Many places to hide information in the national security media

No place to hide: Snowden, Greenwald and Australia’s “national security media”

This piece was first published in New Matilda on 29 July 2014

Eyes On: The Five Eyes agreement means Australia is implicated in the global surveillance economy

Australia is about to get a new raft of national security legislation – the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill – that will radically increase the scope and powers of our spy agencies to snoop on private citizens. The justification for this ramping up of ASIO and ASIS espionage power is the supposed threat from Islamic radicals who, having fought overseas in Syria and Iraq, will be likely to import violent jihad back into Australia. It is a line run almost daily in the Australian news media over the past few weeks .

This is a tenuous justification at best. The historic evidence shows that the police – at both state and federal level – and the nation’s spooks already have ample power to deal with any real and present danger posed by jihadists. For example, Operation Pendennis, which led to the conviction of 13 alleged terrorists in 2007-2008, was conducted using existing phone-tap and other surveillance powers. Between July 2004 and November 2005, the Pendennis dragnet accumulated 16,400 hours of recordings from bugs and 98,000 telephone intercepts; but now ASIO, the Federal Police and state agencies want to sweep up even more calls and even more data.

Additional powers – to tap phones, infiltrate and hack computer networks, give spies the power to entrap suspects and to store electronic metadata for several years – are not necessary under current conditions. However, that has not stopped Attorney General George Brandis (aka “Raging Bedsore”) from touting the new laws as measures to save Australian lives and to keep safe the national interest.

Well, of course the Government – and her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition – would say that wouldn’t they? It’s no surprise that the nation’s politicians, who govern through the promotion of irrational fears and promises of a quick fix, would jump on the “more powers to the spooks” bandwagon. After all, there are votes and endorsements in “security” issues; as well as happy feelings of safety and warmth induced by the vague and unfounded notion of keeping the country out of “harm’s way” and by appearing to be “tough” on terrorists. It is the tried and true method of invoking the sexy beast Laura Norder; and in a world of uncertainty, devastation and death (think Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan Gaza, MH17 and other global hotspots) her warm, comforting embrace seems like a haven from the horror and bloodshed.

But perhaps we might have expected a little more searching, or a little more critical and independent analysis from the nation’s leading media outlets. Maybe it would not have been too much to ask for at least one correspondent or pundit to write a “think piece” about how the call for more spying and less oversight could result in less freedom, not more. Surely there is one “national security” correspondent or “defence” editor out there in the media world who feels it necessary to add a note of caution about our unthinking stumble towards Nineteen Eighty-four?

If you’ve been looking for that op-ed or the news piece quoting critics of the Government’s new legislation, you’ve no doubt been thoroughly disappointed. It is missing in action; not there, invisible and unreported. Instead what we’ve seen in the last few weeks is article after op-ed after editorial praising and supporting the unseemly rush to becoming a nation of spies and spied upon.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the lack of critical reporting; and, if you’ve seen Glenn Greenwald’s excellent recent book, No Place to Hide , you might be slightly and wryly amused at the lack of opposing views, but you won’t be surprised.

Greenwald has written his insider’s account of meeting Edward Snowden for the first time in a Hong Kong hotel room and coming to terms with the enormity of Snowden’s selfless action and the implications held in the treasure trove of National Security Administration data held in the cache of secrets he handed over for public scrutiny.

That story should be familiar to New Matilda readers. Unless you’ve been on Mars for the past year you will know about the NSA documents that revealed, inter alia, Australia’s spying on the Indonesians, the Americans spying on the Germans and pretty much any nation and anybody with a copper wire communication network, an Internet connection or mobile phone.

The sheer scale of snooping – billions of intercepted messages every day – is mind-boggling enough. Greenwald is convinced (and convincing) on the point that the NSA has a goal to collect every bit of electronic information that blips its way across the global communication network. He writes that the NSA mantra is “collect everything” and it is the logistics of doing this, then storing and sorting the results, that he forensically dissects in No Place to Hide.

One of the realisations that any intelligent reader of this book will come to is that the NSA and its “Five Eyes” partners (UK, New Zealand, Canada and Australia) [https://www.privacyinternational.org/reports/eyes-wide-open/understanding-the-five-eyes] could not manage the collection and sifting of so much data without the explicit cooperation of the world’s major telecommunications companies. Yep, just about everyone you deal with for your electronic data life is implicated – Yahoo, Skype, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Verizon, Dell, Facebook and countless others – everyone is scooping and sharing your data with the NSA and God knows who else.

