[Media-watch] RE: how to oppose blair

[Iain Campbell]

Hi Ian,
The best way to opppose blair as you probably know is to meet with others 
who feel the same way and get it all of your chest then demonstrate or phone 
leley's show which i have texted many times. The local SSP branch in your 
area is th Hillfoots branch. We meet regularly and organise buses to demos 
such as the one in inverness last month and the upcoming one in Glasgoe 
against the council tax with music and comedy as well. We are about opposing 
blair and Jack's lot in serious and socialablr way. If you agree with 80% of 
what we say then come along and we will argue about the other 20% but not 
fall out i hope. Give us a phone on 07766706006 if you fancy it next meeting 
not arranged yet so if your quick you could even get it at a time that suits 
you
Cheers
Iain Campbell


>From: "YvonneMarshall" <Brotherhoods at stevenston4.fsnet.co.uk>
>To: <media-watch at lists.stir.ac.uk>,   "caroline pacitti" 
><carolinepacitti at yahoo.co.uk>,   "Neil Ferry" <nferry at k6.dion.ne.jp>,   
>"billy clark" <billy.clark at ntlworld.com>, "kenny" <k.little1 at ntlworld.com>, 
>   "Robert Ian Brotherhood" <ribhood at hotmail.com>
>Subject: [Media-watch] {SPAM?} Thanks
>Date: Fri, 2 Apr 2004 00:27:38 +0100
>
>Dear List-members,
>
>Thanks to those of you who posted kind words in response to the most recent 
>'rant', it was nice to see a flurry of media-watch submissions spilling 
>into the Inbox.
>
>Regarding David Miller's reiteration of the 'purpose' of media-watch, here 
>perhaps is one practical tool which everyone can use - faxyourmp (forget if 
>it's dot-com or dot-org) is a cracking facility, you type in your post-code 
>and up comes a big photie of your MP (so beware !), constituency details 
>etc, and an e-mail form to fill in with your complaint, suggestion etc, and 
>they make sure it's sent and received, then follow-up to see if you've had 
>any response etc. It's very easy to use. I'd never ever written to my MP 
>before but have done so twice (one reply so far) and heartily recommend it.
>
>It may be useful, or encouraging for people who are unsure of their command 
>of language, or, as David stated, 'put off by the erudition of some 
>complainants' to remember that the most effective messages to mass-media 
>are short, get straight to the point and use the simplest language 
>possible. Consider radio, which relies so heavily on language, no silence 
>allowed - lengthy, detailed, 'erudite' slabs of knowledge and/or polemic 
>are virtually never aired if submitted by listeners, no matter how esteemed 
>or 'expert' they may be. The constant intrusion of news/traffic/weather 
>updates and regional broadcasting variations mean that (in the case of BBC 
>Radio Scotland) there is no time for 'real', natural debate about anything 
>and the desperation of producers to 'give everyone their say' leads, more 
>often than not, to a 'spoiled broth' where important strands of discussion 
>are left truncated, unexplored. I've submitted many messages to the Riddoch 
>Show, and the ones they've used have always been brief, three short(ish) 
>sentences at most, and if you can manage to work in a bit of humour or a 
>gentle dig at whoever she's interviewing then that seems to increase the 
>chances of your contribution being aired.
>
>I apologise if my 'rants' are outwith the scope of what media-watch was 
>intended to do, but I can't help it - having witnessed the development of 
>the project, and learned so much from it, it's disheartening when it 
>slumps, when the voices trail away and then are quiet. Many years ago, when 
>David Bowie released his 'Scary Monsters' album, the music press went 
>mental, gigantic detailed reviews of the lyrics etc etc, and one critic, 
>Charles Shaar Murray, commented - 'This is a time in which intelligent 
>people do well to be afraid.'  Well, a typical dictionary definition of an 
>'intellectual' is 'someone who uses his/her mind', and using that 
>definition, most folk would be deeply offended not to be described as 
>'intellectual'. But we all know that most of us don't use our minds to 
>anywhere near capacity, that that potential will never be fully realised, 
>but conversely, we cannot be fooled all of the time, and it may now be that 
>the success of online projects such as this is starting to have a real 
>effect on broader, public debate, perhaps even starting to undermine the 
>monopoly position hitherto enjoyed by mass-media.
