THE HANDSTAND

march 2005

journalists are discontent.

February 14, 2005
Bloggers as News Media Trophy Hunters
By KATHERINE Q. SEELYE

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/14/technology/14cnn.html?th
 
The New York Times
This article was reported by Katharine Q. Seelye, Jacques Steinberg and David F. Gallagher.


With the resignation Friday of a top news executive from CNN, bloggers have laid claim to a prominent media career for the second time in five months.

In September, conservative bloggers exposed flaws in a report by Dan Rather; he subsequently announced that on March 9 he would step down as anchor of the "CBS Evening News." On Friday, after nearly two weeks of intensifying pressure on the Internet, Eason Jordan, the chief news executive at CNN, abruptly resigned after being besieged by the online community. Morever, last week liberal bloggers forced a sketchily credentialed White House reporter to quit his post.

For some bloggers - people who publish the sites known as Web logs - it was a declaration that this was just the beginning. Edward Morrissey, a call center manager who lives near Minneapolis and has written extensively about the Jordan controversy, wrote on his blog, Captain's Quarters (captainsquartersblog.com): "The moral of the story: the media can't just cover up the truth and expect to get away with it - and journalists can't just toss around allegations without substantiation and expect people to believe them anymore."

Mr. Jordan, speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in late January, apparently said, according to various witnesses, that he believed the United States military had aimed at journalists and killed 12 of them. There is some uncertainty over his precise language and the forum, which videotaped the conference, has not released the tape. When he quit Friday night, Mr. Jordan said in a statement that, "I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists."

Some of those most familiar with Mr. Jordan's situation emphasized, in interviews over the weekend, that his resignation should not be read solely as a function of the heat that CNN had been receiving on the Internet, where thousands of messages, many of them from conservatives, had been posted.

Nonetheless, within days of his purported statement, many blog sites were swamped with outraged assertions that he was slandering American troops. In an e-mail message yesterday, Mr. Jordan declined to be interviewed.

But while the bloggers are feeling empowered, some in their ranks are openly questioning where they are headed. One was Jeff Jarvis, the head of the Internet arm of Advance Publications, who publishes a blog at buzzmachine.com. Mr. Jarvis said bloggers should keep their real target in mind. "I wish our goal were not taking off heads but digging up truth," he cautioned.

At the same time, some in the traditional media are growing alarmed as they watch careers being destroyed by what they see as the growing power of rampant, unedited dialogue.

Steve Lovelady, a former editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Wall Street Journal and now managing editor of CJR Daily, the Web site of The Columbia Journalism Review, has been among the most outspoken.

"The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail," he lamented online after Mr. Jordan's resignation. He said that Mr. Jordan cared deeply about the reporters he had sent into battle and was "haunted by the fact that not all of them came back."

Some on line were simply trying to make sense of what happened. "Have we entered an era where our lives can be destroyed by a pack of wolves hacking at their keyboards with no oversight, no editors, and no accountability?" asked a blogger named Mark Coffey, 36, who says he works as an analyst in Austin, Tex. "Or does it mean that we've entered a brave new world where the MSM has become irrelevant," he asked, using blogger shorthand for mainstream media.

His own conclusion is that the mainstream media "is being held to account as never before by the strong force of individual citizens who won't settle for sloppy research and inflammatory comments without foundation, particularly from those with a wide national reach, such as Rather and Eason."

It was a businessman attending the forum in Davos who put Mr. Jordan's comments on the map with a Jan. 28 posting. Rony Abovitz, 34, of Hollywood, Fla., the co-founder of a medical technology company, was invited to Davos and was asked to write for the forum's first-ever blog, his first blogging effort. In an interview yesterday, he said that he had challenged Mr. Jordan's assertion that the United States was taking aim at journalists and asked for evidence.

Mr. Abovitz asked some of the journalists at the event if they were going to write about Mr. Jordan's comments and concluded that they were not because journalists wanted to protect their own. There was also some confusion about whether they could, because the session was officially "off the record."

