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Title: Media Mayhem Author: Chekov Feeney Date: 2004 Language: en Topics: the media, Red & Black Revolution Source: Retrieved on 9th August 2021 from http://struggle.ws/wsm/rbr/rbr8/media.html Notes: This article is from Red & Black Revolution (no 8, Winter 2004)
On one level the phrase âthe mediaâ simply refers to the various modern
technologies for transmitting ideas to large populations, such as
newspapers, television, magazines, radio and the new kid on the block,
the Internet. These are extremely useful tools. They allow people to
know whatâs happening in the world and hence share some common
understanding with strangers. A fundamental precondition for achieving
the type of revolutionary change that anarchists seek is that a large
number of people actively desire it, or at the very least are open to
it. Indeed, communicating âour beloved propagandaâ to the masses has
always played a major part in anarchist activity and hence we require
the media. However, today, when we talk about the media, we also
implicitly refer to the corporate machine that comes very close to
operating monopoly control over mass communication.
This article examines the mainstream media and looks at the various
factors which ensure that it effectively works as a propaganda tool for
the powerful. It looks at ways in which anarchists can deal with this
situation, by creating our own media, but also by challenging the
hostility that they habitually encounter from the mainstream. It is
mostly based on the experience of the 2004 Mayday protests in Dublin,
which saw a huge smear campaign against the organisers, and looks at
some of the ways in which they tried to respond.
A critique of the role of the mainstream media has long been a central
part of the global anti-capitalist movement. Noam Chomskyâs book and
film, âManufacturing Consent,â can probably be considered a core text of
this new movement. It provides a very detailed critique of how news is
created and disseminated according to what Chomsky calls the âpropaganda
modelâ: a series of information filters which serve to tailor
information to the needs of the powerful. This section simply presents
some of these important factors in outline. I strongly recommend
Chomskyâs text for a much more detailed analysis, including a wealth of
empirical evidence.
With the increasing pace of corporate globalisation, the ownership of
mainstream media resources like newspapers, television channels and
radio stations is concentrated in the hands of an ever smaller number of
enormous companies. As a result, the tiny number of individuals who own
and control these companies enjoy effective control over a huge
percentage of the information that is seen by the public. Naturally, the
owners tend to favour news that reflects their own worldviews. So, for
example, news items that are critical of the concentration of ownership
in the media industry are unlikely to be very popular in their
productions.
Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi are two of the better-known global
media moguls, but there are lesser-known figures who exercise a large
degree of control within particular areas or industries. For example,
Tony OâReillyâs company, Independent News and Media, owns Irelandâs
best-selling daily broadsheet, best selling daily tabloid, best selling
Sunday broadsheet, best selling Sunday tabloid, best selling evening
paper as well as owning more than 50% of all local newspapers and radio
stations in the country. This naturally gives him enormous ability to
shape the news agenda in the country.
The primary source of income of virtually all mainstream media comes
from advertising. This has created a situation where the mediaâs core
role is not to sell news to consumers, it is to sell demographic slices
of the public to advertisers. As a result of this focus, the news
content of the media tends to tailor itself to the needs of advertisers.
For example, a publication that tends to be very critical of large
corporations will soon find it difficult to attract advertisers.
Media companies generally depend upon their relationship with centres of
political power. This is especially the case with state broadcasters,
where the government of the day often has the power to fire senior
figures who insist on presenting information in a way that is deemed
unfavourable to the political power. When the BBC made a small, routine
mistake in reporting on the Iraqi âdodgy dossierâ, the chairman was
forced to resign after a government witch-hunt â despite the fact that
the content of the report was substantially accurate. The mistaken
detail was apparently serious enough to cause heads to roll at the BBC,
while the mistake in going to war with dodgy information was not serious
enough to prompt any internal action by the state!
Political pressure is also applied to commercial media who depend on
access to information from the state (e.g. invitations to press
briefings, leaks from government and security sources...) to fill their
pages. Political parties and other powerful groups employ large numbers
of people whose job it is to put pressure on media companies. For
example, Alaister Campbell, New Labourâs press secretary, used to phone
the BBC to complain about their coverage on the Today programme every
single day, regardless of the content. The reasoning behind this was
that it would cause the BBC producers to shape the news in advance, as
they knew that anything unfavourable would be the subject of strenuous
and wearying complaints. Similarly in Ireland, IBEC employs several full
time PR staff who spend much of their time harassing journalists and
lodging complaints when they think that any coverage has been âunfairâ
(code for anything that is critical of them or their members).