>
>The 'point' I'm groping towards is that this project, like mass-media 
>itself, is based on language, on simple words being strung together. There 
>are all manner of debates to be had regarding language-use, whether all 
>language is inherently political, whether 'thought' itself is prescribed by 
>the available vocabulary (i.e. 'you can't think the thought if you don't 
>know the word' etc etc). If we choose to take the words written by others 
>and send them to our friends and colleagues, fair enough, especially if the 
>writer has tackled some subject which we aren't 'qualified' to comment upon 
>with any authority, or if the writer has managed to convey a feeling or 
>reaction in a way which we would like to have done, but haven't the ability 
>to. In such cases, 'posting' other folk's work seems entirely reasonable, 
>even generous, and in many cases is a genuine compliment to the original 
>writer.
>
>But, dear list-members, there is no substitute for your own voice, your own 
>thoughts. Yes, media-watch is not a chat-room, but we've all been 
>witnessing - especially in this past year -how that bloody invasion of Iraq 
>has affected our lives in so many ways, and there comes a point where the 
>sheer frustration caused by seeing such flagrant mass-media duplicity and 
>utter subservience to the liars in Whitehall and Washington becomes 
>painful, unbearable. Of course, it's better to talk to 'real' people 
>face-to-face when it all becomes too much, but many people don't want to 
>talk about war, pain, death etc etc, and no-one can blame them. In most of 
>the responses to my rant there was a clear theme, and that was Time - no 
>time, no space, not enough of it at any rate to devote a chunk to reading 
>this type of thing and 'penning' responses. Many of us never, ever meet 
>people in 'real' life with whom we can discuss this material, it's simply 
>not right to do so, and even when we do, the feeling that we're dong 
>something wrong, something 'conspiratorial' grows stronger with every 
>TERROR ALERT flashing across the screen.
>
>Consider the obscene Press Conference yesterday, hosted by the 
>self-confessedly 'institutionally racist' Metropolitan Police - two of the 
>Yard's finest were brought out to display, for the benefit of the cameras ( 
>those of you who react badly to strobe-like lighting should look away NOW 
>!!) a big plastic bag. That's what it was, a gigantic polly-bag. It wasn't 
>the one which they found, the one which contained a half-ton of ammonium 
>nitrate, but it was a big polly-bag just like the one they did find, so it 
>was important we should all know exactly what such bags look like. Further 
>to the farcical Press call, the mainstream broadcasters then dutifully 
>pursued the unwitting P&R folk representing potential 'ACME Terrorism 
>Suppliers' such as B&Q, Homebase etc, demanding to know if they were 
>monitoring purchases of this devilish material.
>
>So, how does all of this affect us directly ? Well, Al Qaeda 'probably', 
>'almost certainly' has cells in Scotland. Yes, indeed. Last Sunday (March 
>28th), on the 'Scotland Today'  6.30 news, up popped a Mr David 
>Capitanchik. 'Who he ?' said moi, dribbling beer all over my kebab, and, 
>obligingly (almost in a kismet-type manner) the wee banner flashed onto the 
>screen, and thus did it say,  'Terrorism Expert.'  So, me staggered 
>upstairs, 'googled' Mr Capitanchik, and very interesting reading it is too. 
>I recommend you do the same if you want to find out who the 'experts' on 
>Terrorism are in Scotland i.e. the 'experts' who are called upon by 
>Scottish Media to give their informed opinion on the threat we currently 
>face. Mr Capitanchik was not holding up a gigantic polly-bag (to be fair, 
>one man, however learned or expert, can never hope to be a match for two of 
>the Yard's finest and expertly-trained polly-bag-elevators) but one was 
>left with the distinct impression that, had Mr C been willing to do so, 
>some other 'expert' would have been drafted in to assist him in the task - 
>'They're coming for us, and they're going to use big gigantic polly-bags, 
>just like this one !!'
>
>Al Qaeda in Scotland. They must be the guys who drew the short straws, the 
>ones who weren't assigned a hot-bed of fundamentalist/sectarian hatred to 
>draw succour and public support from.  (Doh !!) But worry not, the 
>authorities are on to them, and soon we'll all be asking 'Is that your bag 
>?', 'Is that your dog ?', 'Are you reading that paper you're sitting on ?'