Mr. Abovitz said the remarks bothered him, and at 2:21 a.m. local time, he posted his write-up on the forum's official blog (www.forumblog.org) under the headline "Do U.S. Troops Target Journalists in Iraq?"

He did not think it would get much attention. But Mr. Jordan's comments zipped around the Web and fired up the conservative bloggers, who saw the remarks attributed to Mr. Jordan as evidence of a liberal bias of the big American news media.

"I think he was attacked because of what he represented as much as what he said," said David Gergen, who moderated the panel at Davos and who has served in the White House for administrations of both parties. He said he was troubled by the attacks on Mr. Jordan and said that his resignation was a mark of the increasing degree to which the news media were being drawn into the nation's culture wars.

While over the years Mr. Jordan had helped vault CNN to some of its most celebrated triumphs - it was largely through his diplomatic efforts that CNN was able to broadcast the first live footage from the first Gulf War, in 1991 - he also drew criticism. In one case, he wrote an article for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times in April 2003, saying that CNN had essentially suppressed news of brutalities so the network could maintain access and protect its people in Iraq.

Through the latest uproar, the substance of Mr. Jordan's initial assertion about the military targeting journalists was largely lost. Those who worked closely with Mr. Jordan at CNN, as well as on behalf of other news organizations, said he was aggressive and passionate about making life safer for journalists working in Iraq.

Ann Cooper, executive director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said that 36 journalists, plus 18 translators who worked for journalists, had been killed in Iraq since 2003. Of those 54, she said, at least nine died as a result of American fire.

"From our standpoint, journalists are not being targeted by the U.S. military in Iraq," Ms. Cooper said. "But there certainly are cases where an atmosphere of what, at best, you can call indifference has led to deaths and other problems for journalists."

As an example, Ms. Cooper cited the shelling by American troops of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, well known as the residence of journalists, in April 2003, killing two journalists. .

But the notion that journalists are "targeted" by the military did not first emerge with Mr. Jordan at Davos. Nik Gowing, a presenter, or anchor, for the BBC, has advanced the theory in writings and speeches that because the media can now convey instantaneously what is happening in a war zone, military commanders may find journalists a hindrance. The Pentagon has dismissed such theories.

In any case, on Feb. 2, Rebecca MacKinnon, who worked under Mr. Jordan when she was a producer and bureau chief at CNN, and organized the blog from Davos, contacted him after seeing that conservative blogs had picked up on his remarks.

"I e-mailed him and said the same people who were after Rather appear to be after you," said Ms. MacKinnon, now a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Later that evening, she posted a response from Mr. Jordan, who wrote that on the panel he had meant to say that when journalists are aimed at and shot, as opposed to being killed by wayward bombs, "such a killing is a tragic case of mistaken identity, not a case of 'collateral damage.' "

At about the same time, CNN became aware that trouble was brewing online, and in the wake of Mr. Rather's downfall, it tried to try to head off the storm. When he returned to Florida on Feb. 2 from the conference, Mr. Abovitz said he had messages from Mr. Jordan and from CNN. He sent an inquiry back to CNN but said he did not get a response.

Also that day, CNN's public information division sent an unsolicited e-mail message to many of those who were writing about the controversy. Someone at CNN apparently posted the same statement on several blogs.

The message, which was unsigned, read: "Many blogs have taken Mr. Jordan's remarks out of context. Eason Jordan does not believe the U.S. military is trying to kill journalists. Mr. Jordan simply pointed out the facts: While the majority of journalists killed in Iraq have been slain at the hands of insurgents, the Pentagon has also noted that the U.S. military on occasion has killed people who turned out to be journalists. The Pentagon has apologized for those actions."

