Corporate Media Is the Disease

Unfortunately, whoever on March 27 accused me of slavish allegiance to my "pathetic WW paycheck" and "the agenda" of my "sick corporate masters" seemed unlikely to buy me drinks.

"We have turned against YOU," the writer said. "See you on the streets. And I'll see you long before you ever see me."

The threat came from an unexpected source: an anonymous posting on portland.indymedia.org, a website that is the hub of much of Portland's anti-war activism and a bulletin board for the city's do-gooder communities.

Even if you've never heard of Portland's Independent Media Center, known as Indymedia, you've seen its influence. Over the past month, anti-war protests in the Rose City have dwarfed those in neighboring Seattle in size, number and intensity. A big reason for that, many say, is the militancy and popularity of the Portland website, which, in contrast to its sleepy sister site in Seattle, spits out a steady stream of reports, alerts and exhortations, as well as rage, love, humor and mischief.

The Portland site is one of about 110 volunteer-run indymedia outposts worldwide. This loose affiliation is billed as a world where everyone is a journalist, able to post unedited, uncensored first-person observations and photos or audio or simply linking to articles and viewpoints ignored by mainstream media. The result is a combination chat room/underground newspaper/activist bulletin board run by activist-reporters.

Initially framed in ominous pitch-black, the Portland website today is a cheery key-lime green; there's a pink rose in the left hand corner with waves emanating from it.

With its inviting format, "it is a site that says, 'Become a part of our group by expressing your ideas in our site,'" says Jeffrey Barlow, head of the Berglund Center for Internet Studies at Pacific University, who describes the Portland IMC as the most sophisticated grassroots political website he's seen.

On the left of the screen is a community calendar, a user's guide and more than a hundred links, including Indymedia sites around the globe. The central column is for "features," meaning articles, press releases and rants drawn from the right column, an "open publishing newswire" which bears a steadily changing stream of new posts pouring in from the IMC community.

With a constantly morphing montage of posts that are funny, ugly, smart, wacked-out and inarticulate, this is, in fact what democracy looks like--and this chaotic climate is welcomed, even encouraged, under the IMC's credo of "open publishing." Recent calls for action range from rioting and revolution to a proposed "Vomit-in at the Krispy Kreme."

"I think it's wonderful," says Alan Graf, KBOO radio host. "What's that saying? 'The only free press is for those that can afford one.' I love that anyone can write anything they want."

Portland "would definitely be a different and less vibrant community without it," says bike activist Ayleen Crotty, a driving force in the early days of the combination community calendar, chat room and do-it-yourself news site. "I don't think I ever imagined how large it would become so quickly."

The global rise of Indymedia sites has drawn plenty of notice. Larry Elin, co-author of Click on Democracy: The Internet's Power to Change Political Apathy into Civic Action, says Indymedia could help cure a society that's losing its civic values. "We need it," says the professor at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, "I think it's an absolutely essential part of our democracy."

Indymedia has also been noticed by the Portland Police Bureau, which monitors the local site. "It's just a weird combination of all these different kinds of people," says police spokesman Sgt. Brian Schmautz, who was recently trashed in a string of anonymous messages. "It's anything from people who seem like they are intelligent to people who can't even spell." He says Indymedia's online calls for action often become reality on the streets.

On March 17, for example, as President Bush prepared to invade Iraq, Indymedia ran a central feature with instructions for the day war commenced, under the headline "When the Bombs Drop, Portland Stops."

"We will stop 'business as usual' by blockading key intersections," was one instruction. Another announced an anti-war bike ride to "shut down major thruways."

On March 19, a featured article urged protesters to "block the corporate media" to protect those who might break the law.

On the evening of March 20, streets, highways and bridges were blocked. Protesters, especially two named Deva and spArk, went out of their way to mess with news cameras. Deva would put his hand in front of lenses; spArk would flash a shield painted with the words "Fuck Corporate Media" behind reporters giving live reports.

The vast majority of activists that day were peaceful, but on the Steel Bridge a knot of two dozen black-clad protesters used reinforced banners to ram a few traffic cops who tried to halt their advance, causing a police backlash on innocent bystanders. In the following week's paper, I reported the events on the bridge, as well as the news that Portland TV stations had for the first time hired guards to protect news crews from the hostility of the crowds ("All Bets Are Off," WW, March 26, 2003).

