a “debate” confined between two false poles
Posted on 21. Sep, 2009 by Cameron in media 2.0, new media
There’s a fascinating post on Dissident Voice about the battle going on in the UK between the BBC and corporate media who are apparently threatened by the breadth of the Beeb’s online offerings.
Quotes:
"The Murdochs of this world are naturally unable to conceive that corporate sponsorship compromises news reporting, showering pound and dollar-shaped sticks and carrots that inevitably cause journalism to slither in corporate-friendly directions."
"In his dystopian novel, 1984, George Orwell described the art of thought control called “Newspeak”:
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
We are offered a “debate” confined between two false poles: the claim that the BBC is a threat to the “independent news” provided by commercial interests, and the claim that the BBC is a rare source of “independent, truthful” reporting. Modern journalism acts to “narrow the range of thought”, thus serving the powerful interests that control the mass media."
This idea about "a debate confined between two false poles" is something that Chomsky has been talking about for decades. In the West, we’re told that we have a ‘free press’ but, in reality, we have a press that’s owned either by wealthy individuals (Packer, Murdoch, Stokes, et al) or the Government… whose hold on power is often regulated BY those wealthy individuals and their control over the way the population thinks due to their media assets. And so what tends to happen is that our media discusses the happenings of the day in a limited fashion, always confining the debate between two false poles, making it LOOK like we have choice and healthy debate, where in reality we’re only given a small range of options to discuss.
My favourite example in Australia is to look at our election coverage. What is the range of debate and discussion given in the Australian media, during election cycles or any other time for that matter, to alternatives to our consumerist capitalist economic model? Where is the open discussion about the benefits of Socialism or Communism? It doesn’t happen. Why? Because the aforementioned wealthy owners of the media companies don’t want the people thinking about Socialism or Communism unless, of course, it’s to talk about the failures of those alternative models. The reason they don’t want us thinking about these alternatives is that if we moved towards them, they would lose their wealth, power and privilege.
This is why we need a NEW media that isn’t controlled by corporate interests.
The Coming Media Bailout
Posted on 27. Aug, 2009 by Cameron Reilly in media 2.0, new media
This is to be expected.
the brave experiment starts tomorrow
Posted on 29. Jan, 2009 by Cameron Reilly in media 2.0, new media, twitter
Tomorrow (that would be Friday Jan 30) at 10am Sydney time I have Antony Loewenstein, journalist, blogger and author, back on the show to discuss the recent and current events in Gaza.
The brave experiment is this:
With the help of my two filthy assistants (sorry Tim and Jonathan, I’ve been reading Transmetropolitan too much tonight), I’m going to be doing a LIVE TWITSTREAM of the interview. You can follow it on the gdayworld twitter account.
If you want to ask questions of Antony during the interview, or debate one of his points, then send a reply to gdayworld and we’ll feed it into the interview!
I’m going to try to take twinterviewing to a new level.
Thanks to Darryl King from iReckon for seeding the filthy idea into my head today over coffee.
Rosanne’s belly at Woodford
Posted on 27. Dec, 2008 by Cameron in General, new media
This morning I sat on a 90 minute panel at the Woodford Folk Festival with Rosanne Bersten (whose 8-month pregnant belly is seen on the right with a henna tatoo), Cristen Tilley, an Exec Producer with ABC News Online in Brisbane, and freelance journalist, formerly wtih Crikey, Sarah Stokely. The panel was mysteriously called “Can I Get A Witness” and not many people turned up. As is to be expected when you are on a panel with three journalists, they steered the conversation mostly around “who’s going to fund journalism”, while I, as usual, had the attitude of “let’s blow it all up and see what happens”. I got into a couple of arguments with Sarah about the cost of new media and why people don’t trust the media. One guy in the audience mentioned that the Australian military are trying to figure out how to use new media as a recruitment tool. Cristen said the ABC are desperate to get more user-generated content. Sarah mentioned Nick Holmes a Court‘s recent scuffle with the NSW cops and we discussed the need for financial support for citizen journalists so they can get legal protection from police brutality and defend libel and slander suits. Rosanne used WikiLeaks as a great example of citizen media being used for serious, investigative journalism. In the final stretch, I said that 15 years from now, I expect that many of us will be wearing or carrying some kind of permanent video camera that captures everything we say and do during the day, which will be uploaded to a server, indexed against audio content, time and date stamped, with face recognition pulling out the names of the people in the video, and then some of us will make it public and some will make it private. People laughed but I was totally serious. Think back 15 years to 1993. Can you remember what your mobile phone looked like (if you even had one?). Mine was a LED Motorola brick. Do you think anyone would have believed that in 2008 we’d be walking around with 3G (what’s that?) and wifi (what’s that?) enabled iPhones, uploading our shit on the fly to Flickr and YouTube with 750,000 people following our every movement on Twitter?