Christa Robinson, senior vice president for public relations for CNN, said that CNN sent the statement to those who sent e-mail messages to CNN or had written about Mr. Jordan online. Asked if the network was consciously seeking to head off the protracted criticism that devoured Mr. Rather last fall, Ms. Robinson said that the network was acknowledging the speed with which news now travels.

Mr. Morrissey of Captain's Quarters said he was surprised to receive the message. "I'm sure that what they were trying to do was get people to stop talking about it," he said.

The only way for the network to really clear up the controversy, he and others said, would have been to push for the release of the videotape of Mr. Jordan's remarks.

Ms. Robinson of CNN said that the network had no transcript of the session or a videotape because the conference organizers said that they considered the session off the record. She said that the content of Mr. Jordan's remarks was not in dispute, but that assertion has not satisfied those critics on the Internet who contend Mr. Jordan and CNN have something to hide.

The online attack of Mr. Jordan, particularly among conservative commentators, appeared to gain momentum when they were seized on by other conservative outlets. A report on the National Review Web site was followed by editorials in The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as by a column in The New York Post by Michelle Malkin (a contributor for Fox News, CNN's rival).

Mr. Abovitz, who started it all, said he hoped bloggers could develop loftier goals than destroying people's careers. "If you're going to do this open-source journalism, it should have a higher purpose," he said. "At times it did seem like an angry mob, and an angry mob using high technology, that's not good."


::posted on ::fibreculture:: mailinglist for australasian
::critical internet theory, culture and research
:

Interesting. There was also CNN's recent, and much blogged, use of the same photo to show a nuclear facility in both Iran and North Korea (http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001187.htm).

A sticky issue - seems to tend toward a situation where the power of your camp to mobilse around and sieze on an issue/error/opinion determines its validity/importance/value - sounds like an election, or a reality tv show..."sms in "yes" or "no" as to whether you think the malaysian volcano erupted today". but wait - i recall seeing a Herald Sun poll the other day that asked readers if they believed mahmoud habib's claims of torture.

Then there's another issue the story neglects (not that it should or could cover them all) - the media literacy needed to seek and authenticate these stories. It's more than a case of few rogue media enthusiasts bringing down *the man* with their scrutineering - there's also got to be a certain level of nouse on the part of the audience, and that's the interesting part for me.  
john.


Israel: The Myth of Left-Wing Media Control
by David Newman

During the past decade, presentation of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the Israeli media has come under attack from the right wing for being biased and manipulative, and for spreading a single, pro-peace message. But contrary to public myth, it is the right wing—not the left—that uses and manipulates the media to disseminate its political message.

The argument put forward by the right wing goes like this: Since the left controls the media, the Israeli public was never presented with an alternative to the pro-peace, pro-Oslo message of the 1990s, and was duped into blindly supporting attempts to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Until, that is, the violence and terror of the past 20 months brought Israelis face to face with reality.

But even a cursory look at daily newspapers in Israel reveals another truth. With the possible exception of the self-styled liberal newspaper Ha’aretz, truly left-wing newspapers have disappeared.

Davar (the organ of the Workers’ Movement) and Al-Hamishmar (the publication of the Israeli Communist Party) vanished as the demand for socialist-inspired newspapers decreased, along with the Trade Union Movement whose members received these newspapers. In contrast, the two major mass-circulation tabloids, Ma’ariv and Yediot Aharonot, can in no way be described as promoting a left-wing message.

If there are any truly ideological newspapers left in Israel, they are organs of the right, such as Mekor Rishon (founded a few years ago as a means of combating the perceived left-wing bias in the mainstream media), and Hatzofeh (the only Israeli daily associated with a political party, the extreme right-wing National Religious Party).

Another case in point is the Arutz 7 radio station, set up by the West Bank settler movement in the early 1990s. This station, which has a strong religious component (it closes for the Jewish sabbath and festivals), has tens of thousands of daily listeners. On a typical day, Arutz 7 programming presents a nonstop diatribe against the so-called conspiracy of the left-wing press. Sunday morning features the “Eye on the Media” debate, which dissects the sins of the “left-wing bolshevist” media. The program reserves its most withering attacks for any journalism that dares to turn a critical eye toward Israeli settlers in the occupied territories or promotes a message of peace with Palestinians.

