What's the Matter With Indymedia?

The Independent Media Center is an audacious, international experiment in media production. Since it first launched during the famed Seattle anti-WTO protests in November 1999, it has spread to 45 countries and 150 autonomous sites. There's a great hunger out there for a "people's media," and Indymedia has provided both resources and a working norm that allows small local groups to start up media projects where once there were none. But after six years, it's hard to run on promise. There's a real record of accomplishments and failures to learn from -- and Indymedia (TM) is just one network in a changing media landscape.

Jennifer Whitney has written an interesting piece for one of my favorite magazines, the Bay Area-produced LiP:

"The open publishing newswire, once filled with breaking stories and photographic evidence refuting government lies, now contains more spam than an old email account. On many sites, it's difficult to find original reporting among the right-wing diatribes and rants about chemtrails poisoning the atmosphere. Coverage of local protests often consists of little more than a few blurry photos of cops doing nothing in particular, without a single line of text explaining the context, the issues, or the goals of the protest. And forget about analysis or investigative reporting. They tend to be as rare on Indymedia as they are on Fox News...

"Each time I try and find news among the Indymedia drivel, I ask myself the same question: What happens when--in our attempts not to hate the media but to be it--we end up hating the media we've become?

"I know I'm not alone in my frustration with IMCs. 'I haven't looked at Indymedia in over a year,' says the editor of a nationally distributed radical magazine. "Indymedia? It's completely irrelevant," a talented documentary filmmaker tells me. 'I let the IMC use my photos but I don't ever read it,' says a freelance photojournalist. More and more, independent media makers (even those who occasionally publish on or are affiliated with an IMC) don't even bother looking for news on Indymedia. And for good reason: Indymedia news 'coverage' is often lifted from corporate media websites, with occasional editorial remarks added. Some IMC sites limit this type of reporting to a specific section, and there it can lead to informative discussion and criticism. But most seem to rely on it to fill column space in the newswire. This isn't making media, it's cutting and pasting--relying on so-called experts and professionals to do what you are, evidently, too lazy or busy to do yourself. The few original articles are frequently riddled with unsubstantiated claims, rumors, dubious anonymous sources, bad writing, and/or plagiarism. Rarely is anything edited--and I don't mean by the collective that runs the site. Users themselves aren't editing their own work, but instead are posting 18 blurry, almost identically bad photographs, or thesis-length uninformed opinion pieces that weren't even spell checked. Verified facts are an endangered species on Indymedia, and arguments in support of fact-checking are often met with cries of 'Censorship!' To make matters worse, Indymedia articles are usually posted anonymously (and therefore unaccountably), with no way to offer feedback other than the flame-ridden fray of the comments section. If the goal of Indymedia is, as its mission statement says, 'the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth,' we are clearly falling short."

Read Jennifer Whitney's What's the Matter with Indymedia

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As perhaps the most developed non-corporate information web currently in existence, the future and fate of Indymedia is important to even those who don't identify with it. Red Flags will continue to post thoughtful analysis of the network and hopefully encourage debate among both Indymedia volunteers and radical media-makers in general about how we can all rise to the occasion.

In other news: Venezuela has launched Telesur, a new broadcast network for Latin America. According to its director, Telesur "was born out of the need to give voice to Latin Americans confronted by an accumulation of thoughts and images transmitted by commercial media and out of the urgency to see ourselves through our own eyes and to discover our own solutions to our problems."

Comments

[Urbano Jalepeño]

The "problem" is self-evident: Indymedia tries to use anarchistic principles to accomplish real world tasks. Information and analysis requires parsing and without an editorial function, Indymedia sites are a pack of noise and conspiracy theories.

Independent media, without the logo... meaning radical left media is growing and doing well. Jennifer Whitney basically says, "here's a fever, there's a sore throat, and some sniffles." But she can't say what the virus is. Anti-authoritarianism is incoherent. Projects which adopt those principles unadultered tend to be self-limiting, self-contained, and self-obsessed. They value their process more than what they are supposed to be doing and their "process" ends up being as limiting as they think it is liberating.

I wish Indymedia well, particularly in the locals where people are actually producing work. It's been tremendously valuable in mass mobilizations. But as a source of information, I can't imagine using it beyond flash points.

[red hot]

The advocates of the anti-authoritarian philosophy can be counted on to avoid noting how their philosophy develops in the real world. They will continue to advocate principles that are unworkable at best and downright self-defeating at worst.

Whitney has made quite a name for herself in the alterworld of the anti-globalization movement (aka the Global Justice Movement) with her excellent reporting and work on the We Are Everywhere anthology.

When I read that book, I couldn't help but notice how GOOD it looked, and how gleefully INCOHERENT its ideas were. As if community gardening was more than what it is. The partisans of those ideas try to bunch a thousand things together and then get confused at their own creation.

Indymedia is a great idea and the network of nodes is important and useful to the extent that it outgrowns the scene that birthed it. To do that, people have to just come clean about what the problem is. I don't see that happening.

So people will continue to form new projects no doubt inspired by the "be the media" mantra, but I have trouble imagining real writers and media makers spending hours in consensus meetings and dodging all the scenester crapola from the vegetarian mafia. Why bother?

Good article, it's just not finished yet. There's a lot more to add and I wonder if the Jennifer Whitneys of the world will every write the whole thing.