Media Mayhem - Anarchists and the Mass Media - Dublin Mayday 2004
ireland / britain |
culture |
opinion / analysis
Saturday May 14, 2005 20:52
by Chekov - WSM
![Report this post to the editors Report this post to the editors](/web/20170828091735im_/http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/report.gif)
How anarchists can deal with the media based in part of the experiences of Dublin Mayday 2004
This article examines the mainstream media and looks at the various factors which ensure that it effectively works as a propaganda tool for the powerful. It looks at ways in which anarchists can deal with this situation, by creating our own media, but also by challenging the hostility that they habitually encounter from the mainstream. It is mostly based on the experience of the 2004 Mayday protests in Dublin.
![Click on image to see full-sized version Also covered as 'Anarchists plan to gas 10,000 Dubliners'](/web/20170828091735im_/http://www.anarkismo.net/attachments/may2005/gas.gif)
Also covered as 'Anarchists plan to gas 10,000 Dubliners'
Anarchists and the Mass Media
On one level the phrase "the media" simply refers to the various
modern technologies for transmitting ideas to large populations, such
as newspapers, television, magazines, radio and the new kid on the
block, the Internet. These are extremely useful tools. They allow
people to know what's happening in the world and hence share some
common understanding with strangers. A fundamental precondition for
achieving the type of revolutionary change that anarchists seek is
that a large number of people actively desire it, or at the very
least are open to it. Indeed, communicating "our beloved propaganda"
to the masses has always played a major part in anarchist activity
and hence we require the media. However, today, when we talk about
the media, we also implicitly refer to the corporate machine that
comes very close to operating monopoly control over mass
communication.
This article examines the mainstream media and looks at the
various factors which ensure that it effectively works as a
propaganda tool for the powerful. It looks at ways in which
anarchists can deal with this situation, by creating our own media,
but also by challenging the hostility that they habitually encounter
from the mainstream. It is mostly based on the experience of the 2004
Mayday protests in Dublin, which saw a huge smear campaign against
the organisers, and looks at some of the ways in which they tried to
respond.
Part One
Mainstream Media - The Propaganda Factory
A critique of the role of the mainstream media has long been a
central part of the global anti-capitalist movement. Noam Chomsky's
book and film, "Manufacturing Consent," can probably be considered a
core text of this new movement. It provides a very detailed critique
of how news is created and disseminated according to what Chomsky
calls the 'propaganda model': a series of information filters which
serve to tailor information to the needs of the powerful. This
section simply presents some of these important factors in outline. I
strongly recommend Chomsky's text for a much more detailed analysis,
including a wealth of empirical evidence.
Ownership
With the increasing pace of corporate globalisation, the ownership
of mainstream media resources like newspapers, television channels
and radio stations is concentrated in the hands of an ever smaller
number of enormous companies. As a result, the tiny number of
individuals who own and control these companies enjoy effective
control over a huge percentage of the information that is seen by the
public. Naturally, the owners tend to favour news that reflects their
own worldviews. So, for example, news items that are critical of the
concentration of ownership in the media industry are unlikely to be
very popular in their productions.
Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi are two of the better-known
global media moguls, but there are lesser-known figures who exercise
a large degree of control within particular areas or industries. For
example, Tony O'Reilly's company, Independent News and Media, owns
Ireland's best-selling daily broadsheet, best selling daily tabloid,
best selling Sunday broadsheet, best selling Sunday tabloid, best
selling evening paper as well as owning more than 50% of all local
newspapers and radio stations in the country. This naturally gives
him enormous ability to shape the news agenda in the country.
Advertising
The primary source of income of virtually all mainstream media
comes from advertising. This has created a situation where the
media's core role is not to sell news to consumers, it is to sell
demographic slices of the public to advertisers. As a result of this
focus, the news content of the media tends to tailor itself to the
needs of advertisers. For example, a publication that tends to be
very critical of large corporations will soon find it difficult to
attract advertisers.
Political Pressures
Media companies generally depend upon their relationship with
centres of political power. This is especially the case with state
broadcasters, where the government of the day often has the power to
fire senior figures who insist on presenting information in a way
that is deemed unfavourable to the political power. When the BBC made
a small, routine mistake in reporting on the Iraqi 'dodgy dossier',
the chairman was forced to resign after a government witch-hunt -
despite the fact that the content of the report was substantially
accurate. The mistaken detail was apparently serious enough to cause
heads to roll at the BBC, while the mistake in going to war with
dodgy information was not serious enough to prompt any internal
action by the state!
Political pressure is also applied to commercial media who depend
on access to information from the state (e.g. invitations to press
briefings, leaks from government and security sources...) to fill
their pages. Political parties and other powerful groups employ large
numbers of people whose job it is to put pressure on media companies.