On Friday mornings, veteran journalist Adir Zik uses his allotted time to
castigate all other media outlets for their alleged anti-patriotism and promotion of a “false” message of peace and reconciliation. Zik is an ardent supporter of the conspiracy theory surrounding the 1995 assassination of then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in which the right wing argues that Israel’s internal security service, the Shabak, played a part in whipping up anti-Rabin rhetoric in the period leading up to his murder.

And then there is The Jerusalem Post, an interesting example of a newspaper which, while attempting to retain a public image as a middle-of-the-road English-language publication, has undergone some major ideological shifts during the past two decades. Until the mid-1980s, it represented the Israeli establishment political elite and was edited by people close to the Labor Party, such as Gershon Agron and Arye Roth, with a moderate, left-of-center orientation in its news
analysis and op-ed columns. The paper was then bought by the Hollinger Group, headed by Canadian newspaper mogul Conrad Black (whose media empire includes, among other conservative publications, London’s The Daily Telegraph), and it underwent an almost overnight switch in editorial policy with respect to the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Since the buyout, editors such as David Bar Ilan (who later became a media adviser to former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu) and the recently appointed Bret Stephens have made no secret of their political preferences. These are reflected in an editorial policy which, though it tolerates some diversity (such as this writer’s weekly column), supports Israel’s right-wing government, is largely anti-European, and has become more parochial in its focus on the Jewish world at the expense of a broader coverage and analysis of world news.

When it comes to the airwaves, the left-wing Voice of Peace radio station, which started its life as an illegal offshore station and was influential throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, ceased operations after the signing of the Oslo peace accords in 1993. Its only truly ideological content was the pro-peace jingle at the top-of-the-hour news broadcasts, in contrast to Arutz 7, which preaches a consistent, single-mindedly right-wing message. (Sup-porters of Arutz 7 perceive repeated attempts by legislators to close the station for failing to pay its license fees and receive state authorization as an attempt by media elites to gag alternative political commentary.)

As for the major television channels, the charge that they offer a monolithic political message is unfounded: One only has to tune in to the repetitive chat shows to see a diversity of opinion represented. For more than 10 years, the same six or seven interviewers (veterans such as Dan Margalit on Channel One and Nissim Mishal on Channel Two are the most notable) have interviewed the same 30 or 40 people from the political, academic, and military establishments about the same half-dozen topics. These shows—which typically devolve into disorganized shouting matches—enjoy high ratings, but they serve mostly to entrench each side in its opinions and have done little to advance genuine political debate.

Judging from recent full-page advertisements in Ha’aretz, the right wing appears to have adopted Israel’s last bastion of left-wing thought, although the paper’s editorial columns remain strongly biased toward the left and are somewhat tedious in their well-worn arguments. The Women in Green movement (a pro-settler, anti-Palestinian movement which took its name from a cynical mirroring of the pro-peace Women in Black organization) seems to have limitless funds to pour into advertising, not only in the right-wing press but also in the media outlets of the “opposition.” But while there have been major media exposés concerning European funding for left-wing, pro-peace organizations, we know very little about the sources of right-wing media funding.

The fact that the settlers’ umbrella political lobby, the Council of Settlements in Judea/Samaria (YESHA), is a signatory to many right-wing ads and petitions raises serious questions about the use of public-sector funds earmarked for local government authorities (some of which are channeled to YESHA for political activities). It is highly unlikely that the right-wing newspaper Mekor Rishon would run a paid ad in favor of a Palestinian state in the way that Ha’aretz accepts the right-wing ads that now appear regularly on its pages. No doubt, Ha’aretz is living up to its liberal self-definition (though one can’t discount the lure of advertising dollars, given the astronomical prices charged by the Israeli media for full-page ads), whereas Mekor Rishon has chosen ideological purity at the expense of profit.

