William Cobbett – dead radical, dead relevant

People’s budgets – our cash, why not our call?

People’s budgets or the same-old unaccountable ones?

 

 

 

The basic message of Fraudcast News is pretty simple, you sort of can’t miss it in the subtitle – How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies.

Working from back to front – the bogusness of our democracies is that ordinary citizens get nothing like the influence implied by the word “democracy” – which the Ancient Greeks defined as government by the people.

The UK  budget process is a case in point, consisting of rounds of closed-door horse trading between government departments and ministers. The latest City-loving Chancellor then waves about a battered red briefcase for the media before delivering some crowd-pleasing stunts at the Dispatch Box to hide the fact that most ordinary people are getting stiffed while status quo money holders carry on swimmingly. Gross over-simplification, of course, but it covers the last 30 years of British government relatively well, save for pre-election sweetener budgets and some of Gordon Brown’s giveaways.

The problem is, ordinary people get not a look in on what is the most important function of elected governments. The same problem occurs at lower tiers of government and let’s not even talk about the European Union.

It doesn’t have to be this way, which is why I’m excited to be going along to report on a People’s Budget event in Kingston-upon-Thames on October 8.

This clip explains why such an approach can transform local governance, improving its accountability, transparency and the fairness of its revenue raising and spending.

So rather than “bogus” democracy – we get something more like real democracy.

And bad journalism? It’s all journalism that ignores the bogusness of our current governance systems, at every level, which is pretty much all mainstream journalism.

After that build up, I hope it’s a good night.

What role for government in changing our behaviour?

Very little, I say, as I explained in a video recorded for a GlobalNet21 debate held in London on Tuesday, July 31.

Not least of the problems is the gathering, multiple crises in government legitimacy, at every level from the local to global.

There was an interesting array of opinions expressed on the night, judging from the visionOntv smartphone interviews posted afterwards. You can view them all via this link.

My contribution was purely by pre-recorded video interview, having left England for my usual home in SW France the day before.

This GlobalNet21 blog post gives more details on the evening’s discussions.

No weddings, no funerals – phone hacking victims lay out case for media reform

Actor Hugh Grant tells a public rally for media reform how press problems go way beyond Murdoch. Photo by Patrick Chalmers

The crimes and misdemeanours of large sections of the British media were aired by their various victims during a public rally for Media Reform at Westminster Central Hall in central London on Thursday evening. The question on people’s lips was what will be their punishment and whether the ongoing Leveson Inquiry will be able to bring meaningful reforms either to British journalism or the political establishment it pretends to watch over.

Marc Barto and I elbowed our way through the crowds to land a series of video interviews with some of them, though Hugh Grant proved adept at dodging our efforts to engage him. No matter with the likes of former Crimewatch presenter Jacqui Hames and others on hand to give first-hand accounts of their thorough maulings by the media.

Rounding off the evening, Labour MP Tom Watson explained how grassroots pressure for reform will be critical once the inquiry reports later this year, when pressure on MPs to water down proposals is likely to be intense.

Stirring up mainstream media and politics

I’ve just had a piece published by the bimonthly online Stir magazine, talking about the failings of mainstream media and conventional politics and what we can all do about both.

I like the look of what they’re doing a great deal at Stir – there are tonnes of long-form articles I read all the way through to the end, something I find I do rarely given the tyranny of the internet coupled with my addled brain. The April 2012 issue has plenty more again.

My piece looked at alternatives to the mainstream, drawing inspiration both from the Transition Network and the activist media makers visionOntv. I do volunteer work for visionOntv and learn plenty of new stuff in return, a relationship I find very valuable.

Spreading the word – media training for London Transition Initiatives

A DVD of In Transition 2.0, the latest film to describe what’s up around the world of transition, recently dropped through my letterbox. What a great piece of work. It recounts what people are doing to try to meet the twin challenge of climate change and peak oil, working from within their communities.

