There was a time, not so long ago, when the world of journalism created epic figures and instilled them in the public consciousness: Hemingway and Gellhorn documenting the fight against fascism in Spain; Edward R. Murrow taking to the airwaves to speak out against McCarthyism and the communist witch hunt as it spread across the United States during the 1950s; Woodward and Bernstein blowing the roof off “Watergate”, taking down a president in the process; Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo tours of American culture and the campaign trail seen through a haze of uppers, downers, screamers and laughers. Rather than just reporting the events of the day, these larger than life icons of the medium helped us to understand them, and when necessary, to question the truth behind the headline.
These men and women weren't simply the chroniclers of their times, they were avatars for those at home. This was journalism as protest, journalism as a weapon against tyranny, journalism as a light to shine on corruption, and in Thompson’s case, journalism as psychedelic experience. Above all, it was journalism as a means of conversation.
Sadly things are very different now. Those voices are ghosts of the past, replaced with shrill, dishonest mouthpieces. Mainstream media in the west has abandoned the conversation in favor of the slogan. While it is true that corporations have long owned the news media, there was a time when they did not so deeply and blatantly control how the story gets told. It should come as no surprise, then, that in the Occupy movement’s fight against the same corporate overmind that controls the old media, these propagandists are not “on side” with the cause. You might as well expect a dog to bite the hand that feeds it.
In the aftermath of 9/11, Edward R. Murrow’s warning that we must not confuse dissent with disloyalty came to a morbid fruition. To ask questions about why the attacks happened, or to question who or what was the ultimate root cause became an act of betrayal. To even suggest that decades of imperialist policies, passed from Britain and France to The United States, may have had some part to play in the horror was likely to get you a swift kick in the balls, or worse. As the west marched to war, moving from the hunt for Bin Laden in Afghanistan to the hunt for WMDs in Iraq, we had no Murrow questioning the motivations and the methods of the Bush Presidency. What few voices there were in the media asking the questions were ridiculed, admonished, or snuffed out entirely, shouted down by the parrots and the patriots.
Like many a big lie, the truth eventually came to light. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or anything more than a paper thin justification for invasion. The war on terror, like Oceania’s “perpetual war” in George Orwell’s 1984 was never intended to be won, merely to be fought. The truth came too late. The dissenters, their questions silenced with talk of treason and support for dictators, were unable to halt the slogan from killing the conversation. Ironically enough, this stifling of dissent pushed those who wanted to have the conversation, who dared to ask the questions, toward the same tool that now drives perhaps the largest conversation to ever take place.
The internet is where the great barking dog of corporate owned, ideologically aligned media banished those who wanted to have a true dialogue, to ask the important questions. Once they all got there, it was only a matter of time before they started talking to each other, and realized many felt the same way: that something was very wrong with just about everything. These conversations spread from the message boards, the twitter feeds, the facebook walls and the blogosphere to the streets of Tunisia and Egypt, to the squares of Spain and Greece, to the student unions of Chile. When the old media locked the people out of the discourse, choosing to present the news as something to be processed, packaged and consumed for profit rather than absorbed for knowledge, they helped to create a new media with new journalists and a renewed sense that the questions must be asked. Always. Now, this new media is quickly making them irrelevant.
The contradictory, near schizophrenic way these dinosaur news outlets have reacted to what has quickly turned into a year of revolution, uprising, and occupation belies just how deep their ties to the corporate brand go. Revolts against regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Libya have been lauded and praised, stuffed to bursting with the buzzwords of capitalism. American media trumpeted “Freedom” and “Democracy” and “Western Values” when uprisings target clear enemies abroad, be they actual figureheads or simply unsavory ideas.
However when the people began rising up in America, taking to the streets in New York, Chicago, Oakland and countless other cities to rage against the methodical, amoral hijacking of their democratic process, the rhetoric changed. The cheers turned to jeers. The bluster and the bravado shown for brave revolutionaries abroad changed to bile and venom spewed for lazy, unemployed drug users, hippies, and communists here at home.
The North American movements, in particular, are most often faced with a corporate media whose sole interest is to marginalize them to the point where no one will take them seriously. The questions have been asked without their approval. This mass awakening of the underclasses had gone viral while Beck and O’Reilly were trying to work out what exactly that smiley-faced mask was all about. The old media works so hard to mock and discredit the occupiers because they question the golden calf the old media worships under, and what’s worse, this new media the activists have created has revealed that many arms of the old guard have sold their profession down the river. They took what was once a calling and turned it into a racket, and now they are being forced to look at themselves in the mirror.
Occupiers across the globe must come to the realization that it is pointless to hope and beg for sympathy and a fair shake from these bought and sold news outlets or the corporate mascots they put on the air day in and day out. They will always try to belittle, discredit, and spit on you from a great height. They will do whatever is necessary to warp the perception of their audience. They will take the words or the actions of one mad man in your open societies and prescribe them to all of you, because that is what they are paid to do. You are calling to rights their corporate feeding trough. Having tossed their ethics and integrity aside over the last ten or so years, all they can do is fight, brutal and dirty, to keep the corporate mother’s milk flowing. They hate you for having integrity. They hate you for having ethics. They hate you for daring to question the system that they allowed to devour them. They hate you for resurrecting the conversation in the face of their sloganeering.
The truth is you don’t need them.
Not their approval, or their respect, or their airtime. The old media scoffed at your ideas and ignored you, and as a result you created a new one, and its circulation is unparalleled. The new writers, and the seasoned journalists pushed to the fringes for refusing to give up their voice, now speak to millions with each click of a mouse. The social networks, the blogs, the twitter feeds and the YouTube videos are your medium. These are the tools that brought a million people on to the streets all across the world on October 15th, and each day thousands of new users find your articles and editorials. Some will agree with you, and some will not, but all will be allowed to join the discussion.
Simon & Garfunkel’s classic The Sound of Silence tells us “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls, and tenement halls”. The walls have been digitized, and the virtual halls are filled with millions of tenants, eager for knowledge, for perspective and most importantly, for the conversation to continue.