Perhaps this would all be legitimate freedom of expression in a democracy, were it not for the fact that the right wing continues to cry wolf, bemoaning its perceived exclusion from the mainstream media outlets, and persisting in attempts to replace members
of state-run media with its own political supporters.

In so doing, the right is deceiving the Israeli public, perpetuating a myth of left-wing domination of the press. It is a cheap weapon in the arsenal of Israeli political debate and serves to subvert the discourse from the serious issues facing the country in its chronic conflict with the Palestinians.

The writer is chairperson of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University of the Negev and editor of The International Journal of Geopolitics. He contributes a weekly op-ed column to The Jerusalem Post.

Media: The Lying Machine

By Satya Sagar
Znet

I have finally managed to do it ! Quit the habit ! The horrible, horrible habit of reading the newspaper and watching news on television EVERY DAY !

Let me quickly tell you the results of giving up my addiction. In just two months of ignoring the daily news I breathe better, sleep better, eat better and can think clearly for the first time in many years. Kicking the daily media dose, I can assure you, is like getting over the mother of all modern bad habits.

Of course the disgusting mainstream media coverage of the invasion of Iraq with its (ahem!) bedded journalists, hype and lies has got a lot to do with my decision to quit the habit. But that is not the complete story.

There is something else about the way the modern media has taken over my mind so completely that I am revolting against. The daily involuntary switching on of television news channels. The daily rush to the gate to pick up my morning newspaper. The frantic surfing of internet websites in search of those sensational headlines.

Sorry, I think there is something terribly wrong with the velocity at which all this is happening. In fact, the more I think about it the more I am convinced that if we are to get to the bottom of why the MEDIA SUCKS we should figure out the very physics of wind, heat and matter in motion that combine in deadly fashion to produce this whoooooosh sound.

There is something structurally flawed with the modern media industry. So it is just not enough anymore to complain about the media's hypocrisy or deceit without seeing the roots of such behavior in almost every other aspect of our world too.

But first let us take a look first at the usual reasons why the media machine peddles sensational half-truths and sly lies much of the time. Nothing less than outright lies- is what we have been getting from the media about the US/UK invasion of Iraq all these days. What is it that makes an average journalist lie for a living?

Let me attempt an answer by telling you about the strategy, related to me once by a senior Indian bureaucrat, to keep the media lying on behalf of the establishment. According to him there are three distinct approaches adopted by those in power to keep the so-called 'free' press completely pliant.

The first way to deal with a journalist getting close to the truth is to bribe him/her with money, favors of different kinds, promises of plum posts etc., Many journalists, underpaid as they are in the developing world, succumb to the temptations of such baksheesh.

In a profession where information is the main commodity being marketed, the more sophisticated journalists routinely get bribed with 'scoops' and other special bits of 'insider' information from their sources. While these journalists pretend that they are the ones who are 'cultivating' their sources, it is very often the clever source who is 'planting' stories and reaping an entire 'harvest' of lies through the scribe.

If the journalist persists with telling the truth the second tried and tested method used to silence him/her is to physically threaten him/her or actually beaten up. Again in the developing world this happens only too often with many journalists losing their lives every year. And this is the same tactic that was adopted by the US coalition forces in Baghdad when they deliberately bombed the Al Jazeera channel's offices killing their correspondent or when they shot journalists holed up in the Palestine hotel during the recent invasion of Iraq. Assassination was once considered the most extreme form of censorship but in our age it is evidently becoming the choicest form.

The third and apparently most effective method to get a journalist to lie on your behalf is to pump their egos and lavish them with praise in public. That, said the bureaucrat, will keep the scribe completely servile to your every command for nothing really moves them more than the delusion that they are somehow very important to those in power!!

