Empowering The Truth

national | arts and media | opinion/analysis Thursday November 25, 2004 03:01 by Digitripitaka

Why we need to reclaim the corporate media

I took out the sandwiches from my lunchbox in the canteen at work the other day as the rest of my mates sat down beside me with their trays from the hot counter. You see I’ve been eating from my lunch box ever since Sodexho took over running the canteen, because I read an article saying that Sodexho took over the contracts for the all the canteens in the NHS over in England, and all the staff lost their NHS jobs and became lower paid Sodexho employees with fewer rights.

So you may ask why do I care about this, well in the words of one of my workmates, I’m a “loon who lives on a different planet”. He mean’s this in a friendly way, I’m not a zealot, I don’t bore them senseless with my views, in fact I just weave them into conversation only once in while when I think it’s relevant. You see I know that me eating my sandwiches won’t change a thing on its own, I know that boycotting one or two things here or there when its not part of a larger campaign, or just chatting to my workmates won’t do a thing, but it keeps me sane.

You see my workmate is right, I do live in a different world. Most people go home in the evening and watch the news or RTE or Sky, and read the paper on the bus in the morning. Another lot probably don’t even bother with the news, but maybe during the day they throw on Gerry Ryan or read some gossip sheet magazines, but regardless of that all of us are surrounded by the advertising, a powerful media in it own right.

I rarely watch or read the mainstream news anymore and when I do it’s with a very critical eye, and when I’m forced to listen to Gerry Ryan or Live Line, I generally just seethe at the inanity of it all. Much like you most likely, I get most of my news from weirdo little sites like this one. I watch documentaries about conditions in third world countries and globalisation, I peruse the politics/current affairs sections in Easons at my lunchbreak, and order even stranger books on the internet. Why do I do all this? Well over the course of life I noticed that several events I’ve been involved with or issues I had first hand experience with were completely misrepresented in the media. This got me thinking how much of everything else I read and see on TV is twisted and fabricated, well the answer I’ve found (like Noam Chomsky twenty years before me and countless other) is that pretty much everything is.

But my workmates don’t know that, when I say something about an issue it seems weird or out of place or incongruous with what they know to be true. When they do latch onto something, it’s seen as an aberration, “how could the government do that’, “you should report that garda”, and so on, with every new injustice coming as a shock, a surprise. Some of the others don’t care at all, they perceive themselves as part of those in power and see no injustice in putting down moaners or whiners. But none of them perceive any continuity, any connection between issues. They can’t see the connection between thousands of Indonesian palm oil workers dying of gramoxone poisoning so their shower gel can cost 5 cents less, or any of the other myriad economic and social links that bind this planet together.

You see, we spend our whole day in a raging torrent of input which defines normality, it defines the past and the future in terms of the present as one happy consumerist love-in, a line of progress stretching happily away in both directions. Occasionally our head rises above the waterline but the issue fades and we sink back down. Some of us cling to a rocky outcrop like this site and get a better lasting view of things, we see the cracks and that line of progress for what it is, a fiction masking the continual ruptures and changes of worldview that occur continually throughout history. We see the underbelly of society, the lies, the corruption, and more importantly that these are endemic and inherent in our happy little McWorld. We fill up on these ideas and dive back into the torrent of disinformation, where we are nutters, lunatics because we can no longer accept the status quo, the parameters of normality.

So how do we combat this all powerful brain bombardment? Well there are lots of answers I’m sure, one of them being this very site. But I don’t think it’s enough, nor is simply ranting at people or handing out newspapers on a corner, it’s all just pissing in the wind. We need to do more than just get real news and facts out there, we need to create the space in which those ideas can thrive and compete on an equal footing with the corporate media. We either need to be as powerful, as cool, as flashy and as all consuming, or we need to knock the corporate media back down to our own level.

I don’t know about you but I don’t have the cash to build a huge media empire with satellites and studios and broadcast rights. And don’t tell me the internet will change all that because already companies are moving in to restrict and control the channels of info that will be fed to TIVO-like internet set top boxes. That leaves us with one alternative, to hinder, impede or destroy the corporate media, so alternative, open and community based media has a fair playing field.

I think its time for Media Liberation, to Reclaim The Air. We need to engage in an active campaign of jamming, and disrupting the corporate media, of reclaiming the public arena. Oh yeh, and don’t tell me about free speech, corporations aren’t people, they have no rights. We all need to learn about transmitters and transponders, about tapping cable signals, we need to organise coordinated media blackouts and then keep it up. And most all we need to be creative so we’re not seen as destroyers, but creators, we need to hack signals and insert our own funny advertisements, we need to seamlessly cut into the News at Six and present satires on Bertie and show some real facts.

Okay its sounds impossible, like random pub talk, and maybe it is but we have to start thinking along these lines because it’s not enough anymore to just passionately tell the truth, we must also empower the truth so it drowns out the lies.