Finally, most states have various pieces of legislation which
effectively discriminate in favour of corporate-owned media. Strict
libel and copyright laws and the attendant risks of costly court action
can be very effective means of excluding non-commercial radical
publications. For example, in Ireland the libel laws allow the victim to
sue the distributor. Easons, the company which exercises near monopoly
control over print distribution in the country, thus requires that all
distributed media should pass a costly legal check before it can be
distributed. This effectively excludes virtually all radical and
non-commercial publications.
As the central task of the media is to deliver audiences to advertisers,
the educational value of the content is a much less important
consideration. The news media, therefore, tends to present information
in as âentertainingâ a way as possible in order to maximise market
share. This focus on âinfotainmentâ lends itself to sensationalist
reporting, designed to catch the attention of the public rather than
inform them. Thus, a fantasy about a shadowy group plotting a major
atrocity at a protest is much more likely to grab the headlines than an
examination of why the people concerned are protesting â despite the
fact that the former generally has no informative value whatsoever.
The focus on sensationalism and entertainment lends itself to short
segments composed of âsound-bitesâ, designed to be digestible to the
lowest common denominator among the audience â meaning somebody with
little attention-span and no knowledge of the subject. As a result, it
is extremely difficult to introduce any concepts that fall outside the
âaccepted wisdomâ on a particular issue (the accepted wisdom being
roughly equal to the points of view that are most favourable to
advertisers and owners). Accepted wisdom can be repeated indefinitely,
but any sound-bite that contradicts it tends to sound crazy. For
example, if you were to state the fact that the US is a leading
terrorist state on US television, most viewers would assume you are
barking mad. On the other hand, anybody can say that âCuba is a
terrorist stateâ and it will be accepted by most without a second
thought. Thus, in the era of the sound-bite, it is virtually impossible
for anybody who has an opinion markedly different from the mainstream to
present their ideas in a way that will appear credible.
In line with developments across the board in modern capitalism, the
internal structure of many media companies has changed quickly. The
number of full-time news staff has declined sharply and they have been
replaced by freelancers, either working on short term fixed contracts or
with no contract at all. This has led to a situation where editorial
staff have less and less time to research news stories. As a
consequence, much of the content is cobbled together directly from press
releases and other such pre-packaged forms. Furthermore, without the
time to adequately investigate any issue, content is considered
newsworthy only if it can be squeezed into a well-known angle. Any news
item that does not fit into one of these cliches is just ânot newsâ.
Protestors can be presented as violent hooligans or harmless utopian
hippies but otherwise they can be ignored.
The increasing preponderance of news-staff who work in insecure
positions has also contributed to the decline in the quality of news
content. Working in a highly competitive environment, with future
employment depending on breaking of high-profile stories, the temptation
to embellish and sensationalise stories often proves irresistible to
those who are desperate to establish themselves in the industry.
Attending a public meeting where reasonable people discussed plans for a
protest is a story that is unlikely to grab the front pages. On the
other hand âinfiltrating a secret meeting where fanatics plotted to
bring chaos to the cityâ might.
Possibly the most insidious factor that shapes the mainstream media is
what Chomsky calls âself-censorshipâ or the âinternalisation of valuesâ.
This refers to the process whereby media workers internalise the filters
that apply to the publications that they work for. This creates a
situation where many will strenuously proclaim their freedom to write
whatever they like and deny the existence of any censorship of their
work. In general, journalists start on the bottom rungs of the media
ladder, producing commercial features or lifestyle pieces. By the time
they rise through the system to work on more politically sensitive
pieces, they will be very familiar with the dominant ideologies espoused
by the publication and industry that they work in. Anybody who fails to
internalise the correct values will either fail to rise, or will face so
much turmoil and conflict that they will be driven out.
For example, it is unlikely that the editors of Irelandâs Sunday
Independent have to refuse too many articles on the grounds that they
are too sympathetic to Sinn Fein. Anybody who finds themselves in a
position as a political writer for that publication will already know
well that only criticisms of Sinn Fein are likely to be published.
Furthermore, it is likely that only those writers who demonstrate a
personal dislike for Sinn Fein will ever be given a job as a political
commentator.
For all of the reasons given above, anarchists and other radical critics
of the current social order are never going to be given a fair hearing
in the mainstream media as it is now constituted. On balance, the media
coverage they receive will be overwhelmingly negative. They will be
ignored, belittled, mocked, misrepresented, slandered, vilified and
abused. There is nothing that can be done about this in the short term â
it is a consequence of the structure of the entire industry and is
outside of popular control. Therefore, in the long run, the most
important task is to create alternatives; media that is not controlled
by powerful corporations; that does not depend on advertising revenues;
that primarily aims to inform rather than entertain; that is independent
from political pressure coming from the powerful.