But moving beyond the level of mere individual hacks, an even bigger obstacle to the profession's ability to tell the truth is the media establishment itself, which imposes a huge amount of censorship on its employees mostly for political or corporate reasons.

It could be a media house trying to win concessions and contracts from the government that kills a piece of news that may adversely affect its relations with the ruling regime. Or it could be a large corporate house that threatens the media owners with withdrawal of lucrative advertising if it went ahead with the broadcast of damaging information.

Given the overwhelming dependence of the media industry on advertising revenues such factors can have a devastating influence on the work of ordinary journalists employed by these media houses. Advertising, which mostly consists of promoting half-truths and lies about commercial products anyway, cannot really be expected to support the telling of truth about anything anywhere.

And what purpose do all these lies serve ? To keep the asses among the masses under perpetual CONTROL of course. For when we open the daily newspaper it is not we who read the news but the newspaper that barks out orders to our subconscious. Think this, think that, vote X, vote Y, you little man !

When you switch on a 24 hour news channel it gets worse. Much worse. For the images flickering at high frequency on your television screen have the power of sheer hypnosis. While you may think you are the one pressing all the buttons the sad truth is that you are the one being controlled remotely. Buy, buy, buy, buy, you bozo ! says the television screen to you relentlessly. And after some time you say bye, bye, bye, bye to your own consciousness for the rest of the day (and the next morning it starts all over again).

Have I become a complete cynic after so many years in the profession? A self-hating hack ? A Judas in the media pack ? Nothing of that sort please, for I would also defend journalists from being specially singled out for criticism.

For those members of the public who believe that most journalists are worthless creatures, who don't have the guts to tell the truth and constantly suck-up to their political and corporate masters - I will say you are damn right. But I will also add however that the proportion of such journalists in the profession is not very different from the general ratio of worthless creatures in the society they come from.

After all is this not what most people do in their daily lives in most professions. Bury the few truths they possess, suppress their nobler instincts, say YES to every demand their bosses make and yet come out of it all with a 'clean conscience'? So why should the media be any different?

Of course, there are those numerous people of courage and character who stand up for their and other people's rights, who are kind and human and generous and do many wonderful things. But the journalist profession too has those who would do honor to the ideals of journalism. Braving bombs, bribes and barbs of every kind- committed to telling the unvarnished truth with complete honesty.

If many members of the public believe that the media, which is supposed to be the fourth pillar of popular democracy has become in fact the fifth column of corporate autocracy I will say you are bang on target. I will again however caution that this has become possible only because as societies we have given up the citizen's right and indeed responsibility to both inform others and be informed entirely to the media industry.

Not unlike the way we have given up the task of looking after our health to the medical industry, our sense of justice and injustice to the legal industry, the education of our children to the education industry, the governance of our societies to both governments and industry. If the media in our times has become powerful beyond purpose or proportion it is WE THE PEOPLE who are to blame. So stop complaining.

To really understand the dubious dynamics of the modern media industry we need to look beyond the fallibilities of individual journalists and even the 'usual suspects' of corporate control over and political pressure on the media industry. I feel we need to understand some of the industry's deeper structural problems to figure out what is going so wrong. In our era of consumerist capitalism in many ways we may need to take a closer look at the idea of modern INDUSTRY itself.

It is my conclusion that the media lies not just due to some slavish, unscrupulous journalists and editors or even their evil, corrupt corporate masters but because the media industrial complex, as it has evolved today, is meant for nothing else except- LYING.

When the media lies it is only doing its job. Like shoe factories produce shoes, car factories produce cars and bomb factories produce bombs- the entire media factory is structured to do nothing else but produce lies- daily, 24 hours a day. The media industry as a whole is a LYING MACHINE (if a few gems of truth drop from your daily newspaper consider this a bait for you to swallow the rest of the day's lies)

Here are some aspects of the modern 'industrial' condition which forces the media to lie all the time and also allows the daily newspaper and 24 hour news channels to have so much control over our lives. These are:

The Time is Money Trap: For long, working as a reporter for several national dailies and television channels in India and later in Thailand I have felt severely oppressed by the very idea of 'daily news'. I understand the need for news per se- to add one more source of information that the public can access. Whether the 'news' is good, bad or ugly is a different issue but there can be a certain value to having a system of public information in any society.