For example, Alaister Campbell, New Labour's press secretary, used to
phone the BBC to complain about their coverage on the Today programme
every single day, regardless of the content. The reasoning behind
this was that it would cause the BBC producers to shape the news in
advance, as they knew that anything unfavourable would be the subject
of strenuous and wearying complaints. Similarly in Ireland, IBEC
employs several full time PR staff who spend much of their time
harassing journalists and lodging complaints when they think that any
coverage has been 'unfair' (code for anything that is critical of
them or their members).
Finally, most states have various pieces of legislation which
effectively discriminate in favour of corporate-owned media. Strict
libel and copyright laws and the attendant risks of costly court
action can be very effective means of excluding non-commercial
radical publications. For example, in Ireland the libel laws allow
the victim to sue the distributor. Easons, the company which
exercises near monopoly control over print distribution in the
country, thus requires that all distributed media should pass a
costly legal check before it can be distributed. This effectively
excludes virtually all radical and non-commercial publications.
Sensationalism and 'infotainment'
As the central task of the media is to deliver audiences to
advertisers, the educational value of the content is a much less
important consideration. The news media, therefore, tends to present
information in as 'entertaining' a way as possible in order to
maximise market share. This focus on 'infotainment' lends itself to
sensationalist reporting, designed to catch the attention of the
public rather than inform them. Thus, a fantasy about a shadowy group
plotting a major atrocity at a protest is much more likely to grab
the headlines than an examination of why the people concerned are
protesting - despite the fact that the former generally has no
informative value whatsoever.
Soundbites
The focus on sensationalism and entertainment lends itself to
short segments composed of 'sound-bites', designed to be digestible
to the lowest common denominator among the audience - meaning
somebody with little attention-span and no knowledge of the subject.
As a result, it is extremely difficult to introduce any concepts that
fall outside the 'accepted wisdom' on a particular issue (the
accepted wisdom being roughly equal to the points of view that are
most favourable to advertisers and owners). Accepted wisdom can be
repeated indefinitely, but any sound-bite that contradicts it tends
to sound crazy. For example, if you were to state the fact that the
US is a leading terrorist state on US television, most viewers would
assume you are barking mad. On the other hand, anybody can say that
"Cuba is a terrorist state" and it will be accepted by most without a
second thought. Thus, in the era of the sound-bite, it is virtually
impossible for anybody who has an opinion markedly different from the
mainstream to present their ideas in a way that will appear credible.
The position of reporters
In line with developments across the board in modern capitalism,
the internal structure of many media companies has changed quickly.
The number of full-time news staff has declined sharply and they have
been replaced by freelancers, either working on short term fixed
contracts or with no contract at all. This has led to a situation
where editorial staff have less and less time to research news
stories. As a consequence, much of the content is cobbled together
directly from press releases and other such pre-packaged forms.
Furthermore, without the time to adequately investigate any issue,
content is considered newsworthy only if it can be squeezed into a
well-known angle. Any news item that does not fit into one of these
cliches is just "not news". Protestors can be presented as violent
hooligans or harmless utopian hippies but otherwise they can be
ignored.
The increasing preponderance of news-staff who work in insecure
positions has also contributed to the decline in the quality of news
content. Working in a highly competitive environment, with future
employment depending on breaking of high-profile stories, the
temptation to embellish and sensationalise stories often proves
irresistible to those who are desperate to establish themselves in
the industry. Attending a public meeting where reasonable people
discussed plans for a protest is a story that is unlikely to grab the
front pages. On the other hand 'infiltrating a secret meeting where
fanatics plotted to bring chaos to the city' might.
Self-censorship
Possibly the most insidious factor that shapes the mainstream
media is what Chomsky calls 'self-censorship' or the 'internalisation
of values'. This refers to the process whereby media workers
internalise the filters that apply to the publications that they work
for. This creates a situation where many will strenuously proclaim
their freedom to write whatever they like and deny the existence of
any censorship of their work. In general, journalists start on the
bottom rungs of the media ladder, producing commercial features or
lifestyle pieces. By the time they rise through the system to work on
more politically sensitive pieces, they will be very familiar with
the dominant ideologies espoused by the publication and industry that
they work in. Anybody who fails to internalise the correct values
will either fail to rise, or will face so much turmoil and conflict
that they will be driven out.
For example, it is unlikely that the editors of Ireland's Sunday
Independent have to refuse too many articles on the grounds that they
are too sympathetic to Sinn Fein. Anybody who finds themselves in a
position as a political writer for that publication will already know
well that only criticisms of Sinn Fein are likely to be published.
Furthermore, it is likely that only those writers who demonstrate a
personal dislike for Sinn Fein will ever be given a job as a
political commentator.
