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On the death of a reporter...

category international | culture | non-anarchist press author Sunday October 29, 2006 01:46author by £ Report this post to the editors

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A reporter from the front line (confrontation with "Police" force) is wounded by a projectile, it just happens in this case, a bullet, and was soon dead. What can be written?

With the internet (blogs, social networking, newgroups, websites) more than a great deal. And we all know about how evil monster corporate news Media is.... sorry if that was a bit cynical.

Indymedia has been going through some much needed self-criticism at the time at which this event occurs. That introspection is to be at the very least partly lost now.

What can be written? If anyone dies at the hands of police, and I must include the military in that word, police, how is it more worthy of props if it is one of Ours or not?

And just how can we compare a journalist to an embedded mouthpiece, the latter being the going fare for "Profession Journalism"?

Us versus them, it is the same old M.O. There has never been a time when Free Press meant, 'free reporting of events as they are observed'. Even worse, in this case a video reporter - events become instantaneous to the motion picture video, even if digital, were image can be so readily doctored.

The reports will come in, laced with all idiosyncratic wit and the cynical political subterfuge no writer can avoid in our age of police. There are the truthful reports from the scene or the non-professional, citizen or not. There will be conjured lies from the same place, perhaps bent in favour of a political or/and party view. There will be the lies of Big Media where, also, shall be found truth, as in the expression from the early readership of the state publication, Pravda: just read between the lines. There will be the half assembled facts of the instinctive independent journalist who can just as easily sow contempt for the facts (particularly if, in this, also the age of independent reportage, that particular journalism is widely syndicated amongst independent media outlets) as for promoting the truth ("truth" now a campain in corporate mass media - interestingly a matter of _social_health_, such as with the ills of smoking cigarettes, as opposed to matters of other truth (whatever those could ever be!)).

So here is my own jilted slant... I expect your disagreement somewhere:

As a musician, I sharpened my teeth on the creation of what was called the Indies; independent record labels; the indie scene. This included, though was not exclusive to, recording companies, distribution networks, t-shirt sales, artist designers, stickers and zines, and low-budget promotion. All own, licenced, and operated by one or a handful of individuals acting according to the demands of musicians.

The Indies, as they came to be simply known, were, 'there for the little guy'; 'there to take on the big labels'. The problem, of course, is that they were businesses. As business, the did not fit class or social constraints (like poverty) but, rather, a niche, a market. The Indies would also be, a) the first to come out philosophically opposed to brands, while b), become the better Indie brand (to whom musicians, starving by now, would flock).

Indies became what I always stated they would (much to the contribution of my alienation from all of even the community music scene I must add - independent or otherwise music industry). Apologists for the music industry. Like how the aetheist become expert on god; the nihilist the professional philosopher; the cop the expert murderer. So it is that the Indies would get behind the iTunes of the Apple computer corporation to promote the 'superiour' brand and become apologists to the entire music industry. What did they think? That because they were on the side of mass distribution of content on the interent while the music industry big five (or however many it is now) conglomerates and corporations were ever foaming at the mouth over defining something so trivially benign as "Illegal Music" that meant that somehow they were righteously indignant to the cause of music itself? That because it is a corporation it is clueless as to the value of mass distribution on the internet simply because it is not immediately profitable? That because you are a corporate executive officer, you are un-informed in this time of high-tech spy planes and a globalization led, in part, by the complete deterioration of privacy?

I occasionally argue, in my notoriously shy manner, against my anarchist friends that being dogmatic is itself akin to becoming what it is you claim to fight against. You cannot revolt against the system by reforming it to your way or truth without eventually becoming the system. But how can you claim success in your endeavours if you simply label that, 'anarchy'? As though if it is a non-anarchist revolution (that is, one not approved of by the Kingdom of Anarchia) it is somehow doomed???

I will not even start on the whole subject of Revolutions to begin with, not here.

And so this is what is meant by the truth of conviction. If I write from what I experience, what I observe. If I report, for that matter, from what is happening to any people anywhere (whether or not otherwise reported independent or dependently by others). If we express. When we do this we enact anything we might presuppose to become of our globe (not that the globe is the only game in town, mind you). Thus, the act of writing at this moment is itself a matter for intellectual discourse and not any truth in our writing.

We might also consider this to mean that the greater threat is not the corruption of the literate world, but rather one that is two-fold. That my illiterate friends are in constant threat for their lives (weapons of mass destruction anyone?) and that threat is from the uncritical literate mass.

So what "independent" then. Apologist or not?

I see the mass media is beginning to report on the murdered Indymedia reporter. Fuck them to the hell that they have created. (Indymedia argues on the point of dialogue with the masses, btw.) This place where he now lies dead is the infamous general locale of great promoters of insurrgent tactics against the neocolonialist armies rearing its ugly head around the globe. If the mass news media really did its 'job', instead of embedding its Professional Journalists in helmut fashion and with military body guards, it would embed itself on the front line barricade of challenging the riot police, paramilitary, local police, government police lines. This they will not do? No. This they _cannot_ do. (Could you imagine corporate news reporters learning in real time from just such an Indymedia reporter on how to report news? What farce!)

And it is that last distinction for which I state that there is nothing to write about concerning the death of a reporter except to just keep writing. It is not courage. But in the vacuousness of words and human language, it might just report some tiny item.

thank you

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