But a newspaper every day ? Why ? What is so 'daily' about news, which like life itself is so unpredictable and random ? Why not print a fat newspaper on days when there is lots of 'news' and take a vacation on days there is none ? Who made the law that says a newspaper has to be brought out every day and that reporters like me have to 'file' copy every damn day ? (And if we can't find anything worthwhile to say 'invent' copy to fill up the daily newsprint.)

The same goes for 24 hour television news channels. Who needs news 24 hours a day except complete lunatics? What else is 24 hours a day in our lives ? Should we allow the yak-yak-yak-yak of the daily news compete with the very beating of our hearts and the natural rhythms of our respiratory systems ? Why have we allowed these maniacal peddlers of news to take over our lives, our minds and spray-paint our innermost thoughts ?

This oppressive regularity with which the modern media churns out its products I believe is part of the larger capitalist syndrome that seeks to convert all human time into money. The Capitalist Clock (together with uninterrupted power supplies that turn our nights into day) has carried out a mechanical coup in most industrial societies. It has taken over our lives completely. And who does this really benefit ?

The factory owners, the bankers and the bosses of every kind of course who need slaves to work round the CLOCK- 24 hours a day. The newspaper and television industry follows the same logic of 24 hours of non-stop work for its employees irrespective of the context and unmindful of the consequences for anybody. 24 hours of the cash register ringing in the moolah from the advertising industry is all that they want. Time for the media, like all other industries, is money- a concept which ironically leaves them little 'time' to tell the truth !

The Human Zoo: In his celebrated book 'The Human Zoo' Desmond Morris outlined brilliantly what urbanization had rendered a large proportion of humanity into. Animals trapped in cages of steel and concrete, shackled by lack of space- both material and spiritual. Articulate animals either chattering away nervously to drive away boredom or listening to others chat away nervously in TV talk shows and 24 hour news channels. Millions of lonely animals, marching lockstep to the commands of remote masters- willing to suspend their own thinking, willing to kill and die- rather than face their loneliness together, collectively, or even in groups of two and ten.

It is in this context that the media industry thrives. By providing the non-stop flow of 'analysis', 'information', 'entertainment' to FILL UP our empty souls, help us lighten the burden of TIME weighing heavily on our frail clockwork consciousness. To create spectacles that tickles our tired brains. Tickle us to death if need be.

And as the news media today competes with the movie and entertainment industries for the hearts and minds of audiences it has steadily adopted the same techniques, the same colour and gloss. The glamorous newscaster on your television screen today could well be the action hero of a Hollywood or Bollywood flick tomorrow. And because of the intensity of this competition between the two industries, the news they show you is usually as fictitious too. All bright, shining LIES.

Cerebral Uber Alles: Is that not the dictum that decides who dominates our societies - the Intellect Above All? Those who think, plot, plan, speculate, theorize, manipulate ruling over those who work with their hands, shed blood, sweat and tears - feet planted on mother Earth? Ok, I know the priests with their magic and tricks in ancient Egypt too got away with daylight robbery but I don't think the political and economic domination of the 'informed' and the 'informers' over the 'uninformed' has ever been to the extent that we witness in our industrial/post-industrial societies.

The internet boom during the nineties was one reflection of the way information had suddenly become the key to all riches. Is it a coincidence today that the richest man in the world for quite some years now is someone who deals with 'software'. Mr Bill Gates - who holds the keys to the gates of information and bills you to open them for a few hours before the next version of the gate (or window) comes along?

I am convinced that the power of the media industry in our societies comes similarly from its control over the gates of public information of all kinds from politics to professional crime (same difference ?). It is because of this skewed distribution of material/monetary resources in favor of those who 'think' and those who 'inform' that the media industry commands the great influence that it does.

(Who the hell was that enlightenment philosopher who claimed ' I think therefore I exist'. A swift kick on the hypotenuse could have sorted out his existential puzzle quite certainly besides forcing him to think about things more tangible, and less tangential.)

Hmmm, so what are the alternatives I have to offer? Is this going to be a random rant against all modern 'civilization' as we know it? Not entirely, I would say. There are plenty of things one can do to subvert the logic of modern media and help create a genuinely alternative way of informing ourselves and others.

To begin with one can stop reading the 'daily' newspaper or watching '24 hour' news channels. Secondly get more active in putting together information, analysis on your own and distributing it to your networks.

But for the larger and long term battle to rescue the media from the iron grip of INDUSTRY here are a few things that we need to get cracking on:

Take back your Time: To begin with we need to challenge the obsession of modern industrial capitalism with making us work longer and longer hours for less and less benefit. The massive struggles by trade unions in Germany, France, Italy and elsewhere to reduce the number of weekly working hours are a welcome step forward. The next step is to distribute the burden of all work equally on a global scale so that no one set of individuals get to do all the 'thinking' while the rest of us spend our lives slogging our butts off. It is the hyper mind and not the idle mind that is the devil's workshop. An idle mind is the beginning of you, me and everyone getting a life. Babies have idle minds too and it is only in the feverish imagination of those who make Hollywood horror movies that babies kill anybody.

Once the Capitalist Clock is thrown out of our lives or suitably bashed up to match human needs the media industry will have to adjust accordingly anyway. No more journalists (like other employees) slaving 'round-the-clock' for their capitalist masters.(I can't guarantee, of course, that we hacks will actually stop lying but at least the frequency with which our lies hit the reader's face will diminish considerably.)

Change your Cities: I am actually tempted to say 'Close down the cities!' Or at least dismantle them and spread out the populations drastically. Bring back some community life into your alienated urban existence.

Also, as far as I have seen most Asian cities are simply unlivable because of the way their sheer concentration of resources sucks in large rural populations that finally end up in their urban slums. So, stop the looting of the countryside and give back the resources already taken from the rural poor. Reverse the terms of trade between industry and agriculture. Share national revenues more equitably between the town and the village.

Boy, if that happens anytime I bet not too many people will either have the 'time' or the inclination to watch 24 hour news channels or read the daily newspaper. Try reading the Wall Street Journal while feeding a cow. The cow will love the Journal surely. And the manure will be very fertile too.

Recover your Reality: It is quite widely recognized that one of the most dangerous aspects of the so called 'information age' we live in is the replacement of our sensual understanding of the world by ' virtual reality'. So the military honcho firing his Cruise missile at a Baghdad suburb thinks he is playing a video game with no physical consequences for anybody. Or the ideologue with his bizarre blueprint for a new 'century' goes about the business of creating an Empire irrespective of its costs in terms of flesh and blood human beings.

If we restore the balance between the physical and the cerebral in our world, the media industry which does nothing else except manufacture `reality' for us to consume, will naturally lose its ability to dominate our lives.

One way to cure this modern disease is to seriously take up the old debate about how the rewards of any enterprise should be divided between the so called 'manual' and 'mental' workers. Since the mind and body are normally inseparable- except while watching 24 hour television- I would vote for sharing all profits 50-50. Mental workers who think they deserve better because they are the ones with all the 'ideas' are recommended to try out living in a concentration camp. The camps are supposed to be very good for one's concentration.

Ha ! Now that I have just managed to talk myself out of a livelihood- anyone cares for some curry and Hindi music ?

Satya Sagar is a journalist based in Thailand. He can be reached at sagarnama@yahoo.com