Media

1 November 2013Review

Zero Books, 2012; 317pp; £16.95 AND 2013; 238pp; £10 pbk, £2 ebook from fraudcastnews.net

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…

1 September 2013Review

Microcosm Publishing, 2009, 160pp, £4.99

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…

5 April 2013Feature

Progressive activists have often had a difficult relationship  with the mainstream media. Ian Sinclair discussed the advantages  and pitfalls of working with and in the mainstream with five activists

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…

1 December 2012Resource

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.

26 November 2012Blog

On-going cross-border military actions in northern Iraq are killing civilians and being underreported.

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.

27 April 2012Feature

The police continue to prevent journalists doing their job

 


21 March, Parliament Square photo: Rikki

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.

22 April 2012Resource

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.

22 April 2012Resource

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.

 

1 March 2012Feature

The US journalist I F Stone thought so

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…

1 March 2012Review

Verso, 2012; 237pp; £12.99

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…

24 January 2012Review

OR Books, 2010; 150pp; £9.99

“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…

1 November 2011Review

Gabriel Carlyle surveys some of the books he read during the programming of October’s Rebellious Media Conference (RMC)

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…

1 November 2011Feature

After recently reading Flat Earth News by Nick Davies about “churnalism”, distortion and propaganda in the global media, I thought hard about choosing the “Getting the most from the mainstream media” workshop at the Rebellious Media Conference, among all the opportunities at the RMC for learning about new (to me) ways of communicating for activists. As an anti-war activist not based in London, I feel that the local press and broadcasters still provide ways of getting the message out beyond…

1 November 2011Feature

Reflections on the Rebellious Media Conference, London, October 2011

After two years of preparation, the Rebellious Media Conference (RMC), featuring Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Michael Albert and many others, finally happened on 8-9 October. It was a storming success. Details of what happened, and recordings of various sessions, are available on the RMC website (see end of article).

The RMC began life two years ago, as Peace News staff tried to think of ways to celebrate our 75th anniversary as an activist publication. Our first idea was a dayschool…

1 November 2011News

Over 1,100 people crowded into London’s Institute for Education on 8 October for the start of the Rebellious Media Conference (RMC), organised by Peace News, Ceasefire, NUJ, Red Pepper, Undercurrents and visionOntv.

The final plenary of the Rebellious Media Conference at Friends House

Panel left to right: Taesun Kwon, Becky Hogge, Nadje al-Ali (turning to) Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert. The banner in the background refers to legal threats by international PR and production company “Radical Media” that forced a change in the conferenc

The RMC opened with a keynote speech by US media critic Noam Chomsky, who was introduced by his long-time friend and radical media pioneer Michael Albert, co-…