By Jonathan Cook
My talk at
the International
Festival of Whistleblowing,
Dissent and Accountability
on May 8. Transcript below.
May 12, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - I wanted to use this opportunity to talk about my
experiences over the past two decades working with
new technology as an independent freelance
journalist, one who abandoned – or maybe more
accurately, was abandoned by – what we usually call
the “mainstream” media.
Looking back over that period, I have come to
appreciate that I was among the first generation of
journalists to break free of the corporate media –
in my case, the Guardian – and ride this wave of new
technology. In doing so, we liberated ourselves from
the narrow editorial restrictions such media imposes
on us as journalists and were still able to find an
audience, even if a diminished one.
More and more journalists are following a similar
path today – a few out of choice, and more out of
necessity as corporate media becomes increasingly
unprofitable. But as journalists seek to liberate
themselves from the strictures of the old corporate
media, that same corporate media is working very
hard to characterise the new technology as a threat
to media freedoms.
This self-serving argument should be treated with
a great deal of scepticism. I want to use my own
experiences to argue that quite the reverse is true.
And that the real danger is allowing the corporate
media to reassert its monopoly over narrating the
world to us.
‘Mainstream’ consensus
I left my job at the Guardian newspaper group in
2001. Had I tried to become an independent
journalist 10 years earlier than I did, it would
have been professional suicide. In fact, it would
have been a complete non-starter. I certainly would
not be here telling you what it was like to have
spent 20 years challenging the “mainstream” western
consensus on Israel-Palestine.
No Advertising - No Government Grants - This Is
Independent Media
Before the Noughties, without a platform provided
by a corporate media outlet, journalists had no way
to reach an audience, let alone create one. We were
entirely beholden to our editors, and they in turn
were dependent on billionaire owners – or in a few
cases like the BBC’s, a government – and on
advertisers.
When I arrived in Nazareth as a freelance
journalist, though one with continuing connections
to the Guardian, I quickly found myself faced with a
stark choice.
Newspapers would accept relatively superficial
articles from me, ones that accorded with a
decades-old, western, colonial mindset about
Israel-Palestine. Had I contributed such pieces for
long enough, I would probably have managed to
reassure one of the papers that I was an obliging
and safe pair of hands. Eventually, when a position
fell vacant, I might have landed myself a well-paid
correspondent’s job.
Instead I preferred to write authentically – for
myself, reporting what I observed on the ground,
rather than what was expected of me by my editors.
That meant antagonising and gradually burning
bridges with the western media.
Even in a digital era of new journalistic
possibilities, there were few places to publish. I
had to rely on a couple of what were then newly
emerging websites that were prepared to publish very
different narratives on Israel-Palestine from the
western corporate media’s.
Level playing field
The most prominent at the time, which became the
first proper home for my journalism, was Al-Ahram
Weekly, an English-language sister publication of
the famous Cairo daily newspaper. Few probably
remember or read Al-Ahram Weekly today, because it
was soon overshadowed by other websites. But at the
time it was a rare online refuge for dissident
voices, and included a regular column from the great
public intellectual Edward Said.
It is worth pausing to think about how foreign
correspondents operated in the pre-digital world.
They not only enjoyed a widely read, if tightly
controlled, platform in an establishment media
outlet, but they had behind them a vitally important
support structure.
Their newspaper provided an archive and library
service so that they could easily research
historical and newsworthy events in their region.
There were local staff who could help with locating
sources and offering translations. They had
photographers who contributed visuals to their
pieces. And they had satellite phones to file
breaking news from remote locations.
None of this came cheap. A freelance journalist
could never have afforded any of this kind of
support.
All that changed with the new technology, which
rapidly levelled the playing field. A Google search
soon became more comprehensive than even the best
newspaper library. Mobile phones made it easy to
track down and speak to people who were potential
sources for stories. Digital cameras, and then the
same mobile phones, meant it was possible to
visually record events without needing a
photographer alongside you. And email meant it was
easy to file copy from anywhere in the world, to
anywhere, virtually free.
Documentary evidence
The independent journalism I and others were
developing in the early Noughties was assisted by a
new kind of political activist who was using
similarly novel digital tools.
After I arrived in Nazareth, I had little use for
the traditional “access journalism” my corporate
colleagues chiefly relied on. Israeli politicians
and military generals dissembled to protect Israel’s
image. Far more interesting to me were the young
western activists who had begun embedding – before
that term got corrupted by the behaviour of
corporate journalists – in Palestinian communities.
Today we remember names like Rachel Corrie, Tom
Hurndall, Brian Avery, Vittorio Arrigoni and many
others for the fact that in the early Noughties they
were either killed or wounded by Israeli soldiers.
But they were part of a new movement of political
activists and citizen journalists – many of them
with the International Solidarity Movement – who
were offering a different kind of access.
They used digital cameras to record and protest
the Israeli army’s abuses and war crimes from up
close inside Palestinian communities – crimes that
had previously had gone unrecorded for western
audiences. They then sent their documentary evidence
and their eye-witness accounts to journalists by
email or published them on “alternative” websites.
