[Diggers350] Censored!

[Alison Banville]

'It is already cliché to say that "the problem of media" is now central among 
the challenges to democracy, freedom and justice. The bigger question and 
challenge
is: what can we do about it?.......Commercial media’s relationship with social 
movements, civil resistance, and 

other popular struggles is either one of neglect or outright hostility. People 
organizing for their human and economic rights, for justice, for freedom, for 
more democracy, are generally ignored or treated with great condescension by 
institutional media organizations. Much of this happens because the interests 
that movements and peoples struggle against – corporations and governments – are 

the power-holders that commercial and state-owned media have chosen to favor and 

indulge well before movements erupt to challenge them'

The piece urges a return to 'old school reporting and journalism; the kind that 
bubbles 

up from the streets and back roads where real people live and work and, 
regularly throughout history, helped citizens to reassert ourselves as captains 
of our own destinies. History has always been written by such struggles, and the 

present time is no different. The life’s blood that gave birth to all freedoms 
and to all democracies 

throughout history has been people’s movements and struggles.
The road to a more authentic journalism is found by walking alongside, learning 
from, and reporting on those movements.'

>From the fantastic article 'Authentic Journalism: Weapon of the People'  a 
must-read: 

http://www.opendemocracy.net/al-giordano/authentic-journalism-weapon-of-people?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=On-Demand_2010-11-19%2012%3a13


It's no surprise that the corporate media reports in this way - you ask where 
are our fearless reporters? It's a little more complicated than that. As the 
brilliant war reporter Chris Hedges (formerly of the New Yotk Times until he was 
sacked for speaking out about the Iraq War) wrote on Truthdig in another 
must-read piece:
Journalists, while they like to promote the image of themselves as fierce 
individualists, are in the end another species of corporate employees. They 
claim as their clients an amorphous public. They seek their moral justification 
in the service of this nameless, faceless mass and speak little about the vast 
influence of the power elite to shape and determine reporting. Does a public 
even exist in a society as fragmented and divided as ours? Or is the public, as 
Walter Lippmann wrote, now so deeply uninformed and divorced from the inner 
workings of power and diplomacy as to make it a clean slate on which our armies 
of skilled propagandists can, often through the press, leave a message? ....The 
press, which has always written and spoken from presuppositions and principles 
that reflect the elite consensus, now peddles a consensus that is flagrantly 
artificial.'

With political coverage especially there is the added problem of access to 
'official sources' preventing any hope of unbiased reports:
'The closer reporters get to official sources.... the more constraints they 
endure. When reporting depends heavily on access it becomes very difficult to 
challenge those who grant or deny that access. This craven desire for access has 
turned huge sections of the Washington press, along with most business 
reporters, into courtiers. The need to be included in press briefings and 
background interviews with government or business officials, as well as the 
desire for leaks and early access to official documents, obliterates 
journalistic autonomy. '
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_creed_of_objectivity_killed_the_news_business_20100131/


Media Lens explains in their FAQ: http://www.medialens.org/faq/#objective

Are you saying that the mainstream media is some kind of a giant conspiracy to 
keep the public ignorant?
No. In seeking to understand the basis and operation of systematic mass media 
distortion, we flatly reject all conspiracy theories. Instead, we point to the 
inevitably corrupting effects of ‘market forces’ operating on, and through, 
media corporations seeking profit in a society dominated by corporate power. We 
reject the idea that mainstream journalists are generally guilty of 
self-censorship and conscious lying; we believe that the all-too-human tendency 
to self-deception accounts for their conviction that they are honest purveyors 
of uncompromised truth. We all have a tendency to believe what best suits our 
purpose; highly paid, highly privileged editors and journalists are no 
exception. In any case, professionals whose attitudes and opinions most closely 
serve the needs of corporate power, whether in media institutions or elsewhere, 
are more likely to be filtered through to positions of authority within such 
institutions.
Media Lens has grown out of our perception of the unwillingness, indeed 
inability, of the mainstream media to tell the truth about the real causes and 
extent of many of the problems facing humanity, such as poverty, human rights 
abuses, war, pollution and climate change. Because much modern suffering is 
rooted in the unlimited greed of corporate profit-maximising - in the 
subordination of people and planet to profit - it seems to us to be a genuine 
tragedy that society has for so long been forced to rely on the corporate media 
for 'accurate' information. Obvious conflicts of interest mean it is all but 
impossible for the media to provide this information. We did not expect the 
Soviet Communist Party's newspaper Pravda to tell the truth about the Communist 
Party, why should we expect the corporate press to tell the truth about 
corporate power?

But surely our major authoritative media, such as the BBC, are more or less 
neutral in their reporting and analysis? 