Part Two
Building Alternative Media Institutions
For all of the reasons given above, anarchists and other radical
critics of the current social order are never going to be given a
fair hearing in the mainstream media as it is now constituted. On
balance, the media coverage they receive will be overwhelmingly
negative. They will be ignored, belittled, mocked, misrepresented,
slandered, vilified and abused. There is nothing that can be done
about this in the short term - it is a consequence of the structure
of the entire industry and is outside of popular control. Therefore,
in the long run, the most important task is to create alternatives;
media that is not controlled by powerful corporations; that does not
depend on advertising revenues; that primarily aims to inform rather
than entertain; that is independent from political pressure coming
from the powerful.
In the past there have been many extremely successful examples of
people doing just that. There is a long tradition of radical
grassroots publishing with roots that go back at least as far as the
late 18th century, when Thomas Paine's pamphlet The Rights of Man was
influential in popularising the ideas of the republican revolutions
and uprisings around the world. During the 19th century, a workers'
press flourished, producing numerous popular daily newspapers in new
industrial towns in Britain and the US. In 1930's Spain the
anarcho-syndicalist CNT produced over 30 daily newspapers, including
the national best-seller. Sadly, with the growing importance of
advertising revenues and the decline of radical workers'
organisations, alternative, non-commercial publications found it
impossible to compete with the corporate products and their number
dwindled. Generally only those publications which were run by
well-organised and committed political groups survive today. Their
circulation is mostly tiny compared with the mass distribution that
the workers' press achieved many decades before.
New media technologies such as television and radio that were
introduced in the course of the twentieth century tended to be even
more tightly controlled by government and large corporations as they
require greater capital investment. Today, there are only a small
number of community radio stations and public access television
channels that are truly independent of corporate and state control,
and they have tiny audiences and minuscule resources to cover news
stories when compared with the corporate competition.
To appreciate the marginality of non-commercial media today,
consider the example of Ireland. In terms of print publications, it
is only the newspapers, magazines and 'zines produced by small left
wing groups and individuals that are fully independent of the various
filters in the propaganda model. There are less than 100,000 copies
of libertarian publications and maybe twice that number of Marxist
and other radical publications distributed in Ireland each year. This
figure is easily surpassed by every single issue of several corporate
Sunday newspapers. In other media, such as television and radio, the
situation is worse still. A couple of community-controlled radio
stations compete against a huge array of state and commercial
offerings with vastly greater resources and audiences.
However, the situation is not entirely hopeless. No matter how
hostile and powerful the mainstream media is, radical political
movements can still overcome the barriers put in their way. For
example, in the 1970's Sinn Fein claimed to be able to sell up to
45,000 copies of their newspapers1, An Phoblacht and Republican News,
each week . Although their populist nationalist politics are hardly
radical, their military campaign was in full swing at the time and
they were utterly reviled by the mainstream. Despite the fact that
the corporate world wouldn't touch them with a barge-poll, they
managed to build an impressive network of supporters to distribute
their ideas to a mass audience.
A more recent, if limited, example was seen during the recent
campaign against the bin-tax in Dublin. The mass opposition to this
tax was completely ignored by the mainstream media for three years.
During this time the campaign distributed hundreds of thousands of
leaflets and newsletters to Dublin households, through an impressive
network of volunteers. By the time that the government decided to act
to crush the opposition to the tax, large swathes of the city had
been won over to support the campaign. The huge leafleting network
was crucial in creating a common understanding of the issues among
large numbers of workers across the city. The mainstream media did
eventually start to cover the campaign, but only when the city was on
the verge of being shut down by the campaign and then their coverage
was a good example of how the media can act in unison when the
interests of the powerful are threatened. Virtually every single
piece of coverage in the mainstream media was overtly hostile to the
campaign. Yet, despite the media smears, the long process of building
a campaign and distributing information was strong enough that it
took the full might of the state to crush it.
However, it requires a huge investment of resources for radical
groups to be able to create and distribute their own media. In
general the time, money and energy involved means that it is only
relatively coherent, well organised and committed groups who are
capable of reaching large numbers. This is one area where anarchists
have often fallen down, especially in comparison with authoritarian
socialists. Very few anarchist publications reach large numbers of
people. Indeed anarchists often mock Trotskyists for their
concentration on selling newspapers. Certainly the politics that
their papers advocate and the forceful recruiting that tend to
accompany their sales pitches deserve to be mocked, but not the fact
that they sell newspapers, which is simply part of the hard slog of
trying to build up alternative media.
However, the situation is not entirely depressing for anarchists.
For one thing it is possible for anarchist organisations to expand
the circulation of their publications significantly with hard work
and organisation. For example, the circulation of Workers Solidarity
has increased by a factor of at least ten within three years. Now
about 6,000 copies are distributed, mostly delivered door to door,
every two months. In addition to the publications put together by
organised groups, advances in technology have created something of a
boom in DIY publishing of anarchist zines, mostly assembled by
individuals or small groups of friends. Although these publications
normally have very small circulation and tend not to be aimed
'outwards' at the general public, together they do serve to circulate
ideas and debate among a wider group than would otherwise be
possible. But most importantly, the development of the Internet has
created a new distribution and publication method for radical media,
one that has yet to fall under the absolute control of corporate or
state power and one that is particularly favourable for anarchists.
