[Media-watch] Medialens on the Guardian

[Mark and Andrea]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=5614


Media Alternatives - Part 1
by David Edwards
May 28, 2004


              MAINSTREAM MEDIA


  On February 4, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger emailed us the following
challenge:

  "Dear David,

  I continue to be very pressed. You make an nteresting critique of the
general position regarding the funding of newspapers - and you draw the
implication you choose to draw. That's an interesting debate, if hardly a
new one. I'd be interested to know what alternative business model you
propose for newspapers which would sustain a large, knowledgeable and
experienced staff of writers and editors, here and abroad, in print as well
as on the web. Do you prefer no advertising lest journalists are corrupted
or influenced in the way you imagine? If so, what cover price do you
propose? Or, in the absence of advertising, what other source of revenue
would you prefer?

  These are all interesting debates, and I wish you well. I can only answer
as to my experience. alan." (Email to David Cromwell, February 6, 2004)

  Several readers have asked us why we failed to reply to these specific
points. Rusbridger's response came after a long debate, and scores of
complaints sent by Media Lens readers, on the issue of the Guardian's
dependence on advertising. (See: 'Rapid Response Media Alert: Climate
Catastrophe - The Ultimate Media Betrayal', January 8, 2004, and subsequent
alerts on January 20, 23, and 27, www.medialens.org, Media Alerts archive)

  We had asked Guardian journalists how they could propose environmentally
friendly initiatives to combat global warming in the same edition of a paper
that was, as usual, packed with adverts for major car manufacturers and
airlines. We also asked why the Guardian consistently fails to report the
true extent and ferocity of big business opposition to action on climate
change.

  In response, we received repeated denials and diversions from Rusbridger,
from environment editor Paul Brown, and from the readers' editor, Ian Mayes,
who bluntly stated that no one on the paper saw the rejection of fossil fuel
advertising as a serious option. Finally, we received the above challenge
from Rusbridger.

  The question of alternatives is reasonable enough, of course, when posed
by someone willing to recognise the existence of a problem. But when used as
a device to reinforce the idea that there is no problem - in the absence of
alternatives a problem becomes, after all, a fact of life - then it seems to
us an unreasonable response to an important argument.

  Problems And Solutions

  In response, the first point to make is that we are not obliged to respond
to the question of alternatives at all. Anyone is entitled to point out an
important problem without offering a solution - raising problems for
discussion is itself an important and legitimate activity.

  To our knowledge, Media Lens is the first serious attempt to provide a
regular, radical response to mainstream propaganda in the UK. Criticising
actual or potential employers means career-death for journalists, as it does
in any industry, and so the well-intentioned have by and large attempted to
do what they can from inside the media, stepping cautiously around important
media toes.

  This is not an unreasonable strategy, particularly prior to the internet
revolution when dissident outreach was limited in the extreme. Nevertheless,
dozens of brilliant media dissidents have long worked at the margins of the
mainstream in the United States, while Britain has managed to produce a tiny
handful and, otherwise, a complacent, stifling silence.

  This complacency may in part be explained by the co-option of dissent by a
more 'liberal' section to the left of the British media spectrum - the
Guardian, Observer and Independent - than exists in the United States. The
existence of this more liberal component may, in turn, be explained by the
fact that pre-Blair Britain had a version of left parliamentary opposition
to state-corporate power. Now that our political system has 'converged' in
the way of US politics (dominated by two pro-business parties), our media
may also be converging towards a similarly closed and intolerant, US-style
media system. The recent high-profile dismissals of journalists and
politicians challenging power - the BBC's Andrew Gilligan, the Daily
Mirror's Piers Morgan, and Labour MP George Galloway - for the loss of zero
pro-war journalists and politicians may be evidence of this.

  The point is that the appearance of dissident journalists in the UK
'liberal' press - rare indeed in the US media (Paul Krugman of the New York
Times is a conspicuous example) - has had an impact on liberal perception
that is far greater than their impact on wider public opinion and politics.