As Edward Snowden told Greenwald during one of their first Hong Kong interviews: “I saw firsthand that the State, especially the NSA, was working hand in hand with the private tech industry to get full access to people’s communications.”

A quick reminder that Snowden was employed by the private consulting firm Booz, Allen Hamilton while working at the NSA HQ is all you need to grasp the implications of this. The entire global economy is now systemically and irrevocably enmeshed in an alliance with Governments to suck, squeeze and pulp our data in order to make the juice of profits and to keep the world safe from people like us.

That’s why it is really good to have strong individuals like Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden in the world today. If we relied on the mainstream media to tell us this stuff, we would never know.

No Place to Hide also provides clues as to the “Why?” of the MSM’s silence on the downsides to the creeping, all-seeing surveillance state. There’s a fantastic chapter that details the media’s complicity in not reporting, or more often mis-reporting, the actions of the NSA. The details are different, of course, but the general outline is applicable in Australia. We are experiencing the world of the “national security news media”.

The roots of the media’s complicit silence in relation to surveillance go back to the immediate political reactions to the events of “9/11”. Since that time, Greenwald writes, “the US media in general has been jingoistic and intensely loyal to the government and this hostile, sometimes viciously so, to anyone who exposed its secrets.” The same thing applies here. Even today some columnists cling to the lie of Iraqi WMD, preferring to spout the line that they just “haven’t been found yet”; more than a decade on from the disaster of Iraq some commentators refuse to see that it was a terrible mistake, built on fabrication and probably a war crime. But, history is written by the victors and its first “rough draft” is compiled by the loyal stenographers in the political press corps.

When it comes to “national security” and the surveillance state, loyal news editors and respected senior writers on policy and politics continue to toe the

When Greenwald appeared on the talk shows he was accused of helping a traitor [Snowden]

line. When Greenwald was doing the rounds of American political talk shows, he was confronted with a wall of hostility from his journalistic colleagues: “Many US journalists resumed their accustomed role as servants to the government.” In June 2103 the story turned from the expose of “serious NSA abuses”, to one that Snowden had “betrayed” the US, “committed crimes and then ‘fled to China’”.

In Australia, the Snowden is a “traitor” line continues to be vehemently pursued in the Murdoch newspapers, which increasingly reflect a kind of Aussie-fied Tea Party ideological bent. And it is Murdoch’s The Australian that is leading the “national security”: cheer squad for Bedsore’s touted “improvements” to ASIO and ASIS spying powers. However, to be fair, the Fairfax outlets are well and truly in-line and waving the flag almost as vigorously as News Corps.

I call this proposition the “position of the complicit insider” and it’s not a new phenomenon. The political media – Press Gallery journalists in Australia – enjoy a privileged status alongside politicians, political advisors and senior bureaucrats. Reporters and commentators are often seduced by the close access they gain to the centres of power and political operators are therefore able to prevail upon them to non-disclosure of uncomfortable secrets. As well as this agreement not to rock the boat too hard in return for favours (in reality scraps of information that the insiders want revealed), political reporters feel a false sense of duty to act “responsibly” and not reveal information, or write stories that might damage some false notion of “national security”.

Anyone who regularly reads the “quality” press in Australia (including The Guardian), or who watches political chat shows on television will instantly recognize this problem.

In July 2014 we saw a good example of the supportive opinion piece genre in The Weekend Australian. Associate Editor Cameron Stewart wrote a lengthy commentary endorsing the Government’s proposed tougher surveillance powers and data retention laws . Stewart noted the “hand-wringing” of Left and liberal commentators when the then Howard Government updated and upgraded anti-terror and security laws in 2005 and added that in 2014 it was only “the Greens and a handful of human rights lawyers” who seemed to be complaining. Stewart repeats all the claims made by Bedsore and ASIO boss David Irvine that returning jihadists pose a significant danger and that the collection of electronic “metadata” is just a harmless means of identifying potential threats.

In Stewart’s worldview, any opposition to greater surveillance powers is dismissed as being an issue of concern only for “the Left” and its “prism of Cold War excesses”. Security officials are uncritically quoted about the effectiveness of metadata collection in previous terror-related prosecution. Stewart has only one area of concern: that journalists could be targeted by new provisions to prevent Snowden-style leaks. Stewart’s newspaper has never had much regard for Edward Snowden, whom it says – echoing the American view – is a traitor, not a whistleblower.