In the past there have been many extremely successful examples of people
doing just that. There is a long tradition of radical grassroots
publishing with roots that go back at least as far as the late 18^(th)
century, when Thomas Paineâs pamphlet The Rights of Man was influential
in popularising the ideas of the republican revolutions and uprisings
around the world. During the 19^(th) century, a workersâ press
flourished, producing numerous popular daily newspapers in new
industrial towns in Britain and the US. In 1930âs Spain the
anarcho-syndicalist CNT produced over 30 daily newspapers, including the
national best-seller. Sadly, with the growing importance of advertising
revenues and the decline of radical workersâ organisations, alternative,
non-commercial publications found it impossible to compete with the
corporate products and their number dwindled. Generally only those
publications which were run by well-organised and committed political
groups survive today. Their circulation is mostly tiny compared with the
mass distribution that the workersâ press achieved many decades before.
New media technologies such as television and radio that were introduced
in the course of the twentieth century tended to be even more tightly
controlled by government and large corporations as they require greater
capital investment. Today, there are only a small number of community
radio stations and public access television channels that are truly
independent of corporate and state control, and they have tiny audiences
and minuscule resources to cover news stories when compared with the
corporate competition.
To appreciate the marginality of non-commercial media today, consider
the example of Ireland. In terms of print publications, it is only the
newspapers, magazines and âzines produced by small left wing groups and
individuals that are fully independent of the various filters in the
propaganda model. There are less than 100,000 copies of libertarian
publications and maybe twice that number of Marxist and other radical
publications distributed in Ireland each year. This figure is easily
surpassed by every single issue of several corporate Sunday newspapers.
In other media, such as television and radio, the situation is worse
still. A couple of community-controlled radio stations compete against a
huge array of state and commercial offerings with vastly greater
resources and audiences.
However, the situation is not entirely hopeless. No matter how hostile
and powerful the mainstream media is, radical political movements can
still overcome the barriers put in their way. For example, in the 1970âs
Sinn Fein claimed to be able to sell up to 45,000 copies of their
newspapers1, An Phoblacht and Republican News, each week . Although
their populist nationalist politics are hardly radical, their military
campaign was in full swing at the time and they were utterly reviled by
the mainstream. Despite the fact that the corporate world wouldnât touch
them with a barge-poll, they managed to build an impressive network of
supporters to distribute their ideas to a mass audience.
A more recent, if limited, example was seen during the recent campaign
against the bin-tax in Dublin. The mass opposition to this tax was
completely ignored by the mainstream media for three years. During this
time the campaign distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets and
newsletters to Dublin households, through an impressive network of
volunteers. By the time that the government decided to act to crush the
opposition to the tax, large swathes of the city had been won over to
support the campaign. The huge leafleting network was crucial in
creating a common understanding of the issues among large numbers of
workers across the city. The mainstream media did eventually start to
cover the campaign, but only when the city was on the verge of being
shut down by the campaign and then their coverage was a good example of
how the media can act in unison when the interests of the powerful are
threatened. Virtually every single piece of coverage in the mainstream
media was overtly hostile to the campaign. Yet, despite the media
smears, the long process of building a campaign and distributing
information was strong enough that it took the full might of the state
to crush it.
However, it requires a huge investment of resources for radical groups
to be able to create and distribute their own media. In general the
time, money and energy involved means that it is only relatively
coherent, well organised and committed groups who are capable of
reaching large numbers. This is one area where anarchists have often
fallen down, especially in comparison with authoritarian socialists.
Very few anarchist publications reach large numbers of people. Indeed
anarchists often mock Trotskyists for their concentration on selling
newspapers. Certainly the politics that their papers advocate and the
forceful recruiting that tend to accompany their sales pitches deserve
to be mocked, but not the fact that they sell newspapers, which is
simply part of the hard slog of trying to build up alternative media.
However, the situation is not entirely depressing for anarchists. For
one thing it is possible for anarchist organisations to expand the
circulation of their publications significantly with hard work and
organisation. For example, the circulation of Workers Solidarity has
increased by a factor of at least ten within three years. Now about
6,000 copies are distributed, mostly delivered door to door, every two
months. In addition to the publications put together by organised
groups, advances in technology have created something of a boom in DIY
publishing of anarchist zines, mostly assembled by individuals or small
groups of friends. Although these publications normally have very small
circulation and tend not to be aimed âoutwardsâ at the general public,
together they do serve to circulate ideas and debate among a wider group
than would otherwise be possible. But most importantly, the development
of the Internet has created a new distribution and publication method
for radical media, one that has yet to fall under the absolute control
of corporate or state power and one that is particularly favourable for
anarchists.