Revolution in Cyberspace?
Despite the overblown hype about the potential of the Internet to
replace all traditional forms of communication, its emergence has
still had important effects. It has significantly reduced the costs
of distribution of information to mass audiences, thus lowering the
financial barrier to entry in the industry. This has allowed
organisations without huge financial backing to attract large
audiences to their sites without the need to depend heavily on
advertising revenue. For example, the web site of the WSM probably
attracts significantly more traffic than many of the mainstream
political parties in Ireland, despite the fact that we are thousands
of times poorer.
The inherently trans-national nature of the Internet has had
important effects. By allowing people to communicate without any
penalties for physical distance, radical political currents, which
were previously too geographically dispersed and thinly spread to
form themselves into effective movements, have been able to come
together and organise in cyberspace. The global anti-capitalist
movement, which exploded onto the TV screens in Seattle and Genoa,
had a long incubation period on the Internet before it was capable of
coalescing in the real world. The anarchist movement too owes much of
its current growth to the Internet. Not only have anarchist ideas
been revived in their traditional bases, they have spread all over
the globe, often carried by popular websites and mailing lists to
countries without any anarchist tradition, or one that was long dead.
The Internet's trans-nationalism has also allowed non-corporate
media to somewhat circumvent the various legal impediments that
states have devised to impede radical media. National copyright and
libel laws are difficult to enforce when the website is physically
hosted in another country. As an international entity, there is no
single legal system which has authority over the whole Internet.
Unsurprisingly, the US government have been taking steps to remedy
this. They have effectively attempted to legislate for the entire
Internet, through the promotion of multi-lateral agreements, like the
treaties on intellectual property rights agreed at the World Trade
Organisation, or through unilateral measures like the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, where the US attempted to prosecute foreign
companies for breaking US copyright law. Although such legal control
is still limited, it is a constant threat to free communication on
the internet. History tells us that the more that states can legally
control the information distributed on the Internet, the more
dominated by the corporate sector it will become.
In addition to its low financial barrier to entry and its
trans-national, geographical distance-collapsing nature, perhaps the
most important development of the Internet is a consequence of its
fundamental communication paradigm. Traditional media facilitate
few-to-many communication. This means that a relatively small number
of people produce the information, while a large number of people
consume it and there is a clear division between the two. This model
is favoured when there is a relatively high cost involved in
producing and distributing the information. In the early years of the
Internet, this was the predominant model for web sites, with sites
being managed by individuals and small groups and passively consumed
by viewers.
However, unlike a newspaper or a TV broadcast, there is virtually
no cost involved in adding and distributing new information on the
Internet. There are few of the same constraints on the size and
volume of the information distributed. This feature has facilitated
the development of many-to-many communication models, sources of
information created by participatory, voluntary communities where the
lines between consumer and producer of the information are blurred.
This type of community stretches back to the birth of the internet
and has migrated through the various Internet communication tools
from usenet newsgroups to email lists to the World Wide Web.
Probably the most impressive child of the Internet is the free
software movement, a vast and nebulous community of computer
programmers, spread all over the globe, who use a production model
that is much closer to pure communism than to capitalism - the vast
majority of work is voluntary and the products are given away for
free. This community is responsible for much of the software that
runs the Internet itself and its creations have been crucial in the
development of internet communities where information rather than
software is the product. With the development of software tools to
facilitate the creation and distribution of information by large
groups of co-operating people, enormous repositories of information
have been developed by ever-growing communities. The increasing
sophistication and ease of use of the tools has been closely followed
by larger, more diverse and more sophisticated examples of community
organisation.
Radical political currents have been able to take advantage of
these developments. In the English-speaking world, it is almost
certainly true, if difficult to measure, that vastly more information
written from a radical left-wing point of view is distributed
electronically than on paper today. The nature of the Internet's
communication model has also meant that those political movements
which are more libertarian in their organisation, with considerable
autonomy within broad agreements on principle, and more democratic
and participatory in the way in which they produce information, have
tended to take advantage of this opportunity much more effectively
than the traditional, authoritarian left. Highly hierarchical groups
are organised so that a small number of specialists produce the
information, or at least closely scrutinise it before distribution,
which is more suited to traditional few-to-many communication.
Many of the collectively produced, politically radical information
sources on the Internet are intended for a particular niche audience
and serve mainly as a means of developing the community internally,
by providing a forum in which people with similar views can identify
each other, get some sense of themselves as a collective movement and
develop their ideas through debate and argument. Bulletin board
systems, like urban75.com and enrager.net, based in the UK, are good
examples. Although these communities are very useful, they aren't
aimed at a general audience and will never compete with the corporate
world as a primary source of information about what is happening in
the world.
