Media

19 November 2018Blog

The Inaugural Alternative Claudia Jones Memorial Lecture 2018

In a tucked away corner of Rotherhithe, down a little cobbled street oozing with history, stands Sands Film Studios. Well-known amongst lefties and radicals, this unique corner of London was the perfect place to hear from a unique, leftie and often radical character, Kerry-Anne Mendoza.

Mendoza began by talking about the namesake of the lecture,…

1 June 2018Review

Peter Lang Publishing, 2017; 276pp; £29

‘The biggest immediate single problem we face… is mainstream media reporting’, British historian Mark Curtis recently argued in an Open Democracy interview about UK foreign policy.

Florian Zollmann’s deeply impressive first book – which expands on his PhD, supervised by Professor Richard Keeble – goes a long way in engaging with this long-running issue for peace activists.

‘The news media in liberal democracies operates as a propaganda system on behalf of state-…

1 February 2018Feature

Benjamin reports on PN's digital tools dayschool

Even the lunch break at Weaving Our Own Web spawned an additional workshop discussing ‘feminism and technology’, based on an ongoing project from The Feminist Library. Workshops were crowded with enthusiastic campaigners for Peace News’s successful digital campaigning dayschool in London on 13 January. Activists had come to build their skills in using online tools to strengthen their groups and campaign more effectively.

A range of workshops catered for a broad spectrum of…

1 August 2017News

Come to PN's digital tools dayschool in January 2018!

We’ve had to postpone a major workshop to June 2018! We’re also organising a digital tools dayschool, ‘Weaving Our Own Web’, in January!

This July and August, Peace News was meant to have been hosting noted author and trainer Betsy Leondar-Wright from the US group, Class Action. We have been big fans of Betsy’s work on class and classism (while recognising that there are differences between class in the US and in the UK). We interviewed Betsy over three issues in 2015–…

22 June 2017Blog

How the British mass media exploded with outrage over Jeremy Corbyn's speech linking terrorism with British foreign policy - and then pretended the speech never happened

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn made an extraordinary speech just days after a suicide bomber killed 22 people, nine of them teenagers, one an eight-year-old, at the end of a pop concert in Manchester on 22 May.

In his speech on 25 May, Jeremy Corbyn linked the Manchester attack to British foreign policy, breaking a deeply-held taboo in British politics. (The taboo was also broken in the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks in 2005 by a number of Conservatives, including current foreign…

1 June 2017News in Brief

New Internationalist magazine has not sold out, it’s sold itself to its readers, raising £704,000 in a month-long fundraising campaign.

On 7 April, the day after the community share offer closed, NI co-director Helen Wallis wrote: ‘this email finds us audience-owned, fully capitalized and in a position to put our ambitious plans into action’.

The magazine, which had only hoped to raise £500,000, will now be owned by 3,400 investors who bought shares over the month-long…

1 April 2017Review

Verso, 2016; 272pp; £16.99

Historically there has been a general consensus across British politics and among British political commentators that the BBC is, by and large, an independent, left-leaning institution that serves the public interest. But, as readers of PN will know, especially when it comes to issues of war and peace, this is a myth.

Since its inception, the BBC has overwhelmingly served the interests of the government and elite sectors in society, a fact backed up by virtually every…

1 December 2015Feature

How two activists learned to code from scratch in order to build an online tool to support activist groups

Sky Christensen and Keira PatersonPhoto: eConvenor (timer photo)

About three years ago, two Australian campaigners were surprised and frustrated to discover that the next generation of student activists were making the very same mistakes in organising that they had made at university. Nothing seemed to have changed. A lot of people have had a similar realisation.

Unlike a lot of people, however, Keira Paterson and Sky Christensen decided to do something about it. ‘Sky had this…

1 December 2015Review

Taken out of context, some of the revelations drawn from the US diplomatic cables leaked to Wikileaks sound improbable and even a bit like a conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, many of the issues highlighted in this book, – human rights abuses for instance – have already been widely reported on in the press.

So at first I was a bit doubtful about the value of this book. But in fact its purpose is not to publish secrets. Rather, it is to show what we can learn from these cables as…

1 October 2015Feature

Free Software has come of age

Part of our politics lies in the choices we make in our day-to-day lives. Each of us is prepared to make different compromises. Many of us have changed the way we eat, the way we travel or the way we shop. Yet our choices in the world of technology, the software we use or the websites we habitually return to, remain remarkably conventional.

A hallmark of my own politics is my desire to live each day a little closer to the world I would like to build. I like to make choices by…

1 June 2015Review

The internet has been transformed from a tool of emancipation ‘into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen’. Thus wrote Julian Assange* in his 2012 introduction to Cypherpunks, an eye-opening annotated transcript of a conversation between the Wikileaks founder and three other prominent internet activists.

At that time, such a claim might have appeared hyperbolic. However, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s 2013 exposure of the global surveillance…

31 March 2015Review

Barefoot Publishing, 2014; 96pp; £11.99

Unless you’ve been asleep for the last 15 years, you’ll be aware of the increasingly pervasive role played by the internet in everyday life, with an estimated 2.5 billion people currently able to access its staggering resources.

You’ll also be aware of both its use by activists for purposes ranging from e-petitions and Twitter storms, to whistleblowing and revolution, and of the manifold threats it poses to civil liberties, both here and abroad.

Leaked US national…

31 March 2015News in Brief

Radical media in Britain got a huge boost on 28 February, with the Real Media gathering in Manchester.

In the ‘Sustaining independent media’ workshop, Dave Boyle of the Media Reform Coalition evangelised for radical media taking on co-operative legal forms and issuing community shares to support themselves financially.

Other workshops included ‘Media agenda: racism & sexism’, ‘Conspiracies and how to avoid them’, and ‘Chomsky’s Propaganda Model of the mass media’ (…

1 February 2015News in Brief

On 19 January, Israeli police Monday arrested pregnant journalist Joman Abu Arafeh as she was leaving the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, according to the Palestine News & Information Agency (WAFA).

Earlier, on 14 January, the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms (MADA) launched ‘The Media in Gaza: Caught in the Crossfire’, a report on Israeli media violations during the July-August 2014 attack on Gaza.

MADA’s director general, Mousa Rimawi said: ‘We…

1 February 2015Feature

A report on the Peace News online campaigning conference in January which introduced the PN digital toolset Zylum to the movement

Over 80 people crowded into Peace News’s successful ‘Weaving Our Own Web’ dayschool in Islington, London, on 10 January, to learn how we can use the internet more effectively in our campaigning for peace and justice. We had really great feedback from people (see box).

We achieved our main goal of drawing in people across the spectrum – people at the early stages of learning about digital tools, as well as folk with moderate abilities and the technically-advanced. We had quite an…