Despite the overblown hype about the potential of the Internet to
replace all traditional forms of communication, its emergence has still
had important effects. It has significantly reduced the costs of
distribution of information to mass audiences, thus lowering the
financial barrier to entry in the industry. This has allowed
organisations without huge financial backing to attract large audiences
to their sites without the need to depend heavily on advertising
revenue. For example, the web site of the WSM probably attracts
significantly more traffic than many of the mainstream political parties
in Ireland, despite the fact that we are thousands of times poorer.
The inherently trans-national nature of the Internet has had important
effects. By allowing people to communicate without any penalties for
physical distance, radical political currents, which were previously too
geographically dispersed and thinly spread to form themselves into
effective movements, have been able to come together and organise in
cyberspace. The global anti-capitalist movement, which exploded onto the
TV screens in Seattle and Genoa, had a long incubation period on the
Internet before it was capable of coalescing in the real world. The
anarchist movement too owes much of its current growth to the Internet.
Not only have anarchist ideas been revived in their traditional bases,
they have spread all over the globe, often carried by popular websites
and mailing lists to countries without any anarchist tradition, or one
that was long dead.
The Internetâs trans-nationalism has also allowed non-corporate media to
somewhat circumvent the various legal impediments that states have
devised to impede radical media. National copyright and libel laws are
difficult to enforce when the website is physically hosted in another
country. As an international entity, there is no single legal system
which has authority over the whole Internet. Unsurprisingly, the US
government have been taking steps to remedy this. They have effectively
attempted to legislate for the entire Internet, through the promotion of
multi-lateral agreements, like the treaties on intellectual property
rights agreed at the World Trade Organisation, or through unilateral
measures like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, where the US
attempted to prosecute foreign companies for breaking US copyright law.
Although such legal control is still limited, it is a constant threat to
free communication on the internet. History tells us that the more that
states can legally control the information distributed on the Internet,
the more dominated by the corporate sector it will become.
In addition to its low financial barrier to entry and its
trans-national, geographical distance-collapsing nature, perhaps the
most important development of the Internet is a consequence of its
fundamental communication paradigm. Traditional media facilitate
few-to-many communication. This means that a relatively small number of
people produce the information, while a large number of people consume
it and there is a clear division between the two. This model is favoured
when there is a relatively high cost involved in producing and
distributing the information. In the early years of the Internet, this
was the predominant model for web sites, with sites being managed by
individuals and small groups and passively consumed by viewers.
However, unlike a newspaper or a TV broadcast, there is virtually no
cost involved in adding and distributing new information on the
Internet. There are few of the same constraints on the size and volume
of the information distributed. This feature has facilitated the
development of many-to-many communication models, sources of information
created by participatory, voluntary communities where the lines between
consumer and producer of the information are blurred. This type of
community stretches back to the birth of the internet and has migrated
through the various Internet communication tools from usenet newsgroups
to email lists to the World Wide Web.
Probably the most impressive child of the Internet is the free software
movement, a vast and nebulous community of computer programmers, spread
all over the globe, who use a production model that is much closer to
pure communism than to capitalism â the vast majority of work is
voluntary and the products are given away for free. This community is
responsible for much of the software that runs the Internet itself and
its creations have been crucial in the development of internet
communities where information rather than software is the product. With
the development of software tools to facilitate the creation and
distribution of information by large groups of co-operating people,
enormous repositories of information have been developed by ever-growing
communities. The increasing sophistication and ease of use of the tools
has been closely followed by larger, more diverse and more sophisticated
examples of community organisation.
Radical political currents have been able to take advantage of these
developments. In the English-speaking world, it is almost certainly
true, if difficult to measure, that vastly more information written from
a radical left-wing point of view is distributed electronically than on
paper today. The nature of the Internetâs communication model has also
meant that those political movements which are more libertarian in their
organisation, with considerable autonomy within broad agreements on
principle, and more democratic and participatory in the way in which
they produce information, have tended to take advantage of this
opportunity much more effectively than the traditional, authoritarian
left. Highly hierarchical groups are organised so that a small number of
specialists produce the information, or at least closely scrutinise it
before distribution, which is more suited to traditional few-to-many
communication.