Other communities have taken the first steps towards taking on the
corporate media. Sites like Znet, and commondreams.org gather
together a wealth of high quality radical analysis of current
affairs. While these sites have a large number of contributors, they
still generally rely on a small group of people to choose what to
include and what not to.
Some Internet information communities have attempted to go beyond
this and facilitate as wide an involvement in the process of
information production as is possible. Due to the fact that different
participants have different level of commitment to the goals of the
community, it is probably impossible and undesirable to ever
eliminate the position of members with particular privileges that
allow them to regulate the distribution of information. However,
there have been several hugely successful examples where this
principle is taken to its logical conclusion. Communities like
Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Indymedia and Wikipedia are entirely managed by
the community that uses them, and these communities number many
thousands.
Indymedia is of particular interest to anarchists due to its
political roots as well as its open participatory nature. It was born
in Seattle in November 1999, during the famous protests there against
the WTO and has remained heavily influenced by the radical
libertarian ideas current in the global justice movement. Today, it
has expanded to be a global network of open publishing news sites,
with 150 collectives of varying size in over 70 countries. "Open
publishing" means that all of the users of the site produce the news
collectively, rather than it being a job of a small group. The
members of each collective are responsible for enforcing basic
editorial guidelines and choosing which articles to highlight as
'features'. The network of collectives agree to a basic set of goals
and principles as part of the process of joining. These network wide
agreements amount to a statement of basic anarchist organisational
principles - emphasising democracy, accountability, openness and
non-hierarchical structures. However, beyond the basic agreement of
principles, the collectives are autonomous. This creates a great
diversity within the network, which is particularly obvious when
examining the editorial policies of the various different Internet
sites. Some sites, predominantly in the US, practice a policy of free
speech, where all contributions are automatically distributed,
irrespective of their political point of view, which normally has the
unfortunate consequence of a large amount of the content being made
up of deliberate disruption and abuse. Other sites apply much tighter
guidelines, even going as far as banning hierarchically organised
groups from distributing information through the site, or only
allowing participation by registered users. Most sit somewhere in
between, removing disruptive content and personalised abuse, but
allowing input from all political points of view as long as they do
not contain hate-speech such as blatant racism, sexism or homophobia.
Although communities like Indymedia do eventually aim to challenge
the mainstream media as the dominant way in which people inform
themselves about the world, it is obvious that we are a long way from
there. However, given their apparently utopian principles, their
networks have flourished and grown. Although there are huge
differences in the quality of the information produced on Indymedia
sites, some of them have managed to become important sources of news
in certain fields. For example, although the audience of Indymedia
Ireland is undoubtedly mostly confined to people with left wing
sympathies and it has in no way managed to become a real alternative
to the corporate media for most subjects, with 50-100,000 hits on an
average day, its reach dwarfs that of other radical publications.
When radical political movements are particularly active in the real
world, during campaigns, protests and disputes, the local Indymedia
sites become invaluable sources of news that easily rivals the
coverage of the corporate media. For example, in Ireland, Indymedia
provided the best source of information about the anti-war movement,
the recent battle against the bin tax and the mayday anti-capitalist
mobilisation and during all of these periods, the readership
increased enormously, peaking at 900,000 hits on Mayday 2004.
Similarly, the New York city Indymedia site provided unparalleled
up-to-the-minute coverage of the protests there during the 2004
Republican party convention to appoint George Bush as their candidate
for the presidency.
However, while it is clear that communities like Indymedia are
extremely useful in distributing radical information to large
audiences and the Internet continues to be an extremely powerful
communication tool, it is important to remember that the vast
majority of the world's population have either severely limited
access to the internet or none at all. For the forseeable future we
must resign ourselves to the fact that only a small minority of the
population, even in the richer parts of the world, will have
sufficient access to the Internet to make it a viable source of news,
no matter how high the quality of the material that we produce. If we
want to change the world, we need to win over large numbers of people
who will never have access to the Internet. So it remains of
paramount importance to produce and distribute information in
traditional formats. The Internet gives radical left wing movements
access to a huge range of ideas and information. The process of
distributing this information back into the real world through
traditional media is a crucial part of the cycle. Newspapers, radio
shows, leaflets, magazines and so on will be with us for a long time
yet. Many Indymedia collectives and similar Internet projects are
already addressing this problem and are making great efforts to
transfer the information from the internet onto the streets, through
printable pdf news-sheets, screenings of downloaded video
productions, running radio shows and stations and hosting workshops,
but the distribution of information from the Internet back in to the
real world will remain the bottleneck for the a long time to come.
Part Three
When anarchists swim in the mainstream
Having stressed the paramount and primary importance of building
an alternative media that is open, democratic and transparent, it is
important that we recognise our limitations at the current time. An
article that is published on Indymedia or in Workers Solidarity might
be read by a few thousand people at best. An article that appears in
the Irish Independent might be read by a few hundred thousand. A
story that appears on national television news might be seen by a
million.