The Weekend Australian also carried an editorial supporting the boosting of security laws; ironically the paper seemed to blame communications technology for creating the need to change the law:

In the internet age, legislation governing Australia’s intelligence agencies must keep pace with terrorists’ capacity to use technology

When it comes to the Snowden materials, Greenwald makes the argument that the well-connected Washington media will never go all the way. He says it is an “unwritten rule” that only a few documents from such a vast treasure trove of secrets would be revealed, “so as to limit its impact…and then walk away, ensuring that nothing had really changed”.

This sensibility is evident in the recent Australian reporting of ASIO seeking more powers, or police breach of their own rules for eavesdropping.

A June 2014 story headlined ‘New surveillance powers aim to boost fight against terrorism’, by the Fairfax “National security correspondent” David Wroe, is framed in such a way that the move seems both natural and necessary. The lede clearly suggests that the move is necessary, “amid growing fears about the terrorism threat posed by Australians fighting in the Middle East.”

In the second par the clear distinction is made between “innocent third-party computers” and “a computer used by a suspect terrorist or criminal”, but already the scope of the powers is broadened from just a “suspect terrorist” to now include “criminal” behaviour.

The third par equates the reader’s interest with the point of view of the security services themselves by suggesting the new rules would benefit law enforcement “dramatically freeing up surveillance powers”. Of course, there’s really nothing to worry about because the new, expanded spying powers would only be used, reassuringly, “under ministerial authorisation”.

In the fifth par we are lulled to sleep with the anodyne phrase the “intelligence community” and with the further assurance that what this benign community group has “long called for” is to remove “hurdles” in the way of legitimate “investigations” and to fix a “failure of the law to keep pace with technology”.

The report goes on to tell us that the changes are based on recommendations made by a “parliamentary inquiry, last year, supported by Labor” – the appearance of bi-partisan support is meant to be reassuring too. We are reminded that the report to parliament “stressed there needed to be strict safeguards, including guarantees that the intrusion on the third party’s privacy would be minimised”.

The security community worldwide is fond of the word “minimised”. “Minimisation” is supposed to occur in the US context too, where it means that all non-relevant information is stripped from surveilled communications before it is passed on for analysis. However, as the Snowden documents reveal, in the race to “collect everything”, non-relevant data is always collected and nearly always stored, analysed and archived for later retrieval.

In other words, we cannot trust our political masters; they are probably lying to us and they are most certainly pulling the wool over the eyes of gullible “National security reporters” like David Wroe. Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh by suggesting Wroe is gullible and there is another explanation that stands up. If you are the “National security reporter” it really is not in your interests (or your employer’s) for you to run foul of the key sources who inhabit your beat. If you were to write critically about an official source, for example, the next time you call for a comment, s/he might hang up on you. More likely, their departmental boss will call your boss and you’ll be back on the shipping rounds.

Whatever the ultimate cause, the gulling of the public continues in Wroe’s June 2014 article when he pulls in a “third party” expert to assess the situation. In this case the expert is hardly an independent analyst:

Tobias Feakin, a cybersecurity expert at the Australian Strategic Police [sic] Institute, said the changes would update legislation that was ”well out of date”.

Oops, an interesting Freudian slip by David Wroe; Dr Feakin is actually attached to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and has solid ties into the defence and security establishment, including the Royal United Services Institute (a UK-based military think tank) where he was “Head of Homeland Security Capabilities” and “Director, National Security and Resilience Department” between 2006 and 2007.

Most of the time we don’t bother to check the CVs of these experts that are put in front of us, all too often without question. If “expert” and “official” sources say something then a journalist will usually just report it with stenographic accuracy and perhaps (if we’re lucky) offer up one or two tame questions to be kicked away by the expert.

Dr Feakin is particularly popular on ABC News24 where he pops up on an all too regular basis, confirming Greenwald’s central thesis about media complicity. In September 2013 Dr Feakin was used as a source in an Australian Financial Review story about the new and expensive ASIO headquarters building in Canberra. This story reveals that when ASIO and the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) occupy their new building, private companies in the security industry will be offered the opportunity to “collocate” some of their employees alongside the nation’s senior spooks.

It is expected the centre will allow executives and security staff from select industries to share knowledge and learn from government cyber specialists…in a bid to liaise more frequently with private industry, a task DSD cannot easily do as a Department of Defence entity.

