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The Revolution Will Be Tweeted
Kristin Schall, CommonDreams
Activism in the Age of User Generated Content
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The images coming out of the aftermath of the stolen election in Iran have ranged from inspiring to horrifying. Photos and videos depict streets flooded with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. There also are the visual results of such bold acts—those beaten and bloodied being tended to by their compatriots. With professional journalists sidelined by Iranian officials, much of this media is being produced by amateur journalists and distributed via the internet. Despite the extraordinary measures taken by the Iranian government to restrict information flow, grassroots communications continue. Cell phone service is cut, the movement of international journalists is restricted, and internet sites are blocked. Yet the pictures, videos and blog reports keep coming. Each a testament to the power of mixing human will with advanced technology.

Iranian oppositionists have been able to do this through a variety of innovative tactics. One is the use of internet proxies. These proxies allow internet users in Iran to connect to friendly computers through out the world in order to post information to the web. In addition, the social networking site, Twitter, has also proven extraordinarily valuable. Twitter allows users to post mini-blogs of up to 140 characters, called “Tweets.” Updates about demonstrations, news from the streets and links to photos and videos have all tweeted their way past government censors. Twitter is, unlike say Facebook, decentralized. Each individual Twitter site is connected to a network of other sites. Users can post without ever going to a central Twitter home page.

Ok, so why hasn’t the Iranian government just turned off the internet completely? The answer was provided on a recent edition of All Things Considered—since there is such a high level of internet use by all sectors of Iranian society, turning it off would bring everything to a standstill. A kind of digital general strike. This is the social power that opposition organizers are leveraging. The actions of the censors are just minor roadblocks. In the end, Ahmadinejad needs the internet as much as the protesters do.

The street protests in Iran are not the first international events to use the internet to globalize struggles. Youtube video releases introduced the world to the recent G20 demonstrations in London and the anarchist-led uprisings in Greece.
(20 June 2009)

Reporting Incorporated: Gene Randall, Chevron, and the 'Dark Side'
Brad Jacobson, Columbia Journalism Review

Former CNN correspondent-turned-PR consultant Gene Randall's video "report" for oil giant Chevron might be unprecedented for how it blurred the line between public relations and journalism. But the Randall-Chevron production raises not only ethical questions, but also the question of whether a surge of newly pink-slipped reporters might go, as one media critic put it, "over to the dark side" and how that might further muddy the line between news and corporate advocacy.

As detailed in a recent New York Times article, when Chevron, America's third largest corporation, heard that 60 Minutes was preparing a report about the $27 billion lawsuit filed against it for allegedly contaminating the Ecuador region of the Amazon rain forest, Chevron hired former TV newsman Randall to craft a video from the corporation's perspective, which was posted on YouTube and Chevron's Web site three weeks before the 60 Minutes report aired on May 3.

60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley's investigation presented multiple perspectives while Randall's included only Chevron officials and consultants. Everyone interviewed in Randall's piece, in other words, was paid by Chevron, including Randall himself.

... Solomon also saw Randall's approach as part of a broader effort by Chevron to exploit the air of credibility that journalism and venerable news outlets can lend, pointing to its relationship with PBS's NewsHour:

"Under Jim Lehrer, the NewsHour takes big bucks from Chevron and then allows Chevron to be, in effect, part of the program every night - presenting itself as imbued with a civic spirit, environmentally committed, noble and all-around good neighbors of everyone on the planet."

McBride said that as more corporations begin to package public relations and publicity messages in news formats, unemployed journalists flocking to corporate PR jobs are not the only cause for concern.
(19 June 2009)
Interesting development in light of the kerfluffle at the The Oil Drum, in which a blogger/editor wrote a piece defending Chevron after accepting a trip to South America from the corporation: The Dubious Lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador. -BA

World Can't Be Changed Without Fighting Western Propaganda
Andre Vltchek, ZNet
... What I write and what I photograph appear periodically on the pages of newspapers and magazines. Sometimes one or two images make it to the walls of museums or galleries. But it is always a fight, a struggle to convince editors, publishers, distributors, or curators to accept at least some watered-down glimpse of reality - to be shown to the general public.

The era of brave reporters and determined editors seems to be over. Correspondents who covered the Vietnam War, who actually helped to stop the Vietnam War, are getting older. They write memoirs and publish books, but they hardly witness today's conflicts. There are still some fearless and dedicated journalists - Keith Harmon Snow or John Pilger to mention just two - but they are more exceptions that prove the rule than a common occurrence.

And yet brave alternative voices are needed more now than in any other time in recent history. As corporate control over the media becomes nearly complete, almost all large outlets now serve establishment economic and political interests. The more they do, the more they talk about the need for freedom of the press, objectivity, and unbiased reporting; somewhere else, not at home.

... The more complete the grip on power by market fundamentalists, the more anti-Chinese or anti-Chavez rhetoric appears on the channels of Western mass media - channels whose propaganda now reaches basically every corner of the globe.

I grew up in Czechoslovakia and although I don't remember Soviet tanks rolling down the streets of Prague in 1968 as a small child, I clearly remember the aftermath - the collaboration, lies, and cynicism of the so called "normalization process". What is shocking to me now - being a naturalized citizen of the United States - is not so much that all that I am describing here is actually happening, but the indifference that accompanies all these terrible events. And above all, that the great majority of the people in the English speaking so-called "First World" actually believe what they read in the newspapers and what they see on the television screens. The lies and one-sidedness seem to be too obvious to be ignored! But they mostly are. Describing the lexicon of Western power, Arundhati Roy once wrote: "So now we know. Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is peace." And we accept that they are.

In a way, control of information is now much more complete in the United States or UK or Australia than it was in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Poland. There is no "hunger for truth" - hunger for alternative views - for every pamphlet that dares to challenge the regime and the political doublespeak in books and films. There is no such intellectual hunger in Sydney, New York, or London as there used to be in Prague, Budapest, or Warsaw. The writers and journalists in the West hardly "write between the lines" and readers do not expect and are not searching for hidden messages.

It all goes mostly unchallenged: propaganda and the lack of alternative views. It seems that we forgot how to question things.
(18 June 2009)
Monitoring the world news, I have to say that I agree with Vitchek's general point. What one reads in the mainstream media bears as much relation to reality as do the Greek myths of Zeus and Aphrodite. We can see it in the media's treatment of peak oil and resource depletion, but it's also true in foreign affairs. English-language media dominate the world, and many important stories are ignored. -BA