In his "Journalist's Complaint", Eric Martin aches about the
victimization of indy journalists by those with a dogmatic faith
in an impossible "objectivity." But at present the problems for
self-publishing independent media - with credibility, with audience,
and with resources - are much more basic.

In his "Journalist's Complaint", Eric Martin aches about the
victimization of indy journalists by those with a dogmatic faith
in an impossible "objectivity." But at present the problems for
self-publishing independent media - with credibility, with audience,
and with resources - are much more basic than this.

I want to start by setting philosophical hand-wringing
aside. Admitting that there is a lot to be said about the issue of
"objectivity" in journalism - what it means, whether it's possible,
whether it's desirable, and so on - let's skip all that for now
and talk about something simpler.

Things that never happened.

To take a pertinent example: a nonexistent police raid on the
offices of CMAQ in Quebec City during the Summit of the Americas.
What makes this fictitious raid interesting is the fact that it was
reported to have happened on the CMAQ web site itself. Same
goes for unfounded rumours of deaths at the Quebec City protests.

I was in Quebec City during the Summit of the Americas. I was under the
impression that the story of the police raid was true until
I came to work at Alternatives, an organization in Montreal that
played a key role in organizing CMAQ during the Summit.

There are really no deep issues to be confronted here. The police did
not invade the CMAQ office. A story on CMAQ said that they did. You
don't have to be a "scientist of information" to see how this is a problem.

How big of a problem it is remains to be seen. The experiment of
IndyMedia has only been running for a short time, and there have been
few resources available to check facts, which in any case is not part
of the free-for-all IndyMedia model. In any case, a scarcity of
resources is one of the things that makes the self-publishing model so
appealing to the movement against corporate globalization. It doesn't
cost much to run a web site, and nobody has very much extra to spend.
Meanwhile a spirited crew of independent do what they can to get the
news - mainly, at this point, news about protests - out to the world.

Don't get me wrong. I know that IndyMedia doesn't have a monopoly on
inaccuracy. Corporate media get a lot of things profoundly wrong. To
pick another pertinent recent example, I watched a CNN television
correspondent in Genoa chatter for a lengthy broadcast about how Black
Bloc protestors weren't even there to protest against the G8 - and
that they probably didn't even know what it was. Just as importantly,
corporate media often fail to speak of many important issues at all,
very possibly for some of the reasons described by Eric Martin in his
article.

But IndyMedia's ability to speak back to those media depends on its
maintaining the credibility of its own information. That doesn't mean
falling into the trap of "experts say," or even maintaining a strict
editorial policy. Still, it bears thought, since in the wide-open
self-publishing system, there is a danger of inaccuracies bursting
out and spreading like wildfire. With one such incident around
something really significant, the big story could become the troubles of
IndyMedia system itself.

All of this also depends on whether anyone but committed activists and
fellow-travelers care about what IndyMedia does. At the moment,
it's not clear. Perhaps this is a satisfactory mission for IndyMedia:
as a news exchange for the activist community, with built-in
damage control because of the lack of direct impact its reports have
in the wider community.

And perhaps, as the message gets out, a better-funded and more widely
read alternative press will arise, something like the vibrant
turn-of-the century labour press as described in this passage from
Noam Chomsky's book Year 501.

"At the turn of the century," Jon Bekken writes, "the U.S. labor
movement published hundreds of newspapers," ranging from local and
regional to national weeklies and monthlies. These were "an integral
part of working class communities, not only reporting the news of
the day or week, but offering a venue where readers could debate
political, economic and cultural issues." Some were "as large, and
in many ways as professional, as many of the capitalist newspapers
they co-existed with." "Like the labor movement itself, this press
spanned the range from a fairly narrow focus on workplace conditions
to advocacy of social revolution." The socialist press alone had a
circulation of over 2 million before World War I; its leading journal,
the weekly Appeal To Reason, reached over 760,000 subscribers. Workers
also "built a rich array of ethnic, community, workplace and political
organizations," all part of "vibrant working class cultures" that extended
to every domain and retained their vitality until World War II despite
harsh government repression, particularly under the Wilson
Administration. Repression aside, the labor press ultimately succumbed
to the natural effects of the concentration of wealth: advertisers
kept to capitalist competitors that could produce below cost, and
other market factors took their toll, as happened to the mass working
class press in England as late as the 1960s.

Perhaps - just perhaps - media on the Internet offers a chance
to revive the possibilities of this kind of culture in a new,
global context. To some extent, it already has. But the place of
IndyMedia in the scheme depends on the vision of its architects.

We need to talk.