This is another classic play from the American security state experience that highlights with some certainty that the Security State needs to be enmeshed with the security industry in order to function at a high level. If you ever thought the interests of the State and of Capital were not contiguous, let this dispel you of that myth right now. The AFR article confirms it with this simple statement:

Senior intelligence officials said they remain deeply concerned about the ­vulnerabilities that exist outside a few “islands of excellence”. They said ­relatively “hardened” areas include the major banks and Telstra, which last year hired a former DSD deputy director, Mike Burgess, as its chief security officer. (emphasis added)

Dr Feakin makes an appearance in the final two paragraphs of the story and it is abundantly clear which side of the security fence this “independent” analyst sits:

[Feakin] welcomed the move to integrate private firms into the new cyber operations centre, but said companies would have to be “willing to share data with government, otherwise momentum will be lost and they won’t keep their focus on such efforts”.

The story of Dr Feakin is also a salutary lesson that we should never take for granted the so-called independence and bona fides of the experts served up to us by a complicit and compliant media.

We can expect to see more of this type of “national security news” over the coming months as the new expanded spying power legislation is passed and bedded in. If you want to really know what’s going on, look beyond the mainstream media, which has decided to enjoy the comforts of the insider and to lull the rest of us into a false sense of security.

Remember, there really is no place to hide any longer.

 

“They shoot journalists, don’t they?”

So, the American military has what it calls “rules of engagement” when active in a combat zone.

Normally these “rules” are to protect the lives of non-combatants, but in the urban battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq there is sometimes very little difference.

At least according to the US military. But how far does the American war machine go to distinguish between friendlies and civilians and the so-called “enemy” – the Taleban in Afghanistan or “insurgents” in Iraq?

Really, it doesn’t go very far at all. In a recent Vanity Fair article about snipers in Afghanistan, one US soldier is quoted as calling the Afghan interpreter in his unit a “stinky”.

A Special Forces sergeant came up and said, “Hey, dude, I got some bad news. I gotta put a Stinky in your truck.” Afghans are Stinkies because they don’t wash.

We’ve all heard the term “raghead” used in relation to Iraqis. When this level of embedded racism is in play, the rules of engagement are not worth wiping your stinky on.

Whenever civilians are killed by “mistake” there are major efforts to cover it up. Details are only released when the families of the dead – you should always make sure there are no survivors – make a fuss, or the media starts nosing around.

But what happens when reporters and news workers are killed? Then the cover up goes into overdrive!

The Wikileaks site has just released some very disturbing video footage of two Reuters correspondents being gunned down in Baghdad. According to the army’s statement, the action that led to their murder was within the rules of engagement.

The attack took place on the morning of 12 July 2007 in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad. Two children were also wounded.

Reuters had been seeking access to the video – shot from one of the Apache helicopters that also gunned down the men – for more than two years.

The murdered newsworkers  were local Reuters staff; Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen. Chmagh was a 40-year-old Reuters driver and assistant; Noor-Eldeen was a 22-year-old war photographer.

Rule #1: It’s OK to shoot journalists.

What would you do?

Imagine, reader, that your city is shattered by a disaster. Your home no longer exists, and you spent what cash was in your pockets days ago. Your credit cards are meaningless because there is no longer any power to run credit-card charges. Actually, there are no longer any storekeepers, any banks, any commerce, or much of anything to buy. The economy has ceased to exist.

When the media is the disaster [hat tip, Mr T]

What would you do?

Georgia on my mind – gangsters, oil and blood

Warning: this post contains some AO language and is not really about taxi drivers at all.

I have a lot of respect for cab drivers. Most of the time they’re really well-educated and they’re all very, very  street-smart. Last night I got a ride home with Ahmad. He’s from Afghanistan and he was listening to the BBC World Service.

There were items about the conflict in Georgia and so we got to talking. It was quite funny to realise that my chat with Ahmad was the perfect dessert to my main course argument with my colleague Wayne at the Brooklyn.

Wayne and I had been talking about Russia, Georgia, gangster capitalism, transnationals and failed or failing states. Ahmad segued straight into that line of thinking off the back of the World Service reports from Georgia. Ahmad has been all over the world. He thinks the Russians are crazy and hates the American presence in his homeland. There’s a nice, balanced logic to his position and I’m instantly drawn to a stranger who’s making my journey smooth on a soggy Auckland night.

My conversations with Wayne and Ahmad  led to this little tome: gangster capitalism, the looming resource wars and ‘regime change’.