  Dissident appearances in the mainstream act as a kind of liberal vaccine
inoculating against the idea that the media is subject to extremely tight
restrictions and control. Thus, many people see papers like the Guardian and
Independent as genuinely enlightened, open and honest (just as many people
see the BBC as benevolent 'Auntie Beeb'). As a result, the atrocious
performance of these media in failing to challenge even the most banal
government deceptions facilitating attacks on the Third World goes
unnoticed. Blame is heaped on governments, but the pivotal role of the media
is ignored. Even as we finished preparing this Media Alert, yet one more
example was provided by an editorial in the Independent:

  "The US-led multinational force will continue to guarantee security [in
Iraq] for as long as needed. But its performance so far leaves a lot to be
desired, to put it mildly." (Leader, 'President Bush's latest plan for Iraq
is constructed on the flimsiest of foundations', May 26, 2004)

  Imagine if the Soviet press had said the same of the Soviet army in
Afghanistan. Imagine if Saddam's press had said the same of the Iraqi army
in Kuwait. To suggest that the illegal slaughter and mutilation of tens of
thousands of Iraqis on utterly fraudulent pretexts "leaves a lot to be
desired" is an obscenity. To suggest that an illegal occupying army ruling a
country from the barrel of a gun "will continue to guarantee security" is
propaganda of the most insidious kind. And yet this paper is often
considered a fiercely independent watchdog - even by the honest journalists
who write for it.

  As a 'corporate free press' clearly represents a major contradiction in
terms, an attempt to explore these issues is vital, and is justified quite
regardless of whether someone making the attempt has solutions to offer. We
can imagine somebody interrupting a Town Hall meeting to report that the
local school is on fire and that children are being burned alive. Such a
person would presumably not be chastised for failing, also, to come up with
an idea on how best to extinguish the fire. To suggest, as Rusbridger in
effect intended, that such a (perceived) failure is a further reason to
ignore such warnings, is cynical in the extreme.

  So we +could+ argue that people should decide for themselves what to do
about the problems we are highlighting, that we are simply doing what almost
nobody else is doing in saying: 'There is a +major+ problem with the
corporate media.' We could reasonably argue that, although we don't.

  The Citizen Reporter Revolution

  We do much more than talk about practical solutions - Media Lens is
+itself+ a practical solution. The promotion of public participation in
media criticism is vital work. Writing to the media, for example, is a
powerful and practical part of the solution we are proposing. Journalists,
particularly liberal journalists, commonly see themselves as 'the good
guys'. Moreover, they generally see themselves as admired, respected, even
loved - broadcast journalists often clearly view themselves as celebrities.
This makes them supremely sensitive to even the mildest 'left' criticism
denting their 'good guy' status.

  Challenges of this kind confront their notion of who they are, puncturing
their complacency and wounding their egos, so that they are rarely able to
resist responding. These responses, in turn, often provide precious insights
into the astonishing moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the media - a
closed world of elite privilege largely protected from honest criticism.
Important results can include heightened public awareness of media realities
and even an improvement in journalistic performance. The media depends on
self-delusions normally protected from criticism - rational challenge
therefore often leaves journalists unable to justify (even to themselves)
obviously erroneous arguments and emphases.

  The role of the alternative media has never been more important than it is
today. For the first time, non-corporate journalists are able to instantly
reach a mass audience at minimal cost. Writing at the internet site, First
Draft, journalist Tim Porter notes that photographs revealing both US
military caskets and torture inside Abu Ghraib prison were based on digital
photographs made, not by journalists, but by participants in both stories.
Porter comments:

  "Imagine how quickly the slaughter of innocents at My Lai would have
become known had it been captured by a palm-sized digital camera (or phone)
instead of reported by letter." (Porter, Digital Proof, Human Source, May 6,
2004, www.timporter.com/firstdraft/archives/000309.html)

  Digital and internet-based technologies mean that participants in any
event are now potentially irrefutable witnesses to what really happened.
Backed up by a multitude of websites and bloggers around the world, these
"citizen reporters" represent a very real challenge to the compromised
intermediaries of corporate journalism.