Building up audiences for our media is a very important task, but
it is one that will not happen overnight. The model by which our
media is produced - participatory, democratic and open to radical
opinions - represents a paradigm shift from the passive consumption
that is usual with mainstream news. People are used to reading news
that is written to appear as if it is written by an authoritative,
objective and well-informed writer, with careful balance between the
various opinions represented. In general, since they lack access to
alternative points of view and are not aware of the forces that shape
the process of news production, most people will tend to accept that
these articles are genuinely objective and balanced. When they
encounter alternative publications, they will tend to see them as
biased and 'unprofessional' and will not trust the information that
they carry. Therefore, even if we can succeed in making people aware
of our alternatives, only a minority will be won over at first.
Therefore, we have to reconcile ourselves with the fact that the vast
majority of people are going to continue to get their news about the
world from the mainstream media. This is something that we simply
have to accept for the moment. We wish it was otherwise, we work
towards changing it, but it exists and we can not forget that.
We also cannot forget that as anarchists we are attempting to
change society. We are not interested in creating our own little
niche cut off from the mainstream where we can live outside of the
confines of capitalism. Nobody is truly free as long as one person is
enslaved and even though it is sometimes possible for small groups of
radicals to create their own cultures cut off from mainstream
society, when you consider that this space only exists in the West
due to the extreme exploitation of the poorer parts of the world, it
is quite clear that for us to withdraw into our activist bubbles
would be a clear denial of anarchist principles. We have a
responsibility to try to convince as many people as possible of our
ideas and this means that we have to do whatever is possible to reach
those people. Every time an anarchist is quoted in a mainstream media
outlet, no matter how atrocious the article, large numbers of people
probably learn for the first time that anarchists exist. And if we
can attract any honest coverage at all, we will probably reach more
people in a single blow than we would with years of our own
publications. Therefore, we simply can't ignore the mainstream media
and concentrate on our alternatives, rather we should look for
intelligent ways in which we can attempt to influence the coverage
that we receive.
When I say 'influence', I do not mean that I think that anarchists
will ever receive anything other than shamefully dishonest and
hostile coverage from the media as a whole. However, Rupert Murdoch
has yet to emulate Stalin's control of information. There are
opportunities that we can exploit. Although almost all professional
journalists do labour under the same structural conditions and within
the same corporate framework, there are big differences in their
ethical and professional standards. There are some journalists who
will not set out to deliberately distort what we say and will make
some attempt to portray an accurate representation of our goals and
aims. There are even some rare ones who have somehow retained their
ability to comprehend or even sympathise with our ideas despite the
mind-numbing and narrowing experience of working in corporate media.
Furthermore, it is worth bearing in mind that the media is divided
up into several sectors and there are significant differences between
them. Local media and upmarket newspapers can't get away with the
same indifference to fact that the tabloids enjoy. This is not to
say, however, that 'serious' broadsheet newspapers are much more
likely to paint an accurate picture of anarchists than tabloids are,
or that state broadcasters are any more likely to sympathise with us
than Rupert Murdoch's news channels are (although news is far from an
accurate description of their content). However, the different
sectors of the media can sometimes be played off against each other.
The broadsheets and state broadcasters like to engender a sense of
superiority in their audiences. When the tabloids whip up scare
campaigns, spaces can open in the more respectable media for us.
Suddenly, a realistic portrayal of anarchists can become a story,
with an angle that focuses on the irresponsibility of the tabloids.
In some cases sympathetic interviews, that would be unthinkable in
most circumstances, can get by editors in an atmosphere of tabloid
hype. In 2004 anarchists in Dublin, Boston and New York received
positive exposure in parts of the mass media during the hype
surrounding major protests. In all three cases the positive coverage
was dwarfed by the negative. We had "anarchists planning to gas
10,000 Dubliners" on the front page of the Irish Sun. But the
outlandish scare stories were generally produced by the police and
printed by "crime correspondents" dependant upon them. There is
nothing that anarchists could have done to avoid these. However, the
audience for the positive coverage that anarchists managed to achieve
probably rivalled that which they could reach through several years
of distributing their own publications. By engaging with the media in
a careful, planned and intelligent way, they at least managed to turn
the slanders to some good.
The article linked to below was originally published as a seperate
box in this article
Playing the Media Game
Perhaps the two biggest problems in dealing with the media are
firstly that the media can, through the questions they ask and the
pressures they bring, begin to set the political agenda of the group.
Secondly servicing the media machine can take up all a group's time
and energy (to the detriment of the other activity).
Anarchist Pitfalls
But even if we do try to influence how the media portrays us,
there are major pitfalls for anarchists who decide to talk to the
media and unless the groups and individuals involved are well
prepared, it can turn out to be more damaging than helpful. The media
are used to dealing with traditional hierarchical organisations,
whose spokespeople are also normally leaders of their organisation.