What happens when you give gangsters access to new-killer weapons of mass distraction?

Civil rights protest in New Zealand – stop the terror laws

DEFEND CIVIL RIGHTS
march this Saturday October 27th at 12 noon
from Aotea Square to Mount Eden Prison
For more information Civil Rights Defence Organisation

ABOLISH THE TERROR LAWS-
Socialist Worker (National Exec) statement on Crackdown

If we don’t fight to defend the “Urewera Seventeen” – the activists currently imprisoned without bail or trial – then it could be us next. That’s the simple fact that all of us who believe in social justice have to learn.

Everyone who knows someone who was arrested knows full well that these people are not terrorists. There is no way that these people were planning to kill, maim or destroy in pursuit of their political activism. So why did the cops feel the need to terrorise schoolkids, smash windows and confiscate property on Monday 15th?
It’s surely not a coincidence that that was the week that beefed-up “anti-terror” legislation was up before parliament. And the cops – and the SIS who stand behind them – were probably feeling a bit embarrassed that they hadn’t gotten to use the old legislation yet. So they wanted to give it a go.
But why do we have the “Terrorism Suppression Act 2002” in the first place? Simply put – because the Americans told us we had to.
Using the shock of the aftermath of the attacks on New York and Washington, the United States pushed the demand for “anti-terror” laws through a compliant UN in 2002. New Zealand was “obliged” to adopt these laws, or get in the bad books of the United States.
No New Zealander is on the UN’s list of terrorists or terrorist groups. But Maori activists said at the time that it was only a matter of time before these were used against Maori activists. Looks like they were right.

State violence

Some commentators – even some of those “on the Left” – are wagging their fingers at the people who are currently stewing in jail without trial or bail, saying they should have known better than to even look like they were preparing to challenge the State.
But this is a colonial nation. The New Zealand state was founded on acts of violence and dispossession of the tangata whenua. No-one disputes that. And no-one should be surprised that some Maori are not prepared to accept the status of a defeated people. Challenging the New Zealand state is their political birthright – not an act of “terrorism”.
An attitude that says that challenging the authority of the state should be enough to get you put in “Guantanamo of the South Pacific” isn’t about fighting terrorism. It’s about defining within what limits dissent and debate is “acceptable” – and enforcing those limits with ninja police breaking and entering.
There is no good reason for the “anti-terror” laws. They should be called the Terror Laws – their purpose is to sow terror in the hearts of anyone who might think of challenging those in power over us. Ordinary workers who’ve been in union struggles know that the police and courts are not the friends of anyone who wants to rock the boat.
The Terror Laws must be abolished – before they are used against any of us who doesn’t shut up and do what they’re told. We need to build the biggest possible political movement against these anti-democratic laws – and the corporate politicians in Labour and National who support them.

media ethics, journalism

John Howard – War Criminal

I’ve just received this email from my friend Peter McGregor in Australia. He’s attempting to get several Australian government ministers tried as war criminals and has taken out a Citizen’s Arrest Warrant against them.
Good luck Peter, you crazy diamond.

Citizens Arrest of John Howard, Alexander Downer,Philip Ruddock, & Brendan Nelson as War Criminals.

“Point of order Mister Speaker: I have a Warrant for
the arrest of John Howard, Alexander Downer, Philip
Ruddock, & Brendan Nelson as War Criminals.”

Yesterday in Federal Parliament at Question Time, an
anti-war activist confronted the Government with a
formal Citizens Arrest Warrant, charging them with
various breaches of international law. (see Warrant
below)
Peter McGregor, a retired academic from Newcastle, was
himself then arrested, & charged with ‘unlawful entry
on inclosed lands’ & taken into custody. McGregor was
calling for the Speaker of the House of
Representatives to have the police arrest the 4
Ministers.
“Just the Howard Government’s abandoning of
Habeas Corpus should make it a social pariah,
especially with those who believe in the rule of law &
human rights. Instead of people like me, the Pine Gap
4, the Talisman Sabre Peace Convergence, Rising Tide,
Greenpeace, etc. resorting to acts of civil
disobedience, it would be preferable if groups like
Amnesty, councils for civil liberties, university law
faculties, etc. practiced what they preached, and
brought formal legal charges against the Howard
Government for its War Crimes.”
“In order for evil to triumph, it is enough for good
people to do nothing.”

