Media

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…

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…

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…

Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s 1988 book Manufacturing Consent offered a ‘Propaganda Model’ for analysing our dysfunctional mainstream media system, four of whose ‘five filters’ David Cromwell outlines as: ‘heavy dependence [of corporate media] on advertising revenue; reliance on approved news sources such as governments and business; the threat, and use, of flak by powerful interests to keep the media in line; and an ideological framework that demonises state-designated enemies…

The first zines I bought were punk publications in the late ’70s, and in the early ’90s I produced my own zine. (Wikipedia definition: ‘A zine [zeen; an abbreviation of fanzine, or magazine] is most commonly a small circulation self-published work of original and/or appropriated texts and images usually reproduced via photocopier.’) I’ve read hundreds of zines over the years, and samizdat publishing holds a huge place in my heart. There is an immediacy and humanity about holding a zine in…

David Wearing,  co-editor, New Left Project

As the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci observed, power cannot rule by force alone. Hegemony requires that a sufficient portion of the population view the status quo as fundamentally legitimate, or at least unalterable. Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman described how the corporate media function in a way that manufactures this popular consent, by framing discourse, promoting certain perspectives…

The Rebellious Media Conference took place in London in 2011. It was organised by Peace News, Ceasefire, NUJ, Red Pepper, Undercurrents and visionOntv.

Over 1100 participants came together to talk about the media, activism and social change.

See the website at archive.org.

Read more.

Omission is a key part of the propaganda model proposed by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their classic text on the subject and it can also be used to ascertain bias within the media. Whilst recent media attention has rightly been focusing on military actions in the Middle East in relation to both Syria and to Israel there has been a virtual blackout on reporting when it comes to this month’s military incursions by Turkey into the predominately Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.

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While documenting Budget Day protests in central London on 21 March, I wandered across Parliament Square and was accosted by two ‘Heritage Wardens’ warning me that the grass was out of bounds. As Boris’s fences have finally been removed so that the public can once more enjoy this historic space, I refused to leave, and the police were summoned.

A film of a screening and talk by author and journalist D D Guttenplan on the life and work of one of the 20th century’s great radical journalists - I F Stone. The event (14 March 2012) was organised by Peace News and the National Union of Journalists and was filmed by John Whiting.

Robert McChesney on why progressive media needs to seize the moment, Rebellious Media Conference, October 2011.

Robert McChesney is Research Professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and co-founder of Free Press. The Rebellious Media Conference was organised by Peace News and others in London in October 2011. Filmed by Sam Mayfield.

The US radical broadcaster Democracy Now! calls IF Stone “the premier investigative reporter of the twentieth century.” During his remarkable career, he exposed the reality behind the Great Depression, big business resistance to the New Deal, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Korean war, the Cold War, the McCarthy years, the civil rights movement and America’s war in Vietnam. The FBI tapped his phone, rifled through his rubbish bins and placed him under surveillance in an attempt…

As the BBC Newsnight economics editor, Paul Mason has become a familiar face on television over the last few years, reporting on the protest movements, revolutions and revolts that have been “kicking off” across the globe since 2009.

Mason is also a keen blogger, and it is these (albeit now cleaned up) postings that form the backbone of this electrifying new book.

The essence of his argument is that “we’re in the middle of a revolution caused by the near collapse of free-market…

“The question,” Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty memorably asserted about words “is which is to be master – that’s all.” And the same goes for the digital technologies that now play an increasingly important role in our lives.

“Like the participants of media revolutions before our own,” Rushkoff notes “we have embraced the new technologies and literacies of our age without actually learning how they work and work on us…

Andre Schiffrin, Words and Money (Verso, 2010; 128pp; £12.99).
Dan Hind, The Return of the Public (Verso, 2010; 256pp; £14.99).
Becky Hogge, Barefoot into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia (Bookkake, 2011; 246pp; £8.99, or available for free download from barefootintocyberspace.com/book).

Imagine a world without small publishers or independent bookshops – perhaps without bookshops at all – where the only cinemas are multiplexes showing films like…