For independent journalists like me, their work was
gold-dust. We could challenge Israel’s implausible
accounts with clear-cut evidence.
Sadly most corporate journalists paid little
attention to the work of these activists. In any
case, their role was quickly snuffed out. That was
partly because Israel learnt that shooting a few of
them served as a very effective deterrent, warning
others to keep away.
But it was also because as technology became
cheaper and more accessible – eventually ending up
in mobile phones that everyone was expected to have
– Palestinians could record their own suffering more
immediately and without mediation.
Israel’s dismissal of the early, grainy images of
the abuse of Palestinians by soldiers and settlers –
as “Pallywood” (Palestinian Hollywood) – became ever
less plausible, even to its own supporters. Soon
Palestinians were recording their mistreatment in
high definition and posting it directly to YouTube.
Unreliable allies
There was a parallel evolution in journalism. For
my first eight years in Nazareth, I struggled to
make any kind of living by publishing online.
Egyptian wages were far too low to support me in
Israel, and most alternative websites lacked the
budget to pay. For the first years I lived a spartan
life and dug into savings from my former, well-paid
job at the Guardian. During this period I also wrote
a series of books because it was so difficult to
find places to publish my news reporting.
It was in the late Noughties that Arab media in
English, led by Al-Jazeera, really took off, with
Arab states making the most of the new favourable
conditions provided by the internet. These outlets
flourished for a time by feeding the appetite among
sections of the western public for more critical
coverage of Israel-Palestine and of western foreign
policy more generally. At the same time, Arab states
exploited the revelations provided by dissident
journalists to gain more leverage in Washington
policymaking circles.
My time with Al-Ahram came to an abrupt end after
a few years, as the paper grew less keen on running
hard-hitting pieces that showed Israel as an
apartheid state or that explained the nature of its
settler colonial ideology. Rumours reached me that
the Americans were leaning on the Egyptian
government and its media to tone down the bad news
about Israel.
It would be the first of several exits I had to
make from these English-language Arab media outlets.
As their western readership and visibility grew,
they invariably attracted hostile attention from
western governments and sooner or later capitulated.
They were never more than fickle, unreliable allies
to western dissidents.
Editors as sheepdogs
Again, I would have been forced to abandon
journalism had it not been for another technological
innovation – the rise of social media. Facebook and
Twitter soon rivalled the corporate media as
platforms for news dissemination.
For the first time, it was possible for
journalists to grow their own audiences
independently of an outlet. In a few cases, that
dramatically changed the power relations in favour
of those journalists. Glenn Greenwald is probably
the most prominent example of this trend. He was
chased after first by the Guardian and then by the
billionaire Pierre Omidyar, to set up the Intercept.
Now he’s on his own, using the editorially hands-off
online platform Substack.
In a news environment driven chiefly by shares,
journalists with their own large and loyal
followings were initially prized.
But they were also an implicit threat. The role
of corporate media is to serve as a figurative
sheep-dog, herding journalists each day into an
ideological pen – the publication they write for.
There are minor differences of opinion and emphasis
between conservative publications and liberal ones,
but they all ultimately serve the same corporate,
business-friendly, colonial, war-mongering agenda.
It is the publication’s job, not the
journalists’, to shape the values and worldview of
its readers, over time limiting the range of
possible thoughts they are likely to entertain.
Readers to the rescue
In the new environment of social media, that
began to change. Not only have some journalists
become more influential than the papers they write
for, but others have abandoned the employee-servant
model completely. They have reached the conclusion
that they no longer need a corporate outlet to
secure an audience. They can publish themselves,
build their own readership, and generate their own
income – freeing themselves from corporate
servitude.
In the last few years, this is a path I have
pursued myself – becoming mostly reader-financed.
For most of us, it is a precarious option. But it is
liberating too – in a way that no previous
generation of journalists could ever have imagined
possible.
We are subject to no editorial oversight or
control, apart from our own self-imposed sense of
what is right and fair, or in some cases what we
think our readers are ready to hear. We have no
bosses or advertisers to please or appease. Our
owner are the readers. And with an owner that
diverse and diffuse, we have been freed of the
tyranny of billionaires and corporations.
This new model of journalism is revolutionary. It
is genuinely pluralistic media. It allows a much
wider spectrum of thought to reach the mainstream
than ever before. And perhaps even more importantly,
it allows independent journalists to examine,
critique and expose the corporate media in real
time, showing how little pluralism they allow and
how often they resort to blatant falsehood and
propaganda techniques.
The fact that a few journalists and activists can
so convincingly and easily tear apart the coverage
of corporate media outlets reveals how little
relationship that coverage often bears to reality.
Reporters for hire
Corporate media took none of this lying down, of
course, even if it was slow to properly gauge the
dangers.
Dissident journalists are a problem not only
because they have broken free of the controls of the
billionaire class and are often doing a better job
of building audiences than their corporate
counterparts. Worse, dissident journalists are also
educating readers so that they are better equipped
to understand what corporate journalism is: that it
is ideological prostitution. It is reporting and
commentary for hire, by an establishment class.
The backlash from the corporate media to this
threat was not long coming. Criticism – narratively
managed by corporate outlets – has sought to
character-assassinate dissident journalists and
browbeat the social media platforms that host them.
