Media

Between 25 and 27 November Undercurrents hosts the 6th annual video activist festival with clown rebel army and video workshops.

Hosted in the very heart of Swansea Marina, South Wales, this year sees the first MISTY awards to celebrate media activism, together with homegrown and global films and great music. See p12 for events details.

Being an Indymedia cameraman is becoming a hectic pastime in these, the last days of freedom in the UK. The DSEi weapons convention was a damn fine example of the increasing crackdown on free speech. Independent journalists and activists alike are now on the same level as terror suspects, all rights removed.

Saturday 10 September started peacefully . A hundred pr otesters took to the str eets ar ound Beckton, surr ounded by police, informing residents of the impending weapons…

April 29: It's less than a week before the General Election, the legality of the Iraq war is looking shakier than ever after the Attorney General's original advice to the Prime Minister has been leaked to the media, so what story does then lead on that

Regular Mole-istas will know that this column finds it hard to resist an opportunity to criticise once-Red Ken, Mayor of Greater London. And we all know very well, from recent evidence, that Ken “turn-again” Livingstone similarly finds it impossible (especially when in party mood) to resist slagging off the Daily Mail. Which leaves The Mole, also a hater of the Daily Wail, in an ambiguous position.

The Mail's wilful pandering to (and generation of) the ill-informed…

Tired of the tedious and pitifully one-dimensional debates on the Iraq war that dominate the mainstream media? Got a sneaking suspicion that Tony Bliar may not be being entirely honest with us over WMD? Or simply want your convictions backed up with a wide range of well-researched and diverse articles? Buy this book. Despite the admission at the start that it was “produced at some speed”, it really is a quality little number.

It kicks off (after a typically sarky foreword from…

This is a book which has three separate - but related - parts to it. It starts with an essay by Micah Ian Wright entitled “Moment of Clarity”, in which he writes about his experiences in the US military during the invasion of Panama in 1989 - something which made him question the aims of US foreign policy, and which eventually led him to his remixed poster project.

The most striking part of this work is the remixed (mainly) US military propaganda posters taken from WW1 and WW2 and…

One morning, during the recent invasion of Iraq, I was at home when I idly flipped the tv on.”Daytime tv!” I thought - haven't seen this for a good while. Expecting a banal chat, problem or quiz show. What I got was real time combat coverage from the British military's advance towards Basra. Real, live, war - and at 9.30am.

We need to start our manifesto with epistemology. Not just…

Many journalists enter their profession motivated by some idea, however vaguely defined, of doing some good in the world. Speaking truth to power; uncovering wrongdoing; bringing us the information we need to reach our own opinions, and make choices in a democracy.
Readers may find that idealism difficult to square with the journalism they meet in daily life. Various factors intercede between aspiration and reality - editors and reporters in different parts of the world are constrained…

This interview was conducted by email during October 2003.

PN: How and why did this project start, who is involved and what do you hope to achieve?

NP: We began the project after two years work on Electronic Intifada website, which has proved to be an effective tool in communicating a humanitarian perspective on the conflict.

We knew that Voices in the Wilderness would have people on the ground, and this perspective was the most important part of the site…

When it all started, back in 1991, I could hardly imagine where it would end.

In the summer of 1991 we were just a handful of people concerned about inevitability of the coming war. For more than a year the situation was “cooking”, but it still looked as if a political agreement about the future of Yugoslavia could be reached. In the meantime, in fact since 1986 when Milosevic gained political power in Serbia, Serbian nationalism became political and received academic and media…

Sharman Sinaga's granddaughter looks bored as her grandfather demonstrates for the camera his favoured technique of market liberalisation: holding union activists upside down in flooded fields. He mimics their gargles as they choke in the mud. He could hold down two or three at a time he boasts; he seems faintly nostalgic in the dim light and the smoke; his only regret, that his arms and knees aren't what they used to be.

The orders to hold people upside-down came from the top, he…

This, eighth in the series of SchNEWS annuals, follows a predictable formula laid down in its predecessors, and is predictably fantastic.

The standard compilation (of approximately 50 issues of the weekly Brighton-based SchNEWS newsletter, alongside longer features, interviews, cartoons, photos, and material from around the world largely ignored by the mainstream media) covering April 2002 to April 2003 is distinct from previous annuals in the coverage it gives to the anti-war…

For all its failings, it's sometimes worth reminding oneself that some of the best journalists (as well as some of the worst!) work for the corporate media. Amira Hass is one such reporter.

The daughter of survivors of the Nazi holocaust, Hass was, until September 2002, the chief West Bank and Gaza correspondent for Ha'aretz, Israel's leading liberal daily. Between 1993 and 1997 she lived in Gaza - the only Jewish Israeli journalist to have done so - covering the Oslo “peace” process…

Had they not become leaders in the field of exposing government spin doctoring and propaganda, you suspect that Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber would make pretty effective PR consultants themselves.

I recently spotted Weapons of Mass Deception riding high in the best-seller lists in a mainstream British bookstore. How many of those buying it were seduced by the snappy title and the Saddam/Bin Laden comic-strip on the cover? Those expecting the Michael Moore approach to US…

"The periodical graswurzelrevolution is the main voice of grassroots democratic activists." - Ralf Vandamme, social scientist. 1

"The group that has most consistentlytried to build a social rhizome and that comes closest to anarchist ethics is ...Non-violent Action. It is not by coincidence that this group's newspaper, amagazine with a relatively wide distribution, is called graswurzelrevolution…