  History may judge that one of the defining events of our time was the
appearance of photographs of the Abu Ghraib tortures on the streets of
Baghdad a few minutes after they were published on the net - and a few
months after the mainstream press had blanked the story. Writing at
spiked-online.com, Brendan O'Neill observes:

  "The driving force for the torture scandal was not in Washington's or New
York's newsrooms... it was effectively handed to the media by disgruntled
military men." (Brendan O'Neill Article, 'Leaking self-doubt', 13 May 2004,
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA521.htm)

  American media analyst, Edward Herman, told us:

  "My own view is that the media response is heavily dominated by the need
to focus on an unwanted topic, their hands forced by outsiders who obtained
and began circulating the photos. The photos are inherently sensational, and
so wildly contrary to the self-portrayals of the Bushies as liberators, that
they would be hard to keep under the rug." (Ed Herman, email to David
Edwards, May 13, 2004)

  It seems likely that last year's unprecedented, global anti-war protests
were similarly driven by information flooding out of web-based sites. And
while the mainstream media kept well out of harm's way during the recent US
assault on Fallujah, Arabic journalists and Western bloggers emailed a
steady flow of horrific images and reportage fuelling deep outrage across
the Arab world and beyond. Jo Wilding's brave and compassionate reporting
(www.wildfirejo.org.uk), and Dahr Jamail dispatches for Newstandard
http://blog.newstandardnews.net/iraqdispatches/) are two inspirational
examples. Pressing home the onslaught in the face of this visible carnage,
became politically impossible.

  We appear to be living through an era when, for the first time, ordinary
"citizen reporters" are becoming able to impose a news agenda on the
mainstream.

  Journalism In Chains

  The 'problem' for our argument, we are told, is that the structural
realities of the corporate media remain to restrict journalistic freedom and
to punish and marginalise dissent. Some readers, feeling sympathy for the
plight of journalists we have criticised, have responded: 'Well, what on
earth are they supposed to do?'

  We should be clear that, beyond marginal improvements, the main rationale
for challenging journalists is to generate the kind of debates that
illustrate to +readers+ just how constrained and narrow the existing media
system is - our hope is not at all that editors and journalists will respond
by somehow revolutionising the system from within by, for example, refusing
to carry fossil fuel advertising. That has never been our intention.

  Instead, we have talked many times of how we hope that increased public
awareness of the limits of political and media freedom will generate truly
democratic, alternative media with the power to impose a news agenda on the
mainstream, or to replace it as source of news. The above examples of
internet-led news stories are exactly what we have in mind.

  Ideally, beyond even this, powerful alternative media should aspire to
inform and motivate large popular movements, and even new, libertarian
political parties, which might then be in a position to reform media
structures to limit the influence of corporate interests.

  In an article in The New York Times last year, Howard French reported 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 has fast, broadband connections in 70 percent of all
households. A Western diplomat in Seoul said: "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 in 2002, more and more people began
to get their information and political analysis from internet news services
instead of from the country's conservative newspapers. The most influential
internet service, OhmyNews, registered 20 million page views per day around
election time in December 2002. In March 2003, the service still averaged
around 14 million visits daily, in a country of 40 million people. OhmyNews
was started four years ago by Oh Yeon Ho, 39, 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."

  Relying almost solely on ordinary readers, OhmyNews helped generate a huge
national movement that resulted in the election of Roh Moo Hyun, a reformist
lawyer, in December 2002. 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)

  This is a remarkable story of tremendous importance to anyone interested
in challenging state-corporate control of society. The success of
libertarian, internet-based sites in South Korea suggests that internet
media relying mostly on contributions from ordinary readers represent a
potent democratising force.

  But if the question Rusbridger and others intend is, 'What can newspapers
and journalists do within the system as it actually is now?' - the answer is
that, like everyone else, they can do the best they can within tight limits
while supporting efforts at radical change through alternative media and
movements. Beyond that their options are indeed limited.

  But that really is our whole point. We are trying to point out to readers
just how stuck journalists and the media are, to raise awareness that change
is precisely in the +public's+ hands - journalists just cannot do that much.
To expect genuinely democratic and libertarian 'gifts from above' is naïve
and pointless - progress has only ever been achieved as a result of popular
awareness and energetic demands for change.

  Part 2 will follow shortly...

  SUGGESTED ACTION

  The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect
for others. In writing letters to journalists, we strongly urge readers to
maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

  Write to:

  Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian: Email:
alan.rusbridger at guardian.co.uk

  Ian Mayes, the Guardian readers' editor: Email: ian.mayes at guardian.co.uk

  Please also send all emails to us at Media Lens: Email:
editor at medialens.org

  Visit the Media Lens website: http://www.medialens.org

  Please consider donating to Media Lens:
http://www.medialens.org/donate.html

  This media alert will shortly be archived at:
http://www.MediaLens.org/alerts/index.html

----

Mark and Andrea
Beechwood
Ochil Road
Menstrie
FK11 7BW

Tel. 01259 769007

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