The media tends to identify this spokesperson with the organisation
and focus as much on their personality as their politics. For most
hierarchical political organisations this is not problematic, as they
both want and need to build up the personal profile of the leader.
They also have the advantage of being able to produce statements and
responses at short notice as they rarely have to seek a mandate from
their organisations to do so. If anarchists attempt to engage with
the mainstream media on its own terms, we will find that the inherent
hierarchical model that is assumed will start to rub off on us and we
will emerge from the experience damaged internally, even if we do
manage to put across a good public face.
Individual anarchists often have very personal problems with the
media. As soon as any named individual is publicly associated with
"anarchism" in the media, they become a target for character
assassination by the gutter press. These types of attack can be
vicious and can be very upsetting for whoever has put themselves
forward. They can also lead to serious problems with parents or
relatives and employers. It is not unknown for people to lose their
jobs and seriously jeopardise any chances of future employment as a
result of such attacks.
Taking part in the media spectacle that surrounds summit protests
can have corrosive effects on the politics of the group. Even when
people have a strong commitment to acting as a delegate of the group
and not becoming a leader, they can become entranced by being part of
the spectacle. Media exposure affects the ego. A desire for publicity
and celebrity is a very common feature of our culture and people can
become addicted to it. It is a very flattering experience to have
hundreds of thousands of people seeing your picture or reading your
opinions in the media. The lure of the media spectacle is dangerous
for groups as well as for individuals. A key aim of anarchist
activity is to break down the division between the actors and the
spectators in society. Getting a few positive stories about anarchism
among the celebrity features, while useful, is far less important
than the task of building alternatives.
We need to develop structures that allow us to engage with the
mainstream media on our own terms. The question of how we can do this
was one that was explored in depth by activists in DGN, during the
run-up to the Mayday 2004 protests in Dublin. Despite the fact that
we were caught unprepared by the biggest media smear campaign that we
have ever experienced, we managed to develop a model for dealing with
it which eventually proved crucial to the protest's success. See the
box beside for an outline, or the online version of this article for
full details.
Non Engagement
Several groups within the anarchist and broader anti-capitalist
movement have adopted a position of eschewing all contact with the
mainstream media, refusing interviews, avoiding photographers and
even on occasion physically repelling over-inquisitive reporters. In
the UK the Wombles and other anarchists have adopted this policy,
after a long history of the media inventing plots as evidence of
their utterly evil and sinister nature and mounting witch-hunts
against individuals. A broad consensus emerged in much of the direct
action movement in London that there was little point in talking to
the media as it made little difference to their coverage - they would
stitch you up regardless.
However, there is a serious problem to this approach. In general,
journalists are only interested in talking to anarchists when
anarchists are doing something that is destined to attract media
coverage. This means that they are going to write about you whether
you talk to them or not. Refusing to talk to them whatsoever means
that they pretty much have carte blanche to make up whatever they
like. They don't even have to take the trouble of picking a two-word
quote out of your half-hour interview to fit in with whatever fantasy
they have constructed to sell papers. In general, it is probably true
that including comments from real and named people rarely makes an
article worse from our point of view and it often makes it better.
For one thing, as soon as they include quotes from a real person they
have to start worrying about libel laws. If they are just writing
about anarchists in general, they have no such worries. Despite their
policy of non-engagement, the fact that they are named after a fluffy
toy and the fact that their worst atrocity has been pushing a
policeman, the media has still made the Wombles sound like a gang of
crazed terrorists.
Another factor is that the act of refusing to talk to journalists
is very commonly used as corroborating evidence of the evil and
sinister nature of anarchists ('shadowy' is a favourite adjective).
Furthermore, given the open and public nature of many anarchist
organisations and events, it is in practice impossible to ensure that
there are no journalists present. This especially holds true for
public protests and demonstrations but also extends to public
meetings. In this context, attempts to filter out journalists will
only succeed in rooting out the more honest ones who are willing to
admit their occupation and are much more likely to write less
offensive stuff, while the tabloid journalists who are 'infiltrating'
the public meeting will simply adopt some guise and remain.
I should also add that attempting to physically attack or
intimidate journalists is counter-productive and self-indulgent. It
obviously ensures that they have good material with which to attack
you and the rest of the anarchist movement. It has exactly zero
effect on the dominance of the mainstream media, which the attacks
are presumably aimed against. Journalists, particularly
photographers, do often act in an extremely provocative way, pushing
cameras in protestors' faces and so on. In this case it is quite
likely that they are attempting to provoke a response. As an
anarchist you are part of a collective movement and you have a
responsibility to your comrades to learn enough self-discipline not
to fall headfirst into this simple trap like an idiot.