Shown here taking communion during the March 20 protest, spArk attended a Catholic high school whose mission is "to inspire and help young men develop themselves as leaders in service to others."

Longtime activist journalist Jim Lockhart's motto is "You get the whole story, good, bad or ugly." When it comes to the Indymedia site he helped found, he says it's getting ugly--taken over by a radical clique.

To prepare for the WTO demonstrations, a group of alternative news organizations equipped a storefront with computers so activists could post to a website. When the police claimed they'd fired no rubber bullets into the crowd, the Independent Media Center immediately used photos and eyewitness accounts to prove the cops' claims false.

Indymedia was born: not just a website, but a new movement engaged in grassroots "media activism" and fueled by slogans as catchy as anything dreamed up by Wieden & Kennedy.

"Corporate media is the disease. Indymedia is the cure."

"Don't hate the media. Become the media."

In the span of three years, the original Seattle IMC has spawned 110 fully autonomous offspring, in scores of American cities and dozens of foreign countries spread across six continents. The IMC reach spans from Chiapas, Mexico, to the tiny town of Urbana, Ill.; from Brisbane, Australia, to Danbury, Conn.; from Palestine to a region of Cameroon called Ambazonia.

"If you want to know what's happening in Bolivia next week, you can find out," says Elin, the Syracuse media professor.

The local Indymedia outpost was born in late 2000, in a meeting of the Cascadia Forest Alliance at Southeast 16th Avenue and Clinton Street. A few months later, portlandindymedia.org was up and running. Indymedia was set up to be responsive to a cross-section of Portland's progressive community, with a collective at its helm. But Deva and spArk got frustrated with the slow pace of consensus-based monthly meetings and starting in late 2001 sought complete autonomy for a reporters' committee they led. Others complained that Deva and spArk were engaged in a power grab, and after about a year of email flame wars, Deva, spArk and their supporters sparked a vote of the collective to dissolve itself.

Critics say this change came at the expense of its founding principles of inclusiveness and egalitarianism. "Deva and spArk have nearly complete control over everything PDX IMC does," wrote IMCer "Andy Smith" in an email message last October. "Deva and spArk run out anyone that disagrees with them through a barrage of insults and intimidation."

Stripped of structure, the Portland site has flourished. Deva, spArk and their allies meet every week at the Red & Black Cafe to talk shop. Herndon, who is part of the Seattle IMC, notes that the Portland site's central features are changed every day, whereas in Seattle that takes weeks. In the last month Portland had 9,000 posts, "which is one-third the entirety of the Seattle site over its three-year existence," Deva says.

However, Lockhart, the Portland co-founder, and others are concerned a second principle, openness, has also fallen by the wayside. The website is increasingly censored, and because it embraces a quasi-anarchist credo, there are no standards and no accountability. This means that members of the Indymedia who have the password--essentially Deva and spArk's inner circle--have great discretion over what viewers see onscreen.

Although there has always been censorship of messages posted by cops and right-wingers, dubbed "trolls," some current and former Indymedia activists say the Portland IMC is increasingly censoring progressives who are considered too moderate.

In my case, the people controlling the site placed four long series of posts bashing me, including two threats of violence (the second suggested "accidentally" breaking reporters' fingers), in the prized, central column of the site. However, at least four responses that opposed violence were removed and sent to a hidden "compost" file, where I later found them.

Removing posts for no good reason is a "total abuse" of the system, says Herndon, who was surprised to hear they left the threats in place. "What's unfortunate is that the Portland IMC is backing the position in this case that violence is appropriate."

Asked to explain, Deva denied any "systematic" effort to censor but conceded the group has to censor more due to the volume of posts on the site. Reviewing censorship decisions as a group, as Seattle does, "is a luxury we do not have," he said. He said some posts may have been removed unnecessarily but those with "less bile" were left up. Crotty, co-founder of PDX Indymedia, says the site appears to be violating the anti-censorship policy, which she she helped write and which remains posted on the site as its official policy. Says Crotty, "It pisses me off to know there may be people abusing the power, because that makes us no better than the corporate media."

"Corporate media = lies," says one IMC slogan, "Indymedia = truth."

But its current fundraising video, on sale for $6 to $15 (sliding scale), suggests that its grasp on truth is slipping.

