21’00”

Globalisation of trade is expanding rapidly but many are left wondering if the media are offering a clear analysis of the critical voices

Someone burns a flag for instance, that’s what you see on the front pages but you don’t see these 250000 people peacefully protesting,

Pretty much one sided and misrepresents what’s really going on

In this programme we explore the impact which new technology is having on the role of the traditional news gatherer

News reporting of Globalisation became one of the main discussions at this gathering of television broadcasters in Scotland. One of the Key speakers was the president of CNN Chris cramer

There are now only two broadcasters who have a large spread of international bureau’s, one is BBC primarily public funded and one is CNN business or commercial funded and they are 2 very different organisations but they share a common goal which is to make the world a smaller place

However this former CNN producer believes that the world his previous employer offers is not the full picture. He has turned to the Internet to provide wider viewpoints on world events.

CNN footage is often very flawed in part because it narrows the range of discourse, its like bin laden versus bush but what about the other people in the world who have points of view which are critical of Bin laden and Bush, do we ever hear from NGO groups, do we ever hear from critics of the policies in the same way that we hear from people who support the status quo or who are selling the policy

In London, workers in the media became so frustrated at the BBC’s reporting of the recent conflicts that they held demonstrations outside the studios. They argue that the broadcaster had taken a bias towards the Governments line.

People who work in the media need to earn the right to call themselves journalists again after the way they have reported events in the last month, a lot of them have just turned themselves into part of the government propaganda machine, using terms like war on terrorism without questioning what they mean, war has a specific meaning under the Hague convention

In New York, reporters who have felt alienated by the mainstream news agenda went beyond just demonstrating and have created their own broadcasting outlets.

You are listening to the War and peace report, I am Amy Goodman

There was such a dearth of critical reporting on why this happened and what the response has been it seemed absolutely critical to expand our audience and the demand has been there. We have expanded from a one-hour television show to a two-hour war and peace report on radio and TV

As well as disseminating their reports across the USA and Canada they also gain a wider audience across the Internet

The media has become the most powerful force for shaping public opinion and have become the most powerful corporations in the world and now they are beating a drum for war and we run counter to that

As corporations take a tighter control of the mass media, some journalists believe that business links could affect their reporting.

An Investigation into Britains largest commercial broadcaster, ITN led at least one journalist to cast doubt on its objectivity.

I found that there was a company within the ITN building, 50% owned by ITN and 50% owned by a PR company called Burston- Marstellar, which was called Corporate Television Networks or CTN, and CTN was using ITN staff to make highly misleading corporate videos and it was expecting its staff to make highly biased propaganda and on the other hand makes its news reports, and I felt that the two roles were totally irreconcilable

Shell gives them starter packs such as hair dyers or tool kits so that they can start new businesses

The fact that this was quietly going on within the building shook my confidence in ITN’s ability to deliver the product it said it was delivering

However new technology such as the camcorder encourages people to record their own viewpoints of events such as this oil spill in Nigeria.

I am blaming shell, I am blaming shell for all the hazards that have been caused

We can not even get our boats back again, we can not even go into the water to discover the sand so our source of living is totally dead we are all hungry now, we don’t know what to do now, please shell and our government we are pleading to you to come to our aid. we don’t have a source of living again

There are many people who are looking for answers to basic questions about power in the world and distribution of wealth and resources in the world are looking for media outlets that reinforce their own sense of the world, that reinforce their own perspectives in the world but are also looking for outlets to distribute their own views to other audiences and there have been points of blockages in the mainstream media who tend to report the same issues over and over again

In an office occupation with a difference, environmental campaigners enlisted the World Wide Web to publish their concerns.

We are inside the shell building in embankment, my colleagues are now barricading the door and we are shortly going to transmit live from inside the shell building

Despite Shell cutting the power and all the phone lines they continued to transmit press releases using a mobile phone and a laptop

Instead of relying on the traditional media to put across our message , we can create our own agenda up and put up exactly the information we want to put up and bypass the traditional barriers to get the message across rather than just the spin the media want to put on

Even the images of the police gaining entry six hours later could be seen live over the Internet.

The cream pie is a traditional tool amongst globalisation activists as the former head of the World Trade Organisation, Renato Ruggerio discovered.

Now the pies are now being aimed at people in the media who dismiss important issues such as climate change.

It seems to me that too many people were taking a interest in the Sceptical environmentalist, his book without being critical enough and without understanding what was going on in there, so putting a pie in his face was a way to undermine his stature and to make him look ridiculous and to stop the kinds of things he was using like statistics and graphs from being taking seriously.

It used to be a process of getting out and engaging in the world, finding out what is happening and now it is a process of sitting in the office waiti9ng for the word to come to u and the world that comes to you is the world that has the PR agencies, the money, the time and the resources to put out the press releases and make the phone calls and all the rest of it

However despite a multi million pound media campaign by the Biotechnology industry, the British public still remain sceptical about Genetically Modified food.

The British government has laid at least part of the blame for the nations wholesale rejection of the science on the media.

I can guarantee u tonight unless I say something totally outrageous there will be very little on the news about this whole issue and what there is will be totally truncated into a very small time frame and et the issues u are debating here and the issues he raised just a moment ago are absolutely vital for the whole future of humankind and It’s a debate I think the public if it were allowed to would be far more interested in discovering the facts and coming to terms with the debate and engaging in it

Globalisation campaigners echo Tony Blair’s beliefs that the media are failing to report important issues. These campaigners staged a mock funeral for Journalism outside the studios of the BBC.