Many of the collectively produced, politically radical information
sources on the Internet are intended for a particular niche audience and
serve mainly as a means of developing the community internally, by
providing a forum in which people with similar views can identify each
other, get some sense of themselves as a collective movement and develop
their ideas through debate and argument. Bulletin board systems, like
urban75.com and enrager.net, based in the UK, are good examples.
Although these communities are very useful, they arenât aimed at a
general audience and will never compete with the corporate world as a
primary source of information about what is happening in the world.
Other communities have taken the first steps towards taking on the
corporate media. Sites like Znet, and commondreams.org gather together a
wealth of high quality radical analysis of current affairs. While these
sites have a large number of contributors, they still generally rely on
a small group of people to choose what to include and what not to.
Some Internet information communities have attempted to go beyond this
and facilitate as wide an involvement in the process of information
production as is possible. Due to the fact that different participants
have different level of commitment to the goals of the community, it is
probably impossible and undesirable to ever eliminate the position of
members with particular privileges that allow them to regulate the
distribution of information. However, there have been several hugely
successful examples where this principle is taken to its logical
conclusion. Communities like Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Indymedia and Wikipedia
are entirely managed by the community that uses them, and these
communities number many thousands.
Indymedia is of particular interest to anarchists due to its political
roots as well as its open participatory nature. It was born in Seattle
in November 1999, during the famous protests there against the WTO and
has remained heavily influenced by the radical libertarian ideas current
in the global justice movement. Today, it has expanded to be a global
network of open publishing news sites, with 150 collectives of varying
size in over 70 countries. âOpen publishingâ means that all of the users
of the site produce the news collectively, rather than it being a job of
a small group. The members of each collective are responsible for
enforcing basic editorial guidelines and choosing which articles to
highlight as âfeaturesâ. The network of collectives agree to a basic set
of goals and principles as part of the process of joining. These network
wide agreements amount to a statement of basic anarchist organisational
principles â emphasising democracy, accountability, openness and
non-hierarchical structures. However, beyond the basic agreement of
principles, the collectives are autonomous. This creates a great
diversity within the network, which is particularly obvious when
examining the editorial policies of the various different Internet
sites. Some sites, predominantly in the US, practice a policy of free
speech, where all contributions are automatically distributed,
irrespective of their political point of view, which normally has the
unfortunate consequence of a large amount of the content being made up
of deliberate disruption and abuse. Other sites apply much tighter
guidelines, even going as far as banning hierarchically organised groups
from distributing information through the site, or only allowing
participation by registered users. Most sit somewhere in between,
removing disruptive content and personalised abuse, but allowing input
from all political points of view as long as they do not contain
hate-speech such as blatant racism, sexism or homophobia.
Although communities like Indymedia do eventually aim to challenge the
mainstream media as the dominant way in which people inform themselves
about the world, it is obvious that we are a long way from there.
However, given their apparently utopian principles, their networks have
flourished and grown. Although there are huge differences in the quality
of the information produced on Indymedia sites, some of them have
managed to become important sources of news in certain fields. For
example, although the audience of Indymedia Ireland is undoubtedly
mostly confined to people with left wing sympathies and it has in no way
managed to become a real alternative to the corporate media for most
subjects, with 50â100,000 hits on an average day, its reach dwarfs that
of other radical publications. When radical political movements are
particularly active in the real world, during campaigns, protests and
disputes, the local Indymedia sites become invaluable sources of news
that easily rivals the coverage of the corporate media. For example, in
Ireland, Indymedia provided the best source of information about the
anti-war movement, the recent battle against the bin tax and the mayday
anti-capitalist mobilisation and during all of these periods, the
readership increased enormously, peaking at 900,000 hits on Mayday 2004.
Similarly, the New York city Indymedia site provided unparalleled
up-to-the-minute coverage of the protests there during the 2004
Republican party convention to appoint George Bush as their candidate
for the presidency.
However, while it is clear that communities like Indymedia are extremely
useful in distributing radical information to large audiences and the
Internet continues to be an extremely powerful communication tool, it is
important to remember that the vast majority of the worldâs population
have either severely limited access to the internet or none at all. For
the forseeable future we must resign ourselves to the fact that only a
small minority of the population, even in the richer parts of the world,
will have sufficient access to the Internet to make it a viable source
of news, no matter how high the quality of the material that we produce.