Last Thursday night at Reed College, about 20 Indymedia folks attended an airing of the video, which focuses on protests on both Aug. 22, 2002 and March 20, 2003. The August segment includes clips of TV newscasters who provide a skewed view of events, downplaying the amount of pepper-spraying by police and characterizing protesters with undisguised disdain--with one calling their protest "loitering."

But in the March 20 footage, the IMC presents its own bit of manipulation: the Indymedia footage leads up to the moment just before the Steel Bridge clash. Then, rather than show the protesters assaulting cops, the video cuts to a close-in shot of a man whose identity is disguised with an American flag bandanna. He claims he and other protesters were peacefully marching in the street when the cops ran up, ripped their banners to shreds and started hitting them with batons. The footage then skips a few minutes forward to the cop backlash, with crowds streaming away as police reinforcements fire pepper spray and shove protesters with batons. Nowhere in the film is there a hint that two dozen protesters provided police with a pretext for retribution.

In Indymedia's early days, bike activist Ayleen Crotty pushed for a group dynamic that was upbeat and inclusive; now, she says, it has changed into something else.

Questions about IMC reporting undercut Indymedia's influence with older activists and sympathetic journalists alike.

"They play an important role," says Dave Mazza, editor of the Alliance, Portland's progressive monthly newspaper. But, he adds, "there are issues that need to be addressed in terms of the veracity of their projects."

Local freelance reporter and KBOO radio-show host Lisa Loving doesn't consider the site a viable news source. "I almost never go there," she says.

Portland Tribune reporter Jim Redden, who founded the now-defunct alternative newspaper PDXS, is one of the few mainstream reporters in Portland respected by spArk. But Redden, a former WW reporter, is bothered by the anonymous posts. He recounts a bafflingly libelous attack on him that appeared on Indymedia last year, one that left him without recourse, since he could not locate the site's anonymous operators.

Redden says that if their goal truly is social change, then "I just think it's a great opportunity being squandered."

But hey, what do we know? We're the corporate media.

MAINSTREAM VS. ONLINE
It's not just the lefties complaining that the mainstream U.S. media have abrogated their responsibilities. From Watergate editor Leonard Downie Jr. of the Washington Post to trade publications such as the Columbia Journalism Review, the reviews are bad: Investigative reporting is down, patriotic pandering is up. "The corporate media," says Pacific University professor Jeffrey Barlow, "is broken."

To see how coverage by the new online media, such as Portland.indymedia and Cursor.org, stacks up to traditional newspapers, we reviewed five stories relating to the war in Iraq. Were they covered?

  INDYMEDIA CURSOR.ORG OREGONIAN

1. Bush's erroneous nuke report

President Bush's State of the Union claim that Saddam Hussein tried to obtain nuclear weapons material was later revealed to be false, and based on poorly forged documents whose authenticity had been doubted by the CIA (The New Yorker, March 11, 2003). YES YES YES

2. Spying on the U.N.

To help with its lobbying of the United Nations, the U.S. used the National Security Agency to spy on foreign diplomats in New York City (The Observer-UK, March 2, 2003). YES YES YES

3. Uranium weapons plans

Despite studies after the first Gulf War that found depleted uranium dust to be long-lasting and extremely poisonous, and despite the fact that they are banned by the United Nations, the U.S. again used uranium-coated anti-tank shells in Iraq. (The Sunday Herald­UK, March 30, 2003) YES YES NO

4. Iraqi Geneva Convention Violations

U.S. officials sparked widespread media coverage by accusing Iraq of violating Geneva Convention rules relating to the treatment of prisoners of war, by publicizing photos of them (widespread TV, radio and print coverage). YES YES YES

5. U.S. Geneva Convention Violation No. 1

5. U.S. Geneva Convention Violation No. 1 For more than a year, the U.S. government has been repeatedly accused of violating the Geneva Convention with its treatment of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base (numerous sources). YES YES NO

5. U.S. Geneva Convention Violation No. 2

6. U.S. Geneva Convention Violation No. 2 Documents from the Defense Intelligence Agency indicate the U.S. government violated the Geneva Convention by preventing Iraq from obtaining water treatment and chemicals. The express intention was to degrade IraqÕs water supply, increasing the likelihood of disease and epidemic (The Progressive, September 2001). NO YES NO