn, Quoted New Statesman, November 1, 1996)

 

We received the report on OhmyNews from Edward Herman who followed up his

mention of the story with this email commenting on how it had been received:

 

“In a recent ZNet Commentary I mentioned the South Korean Internet success

story, OhmyNews, and got little or no feedback from the readers of that article.

This puzzles me, as the left in this country is overwhelmed by the power of the

mainstream media, and OhmyNews is a startling illustration of the possibilities

of the Internet for developing an alternative news source. It is true that South

Korea is different, and has, among other differences, 70% of computer-e-mail

users on broadband and with a very Internet-oriented culture. But the culture of

this country is not stable, broadband is growing in importance, and I can’t see

any good reason why the SK experience doesn’t offer a model that we should be

thinking about with great interest and even excitement.” (Herman to Media Lens,

April 20, 2003)

 

We totally agree with Ed Herman. For too long, honest journalists have worried

too much about being marginalised by the mainstream media – now is the time for

readers and journalists to think seriously themselves about marginalising the

mainstream as many people in South Korea have done. We need to do everything we

can to create genuine alternatives with the power to challenge the corrupt

control of the public mind.

 

Media Lens began in July 2001 with three people working in our spare time

without resources. After less than two years of activity we have recently been

invited to give interviews by CNN International, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio Five

Live, the New Statesman and others. We currently have 12 rs within the

BBC receiving our Media Alerts, 12 within the UK government, 5 within the US

government, 3 within the Telegraph Group, 2 within the Guardian, and we seem to

be familiar to many in the BBC and elsewhere in the media (the BBC’s Newsnight

editor, George Entwistle, recently suggested as much to us). We were recently

invited to dinner (on him) by the Guardian’s Political Correspondent, and we

regularly receive supportive emails from dissident journalists working inside

the Guardian, Observer and Independent.

 

The point is that this impact, however small, has been achieved with almost zero

resources in a media environment dominated by multi-billion pound corporate

giants – the implications for what could be achieved with even minimal resources

are blindingly obvious to us.

 

Our hope is to expand Media Lens to provide an alternative to the corporate

media. Our webmaster is developing an Active News services – a glorified Media

Lens message board whereby netizens (who, as Oh says, are all reporters now) can

post their analyses and background sources, and exchange ideas, musings and

thoughts on news stories and on the performance of mainstream media.

 

We also have longer-term plans (dependent on levels of funding) for the

development of a Daily Antidote supplying ‘instant’ email responses to the

mainstream media’s distortion of emerging stories. Our recent Media Alert:

‘Killings At Falluja - The BBC Tells One Side Of The Story’ (April 29, 2003 –

see Media Alert Archive, www.medialens.org) was a trial run of the kind of

short, rapid response we have in mind.

 

The media, frankly, is not our primary concern. Our concern is to work towards a

society in which rational and compassionate ideas are not subject to wholesale

suppression simply because they interfere with the fundamentalist ‘pragmatism’

of maximised profits. We believe that nothing could be more naïve than this

version of ‘pragmatism’. We believe that human happiness and well-being are

naturally rooted in concern for others, and that unrestrained egotism and greed

are as devastating to us as individuals as they are to the world around us.

 

It is all very well to talk of ‘netizens’ and alternative media, but what is

really needed is a truly democratic media rooted in generosity rather than

greed, humility rather than self-aggrandising egotism, compassion rather than

selfishness, honesty rather than compromised ‘lesser of two evil’ careerism. As

has been said: “What use is a revolution if our hearts stay the same?”

 

 

 

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