>
>Orwell could never have made this stuff up. His work has been mis-read and 
>abused. '1984' wasn't a dystopian fiction, as it's so often patly (yes, I 
>mean 'patly', not 'aptly') described. It was the publisher who changed 
>Orwell's original title, '1948'. Orwell wasn't trying to be prophetic, 
>visionary etc etc. He was describing the bombed-out London he knew, the 
>city of rations and misery, and behind the 'stiff upper lip' which had been 
>drummed into him he knew, thanks to his propaganda work with the Beeb, that 
>all was language and language was all as far as the 'masses' were 
>concerned.  Me's no Orwell-scholar, nor pretending to be so, but my humble 
>take is that '1984' was never intended as a prophecy, it was, like Animal 
>Farm, a dark cartoon, a 'fairy-story'. His preoccupation was language first 
>and foremost, honesty next, because he knew that the latter could never 
>ever happen unless the former was capable of accomodating it. And so, right 
>now, we on this wee list, we send each other bits and pieces, we perhaps 
>attach short comments on our own 'take' on things, but any hope we may have 
>that something like 'truth' will ever be a priority for media, despite our 
>complaints and lobbying, is pure delusion.  'War on Terror' is, de facto, a 
>nonsense, a non-sequiter. (I wish I knew more Latin, French or some other 
>language to illustrate how mad and sad and bad it is, but I don't.)  Both 
>are abstract nouns, and so the 'war' is abstract, it is not, in its 
>essentials, 'real'.  That fundamental fact has now been glossed-over, has 
>been allowed to disappear from the debate. CH4 is perhaps the last 
>terrestrial broadcaster which still refers to the 'so-called' War on Terror 
>- for all other outlets it has now become a fact that there is a 'War' and 
>it is on 'Terror'.
>
>The mass-media will have to accomodate the net-writers, the 'posters', 
>eventually, and occasionally does, and in time the 'rules' of journalism 
>will change, they will have to. But that depends on the efforts of 'real' 
>writers i.e. not salaried journalists, to push hard, to develop an entirely 
>new form of journalism which is, in it's essentials, is human and hearfelt, 
>not corporate-funded and edited-to-death.
>
>And that means you.
>
>Regardless of what you feel may be your limitations writing-wise, 
>punctuation, paragraphs, grammar, whatever, it does not matter. What 
>matters is that people speak, tell their truth, speak back to those who 
>disagree, and keep doing it, even if it's just for ten minutes a night - 
>most humans happily spend much longer than that sitting on the toilet pan. 
>So, every time you're on the pan and enjoying it, think about cutting it 
>short (so to speak) and getting online, sounding off, if not via this site, 
>then the others which are out there, write to that councillor, that MP, 
>whoever, just do a wee tiny thing, it'll make you feel better, and who 
>knows, you might end up getting to know people, even if it is 'virtually' - 
>we all know, by now, relationships, families which have been changed 
>because of people sitting alone at night, tapping in words, just wee words, 
>just language...
>
>But, until that happens, the job of 'discussing' what's really going on is 
>paid for, by all of us. We pay the government to fund that thing called the 
>BBC, and theirs is the task of revealing, exploring and detailing the often 
>unpleasant facts about the world, the facts we are in no position for find 
>out for ourselves, the facts many of us would much rather ignore. Today, on 
>BBC News 24, I noticed that they've started running their 
>self-congratulatory 'ads' every half-hour or so, those ones where tasteful, 
>'arty' shots of well-kent correspondents are jazzily spliced along to some 
>rousing, urgent music while the narrator sounds-off about the Beeb having 
>200 correspondents in 150 countries. Thankfully, they didn't feature a 
>graphic of a rotating Earth with a United Kingdom the same size as Africa, 
>but they didn't have to - the immovable gravitas of the voice did that 
>perfectly. Is 'Corporate Masturbation' an established term ?
>
>(Well, it is now !)
>
>I'm not sending any more 'rants' unless other people start sending them as 
>well.
>
>So there !
>
>Goodnight !
>
>Best Regards,
>
>Ian Brotherhood
>
>
>
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>Media-watch mailing list
>Media-watch at lists.stir.ac.uk
>http://lists.stir.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/media-watch

_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself with cool new emoticons http://www.msn.co.uk/specials/myemo