To those who campaign against injustice, to those who campaign against the ransacking in the third world, against genetically engineering, against the arms trade or against the mindless profit driven destruction of our environment, to those we bequeath the label naïve troublemakers

Politics has moved on and the news agenda hasn’t. There are journalist reporting from their hotel rooms or watching CNN inside the press centres…there is no engagement, you really have to be with people, spend some time with them, go on to the streets

Demonstrations against economic summits spread from Eastern Europe to the United states, has this been seriously reported by the international media? Or has it just become a mere game in the eyes of some broadcasters?

IMF has got to go, corporate power has got to go

We have to stop meeting like this, now wait a minute remember at 6.30 this morning u said it’s the 4th quarter, its almost over, we are way ahead

So I missed it by a quarter so.

Everyone of these protests has had a social forum, counter summit, ideas, exciting ideas being talked about, solutions being talked about and they u turn on the news and there is one small pocket of people acting unilaterally and they are the news agenda and that’s all the protest is about and people watching television back home have a sense of that’s what this movement is

We must take part in the debate about lazy journalism and if in the debate we are challenged about our perceptions about world events then so be it

Possibly the strongest challenges to the media monopolies is emerging from a rapidly growing network of volunteer run Independent Media centres.

We don’t have the sort of news which makes a difference in peoples lives and gives them the analysis and critiques and also a key ingredient is the alternatives, where can we go actually go, what is actually been done, who can talk about what an economic transition might look like

Using digital cameras and the Internet, outlets are being created all over the world for viewpoints not often heard in the mainstream media

A unique Website has been created encouraging anyone anywhere to publish their own eye witness reports from an event without the involvement of an editor

We wanted to make sure that the activists could be seen and heard through our media, independent media, but we also wanted to give them the tools so that they could make their own media and speak for themselves rather than have someone else speak for them which we know has problems

The internet is reflecting the new form of political organising in creating a global fabric of struggle and its international networks, increasingly you do get even very poor movements in the south having more internet access or having some internet access

The first Independent media centre was launched during the protests at the world trade organisation summit in Seattle

Their website quickly became the trusted voice of the campaigners.

Once people realise that the mainstream media don’t have a strangle hold on reporting what is really going on and I think you first saw this in 1999 in Seattle with the indymedia centre where the police said we weren’t firing rubber bullets and the indymedia had their cameras and said oh yes you are

When broadcasters failed to believe eyewitness accounts of police over reaction, images of officers shooting at demonstrators with rubber bullets were distributed quickly and widely over the internet.

We had evidence, we had the actual rubber bullets in the IMC (Indy Media centre) in Seattle and we published that to the web immediately for the world to see, and later CNN had to turn its coverage around and by the end of the week they were doing reports on what we were doing

You know why does CNN or BBC fail to capture one image at the last summit or other? The answer is that they don’t have, despite their pretty enormous wealth multiple sets of camera eyes out there

Is the growing number of camcorders at events offering the public a truer viewpoint of world events?

The independent media centre provides a production infrastructure for independent groups so this piece in the end is an amalgamation, an assemblage of the kind of visions of what the week was about

There is a growing dissatisfaction with mainstream television world-wide. In the United States 70% of the viewers when asked about it say it sucks. It is the true within the media itself, as many as 70% of the journalists who work inside media are unhappy with the product of many media companies so you have a great deal of dissatisfaction and searching for alternatives

In the ancient town of Genoa, Italian media tycoon come prime minister Silvio Belisconi hosted a gathering of the 8 leaders of the most powerful industrial democracies in the world.

To ensure their voices were heard, over 200,000 people travelled to Genoa to highlight the increasing role which corporations were playing in the running of their countries.

As the streets shook to the sounds of dissent, the first Italian Independent media centre was established to report on the G8 meeting

We had plenty of computers, telephone lines, mobile phones and different type of equipment and people were broadcasting

We recorded images of police brutality, police criminality against protesters, we filmed both sides but we were so much on the frontline, we got into the firing line

The protests became international news when police shot dead one demonstrator

At the same time the cameras of the campaigners were capturing the full extent of police reaction

People have to see what happened in Genoa, what really happened, which was a lot of violence

Just after midnight police raided the Independent Media Centre building and the sleeping area opposite.

I was whacked in the legs and I went down on the floor, and I was shouting, Journalist, I am not resisting arrest. And the other 5 turned around and kicked me out onto the street. By that time my ribcage was gone, my lung was punctured and a lot of blood was filling up inside

When police finally left, blood stained the walls and floors, cameras and computers lay destroyed with their hard drives ripped out. Dozens of people were hospitalised

In Italian (subtitle in English) People who are in hospital are being arrested and taken to the police station So now I have the choice of going to hospital and being brutalised by police or suffering an aneurysm. What do I choose? I think I will choose an aneurysm. What would you choose? What would you choose?

None of the Tv channels owned by the Italian premier reported the brutal attack.

The great majority of news broadcasting sides with the powerful against the powerless, And I don’t think that is a conscious decision, an editor waking up in the morning and saying ‘right I must shaft the powerless while standing up for the powerful’. But it is the way it works out, partly because of the structure of the organisation, but also because of the nature of political discourse, meaning the people with the most wealth and power are the ones best heard.

For me unless we all invest in news gathering, big news gathering and little news gathering, the world will be a more dangerous place and much sadder place without it.