Letter from a Far-off Galaxy: a Tale of Two Worlds
by
William Bowles
I read an awful lot of articles and essays from the independent media every day, trying to keep up with events, and receive far more than I can ever get to read and no doubt miss a lot of really excellent content. The sheer volume of writing (and for the most part of an extremely high quality) is enough to overwhelm all but the most obsessive of news junkies’.
But if nothing else, it blows away the myth that only professional’ journalists write the right’ stuff, and there are just too many of them to name here. In addition I have also pointed to the role that online publishers (why call them 'aggregators'?) play in the process.
One of the finest examples I can think of is ‘GI Special’. Assembled and edited by Thom Barton, he puts out a daily bulletin (in PDF and Webpage formats) aimed principally at serving men and women in the US armed forces. Obviously decidedly anti the occupation of Iraq (and Afghanistan and Palestine), it successfully delivers a powerful anti-war/anti-capitalist message but does it in a way that personalises the issues. This is committed journalism and every bit as valid as any other kind despite all the pretensions they may have.
The likes of Robert Fisk regarded by many as progressive doesn’t
like us, derogatorily referring to us as ‘Blogopops’, but then we are
not bad copies of his style and context but we are busy building our
own culture and one that is more valid and more truthful than the world
he inhabits.
Robert Fisk’s rant about the ‘blogopops’ being
nothing if not typical of the snobbish and elitist attitude many in the
world of corporate media have concerning us ‘citizen journalists’ (a
designation by the way that originates with the corporate media, not
us).
Kudos goes to Fisk for taking on the LA Times and the
Toronto Globe and Mail (the Globe and Mail ripped off one Fisk’s pieces
without paying for it and changed some key words) but his blanket
condemnation on us ‘citizen journalists’ is simply not true and reveals
the gulf that exists between those whose livelihood depends on the
corporate media and the rest of us fortunate enough to have the skills
and access to the resources needed to produce our own and hopefully
more accurate version of reality.
Fisk’s piece by the way is
about two articles, one on the genocide of Armenians by the Turkish
government at the beginning of the 20th century and the other on
multiple murders that took place in Canada.[1] He rightly condemns the
racism and the twisting of the facts that occurs in the articles but
Fisk is also guilty of the same thing,
‘Arabs have never been squeamish about death’ Robert Fisk, the Independent 29/07/03
Or, ‘During the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, Iraqis became anaesthetised to death.’ (ibid)[2]
Fisk
makes much of his time in the Middle East, as if this somehow
automatically gives him some unique insight into events and their
causes but the reality is that Fisk is not immune to the blinkered
vision of the Western intellectual and just because he sees the racism
someplace else, doesn’t mean that he is not guilty of the same.
But
one thing strikes me above all else; that the independent media might
as well be writing about events on a planet in some far-off galaxy, and
this is what separates the world according to Fisk from our own; in
actuality, it’s the mainstream media that’s stuck on that alien world,
busily rewriting events to fit the worldview of the ruling elite,
notwithstanding Fisk’s sympathies for the Arab’, who is apparently,
according to Fisk anyway, some kind of sub-species of Homo Sapiens.
The
point here is that regardless of the quality of the writing or indeed
the experience of the writer, neither of which are under question here,
the fact remains that journalists like Fisk live in one reality—the
world according to Capital—and the rest of us in another, the one that
Capital has created for us to live in.
Given the centrality of
the media in maintaining the very status quo that Fisk claims to be
exposing, it verges on the obscene for a journalist like Fisk to say
such things, but hey, whaddoIknow, I’m just a ‘Blogopop’ stranded on an
alien planet trying to make sense of things from another perspective
than that of power and privilege.
