The
Emerging Samidzat
By John Pilger
29 September , 2004
Green
Left Weekly
In 1983, the principal media in the Western
world, which dominate much of the media in the rest of the world, were
owned by 50 corporations. In 2002, this had fallen to nine transnational
companies. Rampant deregulation has ended even a semblance of diversity.
In February this
year, Rupert Murdoch predicted that, within three years, there would
be just three global media corporations and his company would be one
of them. He may have exaggerated, but not by much. Consider the situation
in Australia, where Murdoch controls 70% of the capital city press,
including the only newspapers serving Adelaide and Brisbane. (In Adelaide,
he controls all the printing presses.)
On the Internet,
the leading 20 websites are now owned by the likes of Fox (Murdoch),
Disney, AOL Time Warner, Viacom and a clutch of other giants; just 14
companies attract 60% of all the time Americans spend online. The owners
of these vast enterprises make no secret of their global ambition: to
produce not informed, free-thinking citizens, but obedient customers
and to reinforce the rapacious ideology of neoliberalism.
Never, in my experience,
has free journalism been as vulnerable to subversion on a grand, often
unrecognisable scale. Giant public relations companies, employed by
the state and other vested interests, now account for much of the editorial
content of the media, however insidious their methods and indirect their
message. This is another kind of embedding, known in military
circles as information dominance, which in turn is part
of full spectrum dominance. The objective is the merging
of information control and the nominally free media.
How do we react
to this? My own view is that the immediate future lies with the emerging
samidzat, the word for the unofficial media during the late Soviet period.
Given the current technology, the potential is huge. On the worldwide
web, the best alternative websites are already read by an audience of
millions. The courageous reporting of a new breed of citizen reporters
from besieged Iraq has provided an antidote to the embedded
coverage of the official media. In the United States, independent newspapers
flourish alongside popular independent community-based radio stations,
such as Pacifica and Amy Goodman's Democracy Now.
In Australia, against
the odds, the samidzat is growing, and I would say its model is Green
Left Weekly (http://www.greenleft.org.au),
which is produced and published by volunteers and provides a wider coverage
of the other world a world that often does not exist
in the so-called mainstream than any newspaper with resources
of which GLW has not even a fraction.
Those of us who
report this other world actually the majority of
humanity know that true internationalism has returned and that
public opinion has been aroused in so many countries, perhaps as never
before. People have the right for their voices to be heard, and those
who provide the means deserve all our support.
[John Pilger's new
book, Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published in Australia in November by Random House.]