If we want to change the world, we need to win over large numbers of
people who will never have access to the Internet. So it remains of
paramount importance to produce and distribute information in
traditional formats. The Internet gives radical left wing movements
access to a huge range of ideas and information. The process of
distributing this information back into the real world through
traditional media is a crucial part of the cycle. Newspapers, radio
shows, leaflets, magazines and so on will be with us for a long time
yet. Many Indymedia collectives and similar Internet projects are
already addressing this problem and are making great efforts to transfer
the information from the internet onto the streets, through printable
pdf news-sheets, screenings of downloaded video productions, running
radio shows and stations and hosting workshops, but the distribution of
information from the Internet back in to the real world will remain the
bottleneck for the a long time to come.
Having stressed the paramount and primary importance of building an
alternative media that is open, democratic and transparent, it is
important that we recognise our limitations at the current time. An
article that is published on Indymedia or in Workers Solidarity might be
read by a few thousand people at best. An article that appears in the
Irish Independent might be read by a few hundred thousand. A story that
appears on national television news might be seen by a million.
Building up audiences for our media is a very important task, but it is
one that will not happen overnight. The model by which our media is
produced â participatory, democratic and open to radical opinions â
represents a paradigm shift from the passive consumption that is usual
with mainstream news. People are used to reading news that is written to
appear as if it is written by an authoritative, objective and
well-informed writer, with careful balance between the various opinions
represented. In general, since they lack access to alternative points of
view and are not aware of the forces that shape the process of news
production, most people will tend to accept that these articles are
genuinely objective and balanced. When they encounter alternative
publications, they will tend to see them as biased and âunprofessionalâ
and will not trust the information that they carry. Therefore, even if
we can succeed in making people aware of our alternatives, only a
minority will be won over at first. Therefore, we have to reconcile
ourselves with the fact that the vast majority of people are going to
continue to get their news about the world from the mainstream media.
This is something that we simply have to accept for the moment. We wish
it was otherwise, we work towards changing it, but it exists and we can
not forget that.
We also cannot forget that as anarchists we are attempting to change
society. We are not interested in creating our own little niche cut off
from the mainstream where we can live outside of the confines of
capitalism. Nobody is truly free as long as one person is enslaved and
even though it is sometimes possible for small groups of radicals to
create their own cultures cut off from mainstream society, when you
consider that this space only exists in the West due to the extreme
exploitation of the poorer parts of the world, it is quite clear that
for us to withdraw into our activist bubbles would be a clear denial of
anarchist principles. We have a responsibility to try to convince as
many people as possible of our ideas and this means that we have to do
whatever is possible to reach those people. Every time an anarchist is
quoted in a mainstream media outlet, no matter how atrocious the
article, large numbers of people probably learn for the first time that
anarchists exist. And if we can attract any honest coverage at all, we
will probably reach more people in a single blow than we would with
years of our own publications. Therefore, we simply canât ignore the
mainstream media and concentrate on our alternatives, rather we should
look for intelligent ways in which we can attempt to influence the
coverage that we receive.
When I say âinfluenceâ, I do not mean that I think that anarchists will
ever receive anything other than shamefully dishonest and hostile
coverage from the media as a whole. However, Rupert Murdoch has yet to
emulate Stalinâs control of information. There are opportunities that we
can exploit. Although almost all professional journalists do labour
under the same structural conditions and within the same corporate
framework, there are big differences in their ethical and professional
standards. There are some journalists who will not set out to
deliberately distort what we say and will make some attempt to portray
an accurate representation of our goals and aims. There are even some
rare ones who have somehow retained their ability to comprehend or even
sympathise with our ideas despite the mind-numbing and narrowing
experience of working in corporate media.
Furthermore, it is worth bearing in mind that the media is divided up
into several sectors and there are significant differences between them.
Local media and upmarket newspapers canât get away with the same
indifference to fact that the tabloids enjoy. This is not to say,
however, that âseriousâ broadsheet newspapers are much more likely to
paint an accurate picture of anarchists than tabloids are, or that state
broadcasters are any more likely to sympathise with us than Rupert
Murdochâs news channels are (although news is far from an accurate
description of their content). However, the different sectors of the
media can sometimes be played off against each other. The broadsheets
and state broadcasters like to engender a sense of superiority in their
audiences. When the tabloids whip up scare campaigns, spaces can open in
the more respectable media for us. Suddenly, a realistic portrayal of
anarchists can become a story, with an angle that focuses on the
irresponsibility of the tabloids.