Reality has been inverted. Too often it is the
critical thinking of dissident journalists that is
maligned as “fake news”, and it is the genuine
pluralism social media corporations have
inadvertently allowed that is repudiated as the
erosion of democratic values.
Social media platforms have put up only the most
feeble resistance to the traditional corporate
media-led campaign demanding they crack down on the
dissidents they host. They are, after all, media
corporations too, and have little interest in
promoting free speech, critical thinking or
pluralism.
Manipulated algorithms
What resistance they did muster, for a short
time, largely reflected the fact that their early
business model was to replace top-down traditional
media with a new bottom-up media that was
essentially led by readers. But as social media has
gradually been merged into the traditional media
establishment, it has preferred to join in with the
censorship and to marginalise dissident journalists.
Some of this is done out in the open, with the
banning of individuals or alternative sites. But
more often it is done covertly, through the
manipulation of algorithms making dissident
journalists all but impossible to find. We have seen
our page views and shares plummet over the past two
years, as we lose the online battle against the
same, supposedly “authoritative sources” – the
establishment media – we have been exposing as
fraudsters.
The perverse, self-serving discourse from
establishment media about new media is currently
hard to miss in the relentless attacks on Substack.
This open platform hosts journalists and writers who
wish to build their own audiences and fund
themselves from reader donations. Substack is the
logical conclusion of a path I and other have been
on for two decades. It not only gets rid of the
media’s sheepdog-editors, it dispenses with the
ideological pens into which journalists are supposed
to be herded.
Sordid history
James Ball, whose sordid history includes acting
as the Guardian’s hatchet man on Wikileaks founder
Julian Assange, was a predictable choice as the
Guardian Group tried this month to discredit
Substack. Here is Ball ridiculously
fretting about how greater freedom for
journalists might damage western society by stoking
so-called “culture wars”:
Concerns are emerging about what Substack is
now, exactly. Is it a platform for hosting
newsletters and helping people discover them? Or
is it a new type of publication, one that relies
on stoking the culture wars to help divisive
writers build devoted followings? …
Being on Substack has for some become a tacit
sign of being a partisan in the culture wars,
not least because it’s a lot easier to build a
devoted and paying following by stressing that
you’re giving readers something the mainstream
won’t.
Ball is the kind of second-rate stenographer who
would have had no journalistic career at all were he
not a hired gun for a corporate publication like the
Guardian. Buried in his piece is the real reason for
his – and the Guardian’s – concern about Substack:
Such is Substack’s recent notoriety that
people are now worrying that it might be the
latest thing that might kill traditional media.
Notice the heavy-lifting that word “people” is
doing in the quoted sentence. Not you or I. “People”
refers to James Ball and the Guardian.
Severe price
But the gravest danger to media freedom lies
beyond any supposed “culture wars”. As the battle
for narrative control intensifies, there is much
more at stake than name-calling and even skewed
algorithms.
In a sign of how far the political and media
establishment are willing to go to stop dissident
journalism – a journalism that seeks to expose
corrupt power and hold it to account – they have
been making examples of the most significant
journalists of the new era by prosecuting them.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been out of
sight for a decade – first as a political asylum
seeker, then as an inmate of a British prison –
subjected to endlessly shifting pretexts for his
incarceration. First, it was a rape investigation
that no one wanted to pursue. Then, it was for a
minor bail infraction. And more recently – as the
other pretexts have passed their sellby date – it
has been for exposing US war crimes in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Assange could languish in jail for
years to come.
Former UK ambassador Craig Murray, a chronicler
through his blog of the legal abuses Assange has
suffered, has faced his own retribution from the
establishment. He has been prosecuted and found
guilty in a patently nonsensical “jigsaw
identification” case relating to the Alex Salmond
trial.
My talk has been recorded too early to know the
outcome of Murray’s sentence hearing, which was due
to take place the day before this festival [and was
later postponed to Tuesday May 11]. But the
treatment of Assange and Murray has sent a clear
message to any journalist inspired by their courage
and their commitment to hold establishment power to
account: “You will pay a severe price. You will lose
years of your life and mountains of money fighting
to defend yourself. And ultimately we can and will
lock you away.”
Peek behind the curtain
The west’s elites will not give up the corrupt
institutions that uphold their power without a
fight. We would be foolish to think otherwise. But
new technology has offered us new tools in our
struggle and it has redrawn the battleground in ways
that no one could have predicted even a decade ago.
The establishment are being forced into a game of
whack-a-mole with us. Each time they bully or
dismantle a platform we use, another one – like
Substack – springs up to replace it. That is because
there will always be journalists determined to find
a way to peek behind the curtain to tell us what
they found there. And there will always be audiences
who want to learn what is behind the curtain. Supply
and demand are on our side.
The constant acts of intimidation and violence by
political and media elites to crush media pluralism
in the name of “democratic values” will serve only
to further expose the hypocrisy and bad faith of the
corporate media and its hired hands.
We must keep struggling because the struggle
itself is a form of victory.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha
Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books
include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”
(Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s
Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His
website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
If you appreciate his articles,
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