You will recall from a previous post that Peter was arrested earlier this year at an anti-war forum for challenging Philip Ruddocks’ presence on the platform. No date has been set for the trial, but McGregor will be pleading not guilty.

Here’s the text of Peter’s warrant.
————–
Warrant for the Citizens Arrest of John Howard, Alexander Downer, Philip Ruddock, &
Brendan Nelson:

John Howard, Prime Minister; Alexander Downer,
Minister for Foreign Affairs; Philip Ruddock,
Attorney-General; & Brendan Nelson, Minister for
Defence
are hereby charged, to be trial by the International
Criminal Court, with:

(1) Planning, preparing, initiation or waging a war of
aggression or a war in violation of international
treaties, agreements or assurances – VI (i) Nuremburg
Principles

(2) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for
accomplishment of the above – V (ii) Nuremburg
Principles

(3) Participating in the use of cluster bombs in
contravention of the AUSTRALIAN MINES CONVENTION ACT,
1998

(4) Participating in the use of weapons of mass
destruction in breach of the GENEVA Convention
including Fuel Air Explosives which cause death by
asphyxiation

(5) Conspiring to pervert the course of justice by
(i) abandoning habeas corpus both in the domestic
‘anti-terror’ laws & in international policy; & (ii)
covering up or defending the use of torture & over
breaches of the GENEVA Convention, the International
Covenant for Civil & Political Rights, & the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, against Australian – and
other – citizens, at Guantanamo Bay

(6) Failing in its duty to protect Australian citizens
overseas, & conspiring to continue the illegal
detention of Australian citizens without trial or
changes for over 5 years

(7) Demonizing and incarcerating asylum seekers under
the policies of mandatory detention and fortress
Australia. Such policies contravene the legal
principle of habeus corpus and have induced undue
suffering and mental illness for detainees.

Dated this Wednesday 19th September, 2007.
Signature(s): Peter McGregor:
(mcgregorpeter@yahoo.com.au)
Issued & authorized by Citizens against War Crimes

media ethics, journalism

Challenging journalism in a Postmodern World

This piece began with me just reposting something I saw on another blogspot recently. But it’s developed into something of a manifesto – a call to arms, if you like – for journalists who, in John Pilger’s words, “Give a damn”.

TV News in a Postmodern World, Part LXVIII:

“To lead with Paris or not, that is the question.

I’m not what you’d call a Paris Hilton ‘fan,’ but I have been deeply intrigued by her life in the month of June 2007. My interest is in her as a person, not a celebrity, for I’m a student of human nature, and here was a fascinating human nature story: someone from the other side of the tracks having everything taken away, albeit for a short season, and I was most curious about how it impacted her, all judgments about her behavior aside.

It’s not every day that a person of such ‘position’ is stripped of that position and placed in a situation of extreme conflict. I found the whole mess to be a great study in class bias from every conceivable angle, but most of my curiosity was directed at Paris, the woman herself. All that I knew of her was a media creation, but that boyhood curiosity was still there, so I followed the story.”

Terry Heaton, the author of the quote above runs a blog called “the pomoblog” and he’s fascinated by Paris Hilton ‘the person’. Unfortunately, Terry, there are many people every day who are placed in situations of extreme conflict. At the last count I checked, more than 70,000 dead in Iraq since March 2003 and the body count is rising every day. Save your curiosity for them, Paris can look after herself; at least she might, with the help of maids, drivers, stylists, managers, publicists, a rich family, a cellphone, a cock’r’two, Larry King, a good tote bag, a pooch, a gold Amex card, cocaine, marijuana, cigarettes, Percodan and plenty of pricey booze.

I’ve always had my doubts about postmodernism and postmodernists. I’ve long considered most of them a bunch of eclectic pseudo-intellectuals who don’t know their ar*ehole from a dishwasher. But you know, there’s a grain of truth in Heaton’s piece. The world of journalism is changing.

Celebrity is now a news value in its own right and many millions of people, most in less fortunate circumstances than the object of their curiosity, take news about Paris Hilton seriously. Here’s another take from Heaton that I actually think is worth discussing:

A whole new world of media is springing up around us, people informing themselves and their tribes as a part of the personal media revolution. Traditional professional journalism is really at odds with this, because the ability of groups to do it increasingly shines a light on the shallowness of the all-things-to-all-people paradigm. If I’m interested in the iPhone, I will trust the group that’s covering it for themselves. If I’m interested in Paris Hilton, I will trust the