Another important disadvantage of the strategy of not engaging
with the media is that there is always somebody there who will
happily talk on your behalf or about you and normally misrepresent
your ideas to suit their own agenda. This can be a liberal protest
group who will happily weigh in to the scare campaign in order to
gain a bit of publicity for themselves, or more commonly one of the
poisonous varieties of Leninists who will use the opportunity to
promote one of their own cult-recruitment sessions, advertised as a
rival protest.
We should remember that the reason that they want to talk to us
(and slander us) is because we are news. There is a growing
ideological vacuum at the heart of capitalism. In its arrogance,
Western capitalism has dispensed with the trouble of convincing its
subjects to internalise the ideologies of the ruling classes.
Abstentionism in elections is rife and pervasive. Trust in our
leaders and public figures is practically non-existent. Authoritarian
socialism has collapsed into a tiny shadow of its former self and
either remains rigidly fixed into an antiquated theoretical
framework, frantically spinning in ever decreasing circles, or has
completely capitulated and signed up to the doctrines of the global
elite. It is for this reason that we increasingly find ourselves,
often unwillingly, cast under the media spotlight. Despite its
minuscule size and negligible influence, the anarchist movement is
increasingly the only source of real ideological opposition to the
seemingly inexorable march of this corporate world order. Ours is an
opposition that goes to the heart of the problem and rejects the
system in its entirety. Most importantly, our opposition has steel.
We do not shy away from confrontation with the state or with
corporate power. We do not respect their stinking laws. We are a flag
of principled resistance to their entire world-order and this is why
they come looking for us in order to vilify us. And it is because of
the depth of our opposition that we should always seek to prevent the
various fools looking for a job in a city-council or parliament
chamber from speaking on our behalf. We should always seek to speak
for ourselves and let our difference and resistance be known.
Conclusion
The various filters of the propaganda model of mainstream media do
effectively ensure that the media will be overtly hostile to
anarchists and will publish material that is as damaging as possible
to us. However, there is an important limit on how far they can go in
their lies and distortions. Basically, they depend on the fact that
most people believe most of the things that they write. Although
there is a widespread understanding that much news is sensationalised
and closer to entertainment than information, especially in the
tabloids, very few people have any idea of the process by which news
is created and are ignorant of the powerful forces that consciously
distort information in pursuit of their own agendas and will tend to
generally believe news reports unless they have a good reason not to.
Once the illusion of the credibility of the mainstream media is
shattered, it is difficult to reforge. People who become aware of the
depth of the manipulations and distortions can be difficult to win
back, so the media, particularly those sections that have greater
pretensions about their own worth, are cautious about publishing
information that is seen as clearly false by a large number of
people.
The most effective thing that we can do in the long term to limit
the lies that the mainstream media tells about us is to create our
own alternatives and give people access to information that we
produce. In addition to creating our own media, by being active as
anarchists in our communities, workplaces and campaigns, blatant
media lies about our movement will prove more costly to the corporate
media and will tend to push people towards us. However, in the
current situation, with our small size and tiny circulation of our
publications, these factors are only really significant in very
localised campaigns or struggles on relatively marginal issues. When
the might of the state and corporate sector decide to attack us - as
is becoming par for the course in the run up to large protests that
challenge the fundamental concepts of our capitalist world order -
our own media and local connections only reach a negligible
proportion of the audience. In these cases, if we refuse to challenge
the slanders in the mainstream media, the vast majority of people
will have absolutely no reason not to believe the rubbish that they
are being fed. On the other hand, even by showing a willingness to
argue our case in the mainstream, we place limits on their lies. If
the media is full of reports about violent hooligan terrorist
anarchists, but the anarchists who appear in the media seem to be
sane, rational, well-informed and articulate, the chances of the
public smelling something fishy are increased many times.
by Chekov Feeney
First published in Red and Black Revolution No 8, 2004
![Click on image to see full-sized version The media described how the march had been banned without ever using that word!](/web/20170828091735im_/http://www.anarkismo.net/cache/imagecache/local/attachments/may2005/460_0___30_0_0_0_0_0_plans.jpg)
The media described how the march had been banned without ever using that word!
![Click on image to see full-sized version burn.gif](/web/20170828091735im_/http://www.anarkismo.net/attachments/may2005/burn.gif)
![Click on image to see full-sized version the_star_sunday_1.gif](/web/20170828091735im_/http://www.anarkismo.net/attachments/may2005/the_star_sunday_1.gif)
![Click on image to see full-sized version A suburban shopping mall miles away from any planned protest](/web/20170828091735im_/http://www.anarkismo.net/attachments/may2005/shopping.gif)
A suburban shopping mall miles away from any planned protest
![Click on image to see full-sized version Targetting our spokespeople](/web/20170828091735im_/http://www.anarkismo.net/cache/imagecache/local/attachments/may2005/460_0___30_0_0_0_0_0_media.jpg)
Targetting our spokespeople