One of the things I liked most, in addition to all the inspiring stories, was the promotional schematic on the back of the box. Sixteen stories, 7 countries and no flights taken – what a great way to make a documentary. Wisdom from far-off parts of the world came alive in my living room thanks to the wonders of modern communications technologies. That no flights were taken was the 17th inspiring story as far as I was concerned.

My response to all that is to do more reporting on those sorts of stories myself and to help teach others to do the same. That’s the idea behind plans for a video training weekend, or weekends, for Transition Initiatives in or around London. You can read more about it here in a blog post here.

If the idea of video training is for you, register your interest and possibie availabilities in a comment below or email me via patrickchalmers [at] orange.fr

That way maybe your work and your stories can feature in the next transition film.

What’s the point of documentary film festivals?

I’ve spent some of the past few days working with Glenn McMahon on covering the  Human Rights Watch Festival 2012 in London for visionOntv.

We ended our interview series by asking HRW’s Andrea Holley on her organisation’s thinking about the hows and whys of these video fests. Are they preaching to the choir, reaching out to new audiences or bringing real stories to the often-dry and abstract facts and figures?

As well as answering that question, Andrea explains how HRW selects the documentaries it screens and how film makers can pitch their finished stories.

The no-edit interview was shot using a Samsung Galaxy SII smartphone with an audio splitter and a basic microphone following visionOntv’s mobile reporting template. The reason I like the approach so much, and recommend it in the conclusions of my book Fraudcast News as a basic tool for citizen journalists, is because it cuts out so many of the hurdles to getting video news out there quickly.

Industrial agriculture meets peasant farmers – who wins?

I’m due to interview Bettina Borgfeld for visionOntv later today to talk about Raising Resistance, a film she co-directed with David Bernet about
the fight of the small farmers of South America against industrial agriculture.

The subject is one close to my heart, I covered a version of it over many years while working for Reuters as EU environment correspondent in Brussels and then again as an independent journalist following the trials of French farmers fighting against genetically modified maize produced by Monsanto and others.

Today’s film depicts this conflict as it plays out in Paraguay, describing the global impact of most of today’s genetic engineering on people and on nature. The film makers describe their documentary as a parable on the suppression of life, the diversity of plants and cultures, and how resistance arises both in people and in nature.

I will be working again with fellow independent journalist Glenn McMahon as part of visionOntv’s coverage of the Human Rights Watch Festival 2012 in London. He will be using an iPhone and iRig mic to shoot a no-edit video interview based on the visionOntv mobile phone interview template.

Before that happens, I need to watch the preview. Below you can see a trailer for the film, which is due out in May this year.

If you’re in London, you can catch it at the Curzon Soho at 6.40 pm or tomorrow at the Ritzy Cinema at 8.40 pm.

Indy media legacy documents Genoa G8 police violence

 

Carlo Augusto Bachschmidt, director of the documentary Black Block, explains how work by independent media helped piece together the story of unprovoked Italian police violence at the G8 2001 summit meeting in Genoa. (Italian with English interpretation).

His film features powerful testimonies by some of the dozens of activists who were savagely beaten by Italian police during a raid on the Diaz school at the G8 meeting. Lena, Niels, Chabi, Mina, Dan, Michael, and Muli recount in painful detail how they went from demonstrating in the streets to what they thought was a safe shelter for the night — the Diaz school on the outskirts of the northern Italian city of Genoa.

Each describes what they experienced that night and in the days that followed. Despite their trauma, the survivors have continued with their activism, in addition to suing the Italian police through the courts.

Bachschmidt says video and still images gathered by independent journalists in Genoa meant the facts of police brutality reached a wider public, painting a far more accurate picture of events than portrayed by the authorities or conventional media.

I did the interview with fellow independent journalist Glenn McMahon as part of visionOntv’s coverage of the Human Rights Watch Festival 2012 in London. He used an iPhone and iRig mic to shoot a no-edit video interview based on the visionOntv mobile phone interview template.

The idea is to do short videos that can be rapidly uploaded to the internet with minimal hassle, vastly increasing the chances of making media that gets seen. Just the sort of thing needed for covering the likes of the Genoa G8.