On Saturday February 28th, I attended The Real Media Gathering in Manchester. The aim of the conference is “to challenge mass media distortion and support public interest journalism.” The gathering particularly wants to focus on “disproportionately negative, exaggerated or misleading coverage of issues like migration, crime, Scottish independence and poverty.”
The day began with an opening plenary session featuring four speakers; Kam Sandhu, Donnachaudh McCarthy, Samantha Asumadu, Des Freedman and Nafeez Ahmed. All of them explained why a different approach to media and journalism is needed; the media in the UK is owned by “five right wing billionaires” as Donnaclaudh reports. Each speaker explained how they had found themselves supporting and being a part of a campaign for a different independent media that is funded by civilians and advocates a more democratic approach than that of the so called mainstream press.
Following this introductory session were several workshops running concurrently and a chance to network with other organisations and individuals. I attended the Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model of the Mass Media, which was run by Milan Rai from Peace News. We spent the workshop looking at articles from the last week about Jihadi John; we discussed how quotes of the victims of the families affected by Jihadi John were reported and how this fed into Chomsky’s theories on Mass Media. For instance, most of the mentions by families of victims appeared in the ultimate or penultimate paragraph of the article, this position in the article risks being cut by the sub-editor and shows that the editorial policy of the paper places these quotes as low in importance. I feel that if we had more time, we may have started talking about how to subvert the ideas of what the mainstream press deems important, unfortunately time marched on and the hour was up very quickly.
I decided to grab some lunch in the new library building across the street. As usual at conferences, this meant I had some really interesting conversations with other delegates. Two of the people I chatted to are from Impress, a new organisation who are setting up an independent press regulator that will be affordable to independent press, ensuring that the independent press is monitored and fact checked.
After returning from lunch I attended a talk on conspiracy theories and how to avoid them led by political cartoonist Polyp. The talk was centred on practical advice about how to avoid conspiracy theorists piggybacking on legitimate campaigns to forward their conspiracies. Polyp was keen to stress that he didn’t want to spend time in the talk discussing how various conspiracies might be real, but rather how to prevent giving ‘air time’ to people who might have conspiracies for which there is little evidence. The talk was interesting, and of course there were a couple of attendees who wanted to run their conspiracy theories past Polyp! Unfortunately the hour again flew by so there wasn’t time to consider the flip side of the argument (which I would have been interested to hear) on what to do if you have evidence to back up an investigation, but cannot get your idea into the mainstream press who may accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist. I wouldn’t be surprised if other workshops were discussing this issue however.
Finally, everyone congregated in the main hall to listen to the closing plenary. The speakers for this event were Tom Barlow, Jamie Kelsey-Fry, Natasha Booijawon and Angela Haggerty. I really enjoyed these closing words as all speakers focused on how to make the alternative or independent press into the main-stream press- how to overturn what people consider to be the mass-media and get independent journalism that concerns issues that are of genuine importance to the population out there to be heard. All of the speakers were inspiring, but I was particularly interested to hear Angela Haggerty editor for Common Space in Scotland. Her news about the rise of independent media in Scotland was invigorating and hopeful. She mentioned several accounts where crowd funding has been used to great effect. For instance, the Sunday Herald was the only mainstream Scottish paper to back the Yes campaign on the run-up to the Scottish referendum. They ran a crowd-funding campaign to raise money for a daily publication and more than exceeded their limit within 24 hours.
I left the conference for the pub feeling buoyed up by the experience of meeting like-minded people and organisations who are all working towards a fair, legitimate, professional and accountable press of the future. Here’s to Real Media and the future of a people-led press.
The day began with an opening plenary session featuring four speakers; Kam Sandhu, Donnachaudh McCarthy, Samantha Asumadu, Des Freedman and Nafeez Ahmed. All of them explained why a different approach to media and journalism is needed; the media in the UK is owned by “five right wing billionaires” as Donnaclaudh reports. Each speaker explained how they had found themselves supporting and being a part of a campaign for a different independent media that is funded by civilians and advocates a more democratic approach than that of the so called mainstream press.
Following this introductory session were several workshops running concurrently and a chance to network with other organisations and individuals. I attended the Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model of the Mass Media, which was run by Milan Rai from Peace News. We spent the workshop looking at articles from the last week about Jihadi John; we discussed how quotes of the victims of the families affected by Jihadi John were reported and how this fed into Chomsky’s theories on Mass Media. For instance, most of the mentions by families of victims appeared in the ultimate or penultimate paragraph of the article, this position in the article risks being cut by the sub-editor and shows that the editorial policy of the paper places these quotes as low in importance. I feel that if we had more time, we may have started talking about how to subvert the ideas of what the mainstream press deems important, unfortunately time marched on and the hour was up very quickly.
I decided to grab some lunch in the new library building across the street. As usual at conferences, this meant I had some really interesting conversations with other delegates. Two of the people I chatted to are from Impress, a new organisation who are setting up an independent press regulator that will be affordable to independent press, ensuring that the independent press is monitored and fact checked.
After returning from lunch I attended a talk on conspiracy theories and how to avoid them led by political cartoonist Polyp. The talk was centred on practical advice about how to avoid conspiracy theorists piggybacking on legitimate campaigns to forward their conspiracies. Polyp was keen to stress that he didn’t want to spend time in the talk discussing how various conspiracies might be real, but rather how to prevent giving ‘air time’ to people who might have conspiracies for which there is little evidence. The talk was interesting, and of course there were a couple of attendees who wanted to run their conspiracy theories past Polyp! Unfortunately the hour again flew by so there wasn’t time to consider the flip side of the argument (which I would have been interested to hear) on what to do if you have evidence to back up an investigation, but cannot get your idea into the mainstream press who may accuse you of being a conspiracy theorist. I wouldn’t be surprised if other workshops were discussing this issue however.
Finally, everyone congregated in the main hall to listen to the closing plenary. The speakers for this event were Tom Barlow, Jamie Kelsey-Fry, Natasha Booijawon and Angela Haggerty. I really enjoyed these closing words as all speakers focused on how to make the alternative or independent press into the main-stream press- how to overturn what people consider to be the mass-media and get independent journalism that concerns issues that are of genuine importance to the population out there to be heard. All of the speakers were inspiring, but I was particularly interested to hear Angela Haggerty editor for Common Space in Scotland. Her news about the rise of independent media in Scotland was invigorating and hopeful. She mentioned several accounts where crowd funding has been used to great effect. For instance, the Sunday Herald was the only mainstream Scottish paper to back the Yes campaign on the run-up to the Scottish referendum. They ran a crowd-funding campaign to raise money for a daily publication and more than exceeded their limit within 24 hours.
I left the conference for the pub feeling buoyed up by the experience of meeting like-minded people and organisations who are all working towards a fair, legitimate, professional and accountable press of the future. Here’s to Real Media and the future of a people-led press.