We believe that media 'neutrality' is a deception that often serves to hide 
systematic pro-corporate bias. 'Neutrality' most often involves 'impartially' 
reporting dominant establishment views, while ignoring or marginalising 
non-establishment views. In reality it is not possible for journalists to be 
neutral; regardless of whether we do or do not overtly give our personal 
opinion, that opinion is always reflected in the facts we choose to highlight or 
ignore.
While Media Lens seeks to correct some of the worst excesses of corporate media 
distortions as honestly as possible, our concern is not to affect some spurious 
'objectivity', but to engage with the world to do whatever we can to reduce 
suffering and to resist the forces that seek to subordinate human well-being to 
profit. We do not believe that passively observing human misery without 
attempting to intervene constitutes 'neutrality'. Nor do we believe that 
'neutrality' can ever be deemed more important than doing all in our power to 
help others.
 So, what is the fundamental aim of Media Lens ? 
We accept the Buddhist viewpoint that while greed, hatred and ignorance distort 
reason; compassion empowers it. Our aim is to increase rational awareness, 
critical thought and compassion, and to decrease greed, hatred and ignorance. 
Our goal is not at all to attack, insult or anger individual editors or 
journalists, but to highlight significant examples of the systemic media 
distortion that is facilitating appalling crimes against humanity: the failure 
to communicate the truth of who is responsible for the slaughter of over half a 
million Iraqi children under five since 1991; the silence surrounding the 
motives and devastating consequences of corporate obstruction of action on 
climate change; the true nature, motives and consequences of 'globalisation'; 
the corporate degradation and distortion of democratic society and culture.
Our hope is that by so doing we can help all of us to free ourselves from 
harmful delusions. In the age of global warming and globalised exploitation 
these delusions threaten an extraordinary, and perhaps terminal, disaster. They 
should not be allowed to go unchallenged.
We hope that this website will help to turn bystanders into compassionate 
actors. As historian Howard Zinn has written:
"Society has varying and conflicting interests; what is called objectivity is 
the disguise of one of these interests - that of neutrality. But neutrality is a 
fiction in an unneutral world. There are victims, there are executioners, and 
there are bystanders... and the 'objectivity' of the bystander calls for 
inaction while other heads fall."
 
As Media Lens urges, reporters and editors should be confronted about their 
damaging coverage and I think stations too should be targets of protest.





________________________________
From: james armstrong <james36armstrong at hotmail.com>
To: londonsocialforum2003 at yahoogroups.com; redpepperdebate at yahoogroups.com; 
ukcpn at yahoogroups.com; directactionagainstwar at yahoogroups.com; the land is ours 
<diggers350 at yahoogroups.com>; envlist at yahoogroups.com; 
esfdemocracy_eurodebate at lists.riseup.net; democracy-forum at yahoogroups.com; 
political_science at yahoogroups.com; project2012 at googlegroups.com; 
democracyvillage at googlegroups.com; campaignforrealdemocracy at lists.aktivix.org
Sent: Thu, 25 November, 2010 19:58:54
Subject: [Diggers350] Censored!

  
To-days coverage of the  24rd November student  demonstrations in London and 
other towns
on BBC Radio 4 on the 6pm News slot was brief.
The Financial Times ran a headline  ‘Start Up Protests’,   with pics.
 And inside  FT was more coverage with 4 pics
Daily Mail Front Page “ Rage of the Girl  Rioters” with pics
Guardian Front Page reads  “Schools Out children take to the streets”
Inside  G. a double page spread with pics
Daily telegraph reads “Student Protests turn to violence again”.
And inside, “Revolution in the classroom.”
 
In September 09 the coverage of the Iran presidential elections went on for days 
in UK press  and t.v,. with interviews of the opposition marchers. 

Some days  later  BBC Radio Four 8am reported (with some disappointment?)  
‘there were  no demonstrations yesterday in Tehran.’
 
Listeners/readers will remember the wide coverage of a group of  Gurkha 
ex-soldiers protesting outside Parliament at receiving smaller pensions than UK 
ex soldiers and being refused the right to residence in UK on retirement.  I 
counted 18 protesters in the group (plus Joanna Lumley) .and there were more 
reporters than demonstrators.  JL was  quoted in full with a hapless Labour 
Minister disconsolately  nodding approval as she triumphantly repeated the 
Government’s concessions.   

At the time of the  protest of the bhuddist monks  in Myanmar, thousands took to 
the streets of Rangoon .  BBC reporters, in spite of a Myanmar Government ban  , 
managed to be present and interviewed  protesters.   The events were given wide 
coverage on t.v. and in the UK press.
 
  On a Sunday early in  February 2003, some one to two million people peacefully 
demonstrated against the imminent  invasion of Iraq, marching from the 
Embankment  via Whitehall and along Piccadilly massing in Hyde Park to hear a 
dozen or so speakers including Wedgie Benn,  say ‘No’    Other demonstrations 
took place simultaneously up and down the country and also in USA. 

Later that day I listened on the evening radio news programmes for reports and 
heard nothing.  Next day I  got the Observer- nothing .  The sole coverage had 
been a feature had been a big article  in the Saturday Guardian on the eve of 
the demo ( with pics ) 

  I could find no reports  of this anti Iraq invasion demo ,  nor pics nor radio 
coverage in the days following. 

What does this say about freedom of the press?   Where are our fearless 
reporters?
 



      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.gn.apc.org/mailman/private/diggers350/attachments/20101125/53f11cb6/attachment.html>