In some cases sympathetic interviews, that would be unthinkable in most
circumstances, can get by editors in an atmosphere of tabloid hype. In
2004 anarchists in Dublin, Boston and New York received positive
exposure in parts of the mass media during the hype surrounding major
protests. In all three cases the positive coverage was dwarfed by the
negative. We had âanarchists planning to gas 10,000 Dublinersâ on the
front page of the Irish Sun. But the outlandish scare stories were
generally produced by the police and printed by âcrime correspondentsâ
dependant upon them. There is nothing that anarchists could have done to
avoid these. However, the audience for the positive coverage that
anarchists managed to achieve probably rivalled that which they could
reach through several years of distributing their own publications. By
engaging with the media in a careful, planned and intelligent way, they
at least managed to turn the slanders to some good.
But even if we do try to influence how the media portrays us, there are
major pitfalls for anarchists who decide to talk to the media and unless
the groups and individuals involved are well prepared, it can turn out
to be more damaging than helpful. The media are used to dealing with
traditional hierarchical organisations, whose spokespeople are also
normally leaders of their organisation. The media tends to identify this
spokesperson with the organisation and focus as much on their
personality as their politics. For most hierarchical political
organisations this is not problematic, as they both want and need to
build up the personal profile of the leader. They also have the
advantage of being able to produce statements and responses at short
notice as they rarely have to seek a mandate from their organisations to
do so. If anarchists attempt to engage with the mainstream media on its
own terms, we will find that the inherent hierarchical model that is
assumed will start to rub off on us and we will emerge from the
experience damaged internally, even if we do manage to put across a good
public face.
Individual anarchists often have very personal problems with the media.
As soon as any named individual is publicly associated with âanarchismâ
in the media, they become a target for character assassination by the
gutter press. These types of attack can be vicious and can be very
upsetting for whoever has put themselves forward. They can also lead to
serious problems with parents or relatives and employers. It is not
unknown for people to lose their jobs and seriously jeopardise any
chances of future employment as a result of such attacks.
Taking part in the media spectacle that surrounds summit protests can
have corrosive effects on the politics of the group. Even when people
have a strong commitment to acting as a delegate of the group and not
becoming a leader, they can become entranced by being part of the
spectacle. Media exposure affects the ego. A desire for publicity and
celebrity is a very common feature of our culture and people can become
addicted to it. It is a very flattering experience to have hundreds of
thousands of people seeing your picture or reading your opinions in the
media. The lure of the media spectacle is dangerous for groups as well
as for individuals. A key aim of anarchist activity is to break down the
division between the actors and the spectators in society. Getting a few
positive stories about anarchism among the celebrity features, while
useful, is far less important than the task of building alternatives.
We need to develop structures that allow us to engage with the
mainstream media on our own terms. The question of how we can do this
was one that was explored in depth by activists in DGN, during the
run-up to the Mayday 2004 protests in Dublin. Despite the fact that we
were caught unprepared by the biggest media smear campaign that we have
ever experienced, we managed to develop a model for dealing with it
which eventually proved crucial to the protestâs success. See the box
beside for an outline, or the online version of this article for full
details.
Several groups within the anarchist and broader anti-capitalist movement
have adopted a position of eschewing all contact with the mainstream
media, refusing interviews, avoiding photographers and even on occasion
physically repelling over-inquisitive reporters. In the UK the Wombles
and other anarchists have adopted this policy, after a long history of
the media inventing plots as evidence of their utterly evil and sinister
nature and mounting witch-hunts against individuals. A broad consensus
emerged in much of the direct action movement in London that there was
little point in talking to the media as it made little difference to
their coverage â they would stitch you up regardless.
However, there is a serious problem to this approach. In general,
journalists are only interested in talking to anarchists when anarchists
are doing something that is destined to attract media coverage. This
means that they are going to write about you whether you talk to them or
not. Refusing to talk to them whatsoever means that they pretty much
have carte blanche to make up whatever they like. They donât even have
to take the trouble of picking a two-word quote out of your half-hour
interview to fit in with whatever fantasy they have constructed to sell
papers. In general, it is probably true that including comments from
real and named people rarely makes an article worse from our point of
view and it often makes it better. For one thing, as soon as they
include quotes from a real person they have to start worrying about
libel laws. If they are just writing about anarchists in general, they
have no such worries. Despite their policy of non-engagement, the fact
that they are named after a fluffy toy and the fact that their worst
atrocity has been pushing a policeman, the media has still made the
Wombles sound like a gang of crazed terrorists.
Another factor is that the act of refusing to talk to journalists is
very commonly used as corroborating evidence of the evil and sinister
nature of anarchists (âshadowyâ is a favourite adjective). Furthermore,
given the open and public nature of many anarchist organisations and
events, it is in practice impossible to ensure that there are no
journalists present. This especially holds true for public protests and
demonstrations but also extends to public meetings. In this context,
attempts to filter out journalists will only succeed in rooting out the
more honest ones who are willing to admit their occupation and are much
more likely to write less offensive stuff, while the tabloid journalists
who are âinfiltratingâ the public meeting will simply adopt some guise
and remain.
I should also add that attempting to physically attack or intimidate
journalists is counter-productive and self-indulgent. It obviously
ensures that they have good material with which to attack you and the
rest of the anarchist movement. It has exactly zero effect on the
dominance of the mainstream media, which the attacks are presumably
aimed against. Journalists, particularly photographers, do often act in
an extremely provocative way, pushing cameras in protestorsâ faces and
so on. In this case it is quite likely that they are attempting to
provoke a response. As an anarchist you are part of a collective
movement and you have a responsibility to your comrades to learn enough
self-discipline not to fall headfirst into this simple trap like an
idiot.
Another important disadvantage of the strategy of not engaging with the
media is that there is always somebody there who will happily talk on
your behalf or about you and normally misrepresent your ideas to suit
their own agenda. This can be a liberal protest group who will happily
weigh in to the scare campaign in order to gain a bit of publicity for
themselves, or more commonly one of the poisonous varieties of Leninists
who will use the opportunity to promote one of their own
cult-recruitment sessions, advertised as a rival protest.
We should remember that the reason that they want to talk to us (and
slander us) is because we are news. There is a growing ideological
vacuum at the heart of capitalism. In its arrogance, Western capitalism
has dispensed with the trouble of convincing its subjects to internalise
the ideologies of the ruling classes. Abstentionism in elections is rife
and pervasive. Trust in our leaders and public figures is practically
non-existent. Authoritarian socialism has collapsed into a tiny shadow
of its former self and either remains rigidly fixed into an antiquated
theoretical framework, frantically spinning in ever decreasing circles,
or has completely capitulated and signed up to the doctrines of the
global elite. It is for this reason that we increasingly find ourselves,
often unwillingly, cast under the media spotlight. Despite its minuscule
size and negligible influence, the anarchist movement is increasingly
the only source of real ideological opposition to the seemingly
inexorable march of this corporate world order. Ours is an opposition
that goes to the heart of the problem and rejects the system in its
entirety. Most importantly, our opposition has steel. We do not shy away
from confrontation with the state or with corporate power. We do not
respect their stinking laws. We are a flag of principled resistance to
their entire world-order and this is why they come looking for us in
order to vilify us. And it is because of the depth of our opposition
that we should always seek to prevent the various fools looking for a
job in a city-council or parliament chamber from speaking on our behalf.
We should always seek to speak for ourselves and let our difference and
resistance be known.
The various filters of the propaganda model of mainstream media do
effectively ensure that the media will be overtly hostile to anarchists
and will publish material that is as damaging as possible to us.
However, there is an important limit on how far they can go in their
lies and distortions. Basically, they depend on the fact that most
people believe most of the things that they write. Although there is a
widespread understanding that much news is sensationalised and closer to
entertainment than information, especially in the tabloids, very few
people have any idea of the process by which news is created and are
ignorant of the powerful forces that consciously distort information in
pursuit of their own agendas and will tend to generally believe news
reports unless they have a good reason not to. Once the illusion of the
credibility of the mainstream media is shattered, it is difficult to
reforge. People who become aware of the depth of the manipulations and
distortions can be difficult to win back, so the media, particularly
those sections that have greater pretensions about their own worth, are
cautious about publishing information that is seen as clearly false by a
large number of people.
The most effective thing that we can do in the long term to limit the
lies that the mainstream media tells about us is to create our own
alternatives and give people access to information that we produce. In
addition to creating our own media, by being active as anarchists in our
communities, workplaces and campaigns, blatant media lies about our
movement will prove more costly to the corporate media and will tend to
push people towards us. However, in the current situation, with our
small size and tiny circulation of our publications, these factors are
only really significant in very localised campaigns or struggles on
relatively marginal issues. When the might of the state and corporate
sector decide to attack us â as is becoming par for the course in the
run up to large protests that challenge the fundamental concepts of our
capitalist world order â our own media and local connections only reach
a negligible proportion of the audience. In these cases, if we refuse to
challenge the slanders in the mainstream media, the vast majority of
people will have absolutely no reason not to believe the rubbish that
they are being fed. On the other hand, even by showing a willingness to
argue our case in the mainstream, we place limits on their lies. If the
media is full of reports about violent hooligan terrorist anarchists,
but the anarchists who appear in the media seem to be sane, rational,
well-informed and articulate, the chances of the public smelling
something fishy are increased many times.