Staying with the Press Gazette for a minute. Julie Tomlin has a long interview with the journalist's journalist, John Pilger. Well worth a read, here's Pilger on blogs, bloggers and the power of... hmmm... CitJ,
“People on the internet are shaming journalists”
If you take the reporting of Iraq, the best reporting has been on the internet.
If you go online you can read someone like Dahr Jamail — he’s a Lebanese American who speaks Arabic — and he has been reporting on the net since the invasion. He’s the one I turn to because he reported from inside Fallujah, where journalists either don’t go or go with the American army or the British.
Another I used in the book I edited last year about investigative journalism, Tell me no Lies, one of the non-journalists was a young British woman called Jo Wilding. At the time she was just filing. She was living with a family in Baghdad and then was in Fallujah and she was just filing every day. It was some of the most seering eye-witness journalism I have ever read. It told me what was happening in the country.
Can you imagine hearing “Here is the news, children are being starved in Palestine”, or “Here is the news, the state of Iraqi children is worse than it was under Saddam Hussein”?
Both those are true, but we are never going to hear that because the way it is reported in the mainstream is skewed towards the idea that it is a civil war, that the Iraqis are all fighting each other and that the occupiers are only really crisis managers.
“A lot of blogging can be nerdish”
It was a couple of bloggers who finally got into American documents and got an admission from the US that they were using chemical weapons in Fallujah.
I have got some criticisms about blogging. A lot of it can be simply nerdish, but informed blogging can be really wonderful diary journalism.
It is the people who are doing the equivalent of journalism on the net who I admire. When I get up in the morning, instead of picking up a newspaper, I will log on and go through a whole series of sites for the best or relevant journalism on particular issues across the world. I will download those, then I will go and look at the paper. That change of habit as a journalist is quite interesting to me.
“Bloggers are battering down the doors of the club”
The defensiveness of journalists is quite something to behold. How dare the public challenge us rather than writing a polite letter to The Guardian for it to be edited and published if they are lucky? They can now say what they think. Alright, some of it, if it is simply invective or abuse, is worthless. But the way some leading journalists have reacted to factual meticulous analysis is quite revealing.
Pilger's my hero. Reading what he has written has had a major impact on my life and what I believe and how I see things.
He makes me question so much about what I hear from official news channel.
He is spot on when he says:
...Can you imagine hearing “Here is the news, children are being starved in Palestine”, or “Here is the news, the state of Iraqi children is worse than it was under Saddam Hussein”
He's right. And it shames our media. The state of the media, for me, is the biggest reason behind the growth of bloggers. Traditional media is under resourced, too cosy with politicians and unused to making waves.
Incidentally, I haven't been able to turn on my tv for the past 24 hours without hearing about the slaying of al-Zarqawi.
I hardly knew who this guy was before and this morning I saw the heads of state of America, the UK, Japan and Australia trumpeting his capture. It's so obviously a small victory that the allied leaders have been told to push to the biggest possible effect possible to order to defelct mounting problems. And yet, CNN, BBC World News etc swallow the bait and stick it on heavy rotation for the best part of a couple of days - seemingly without question.
How many times have I heard from experts and scholars (and particularly) bloggers that there is no such thing as Al Qaeda (it's just a catch all title for Muslim fundamentalists), and yet I have heard time and time again that he was an Al Qaeda leader.
Does anyone really think this killing either absolves Bush/Blair and friends of blame, or makes up for the recent massacres by US troops, or...that it will make even a 1% difference in improving the horrific mess that is over there?
The only reason these people get away with it is the media. The media are the single biggest tool we have to educate ourselves in order to take part in democracy. If the media are compliant then there is no democracy.
I guess that is why we turn in increasing numbers to bloggers.
Posted by: omih | June 09, 2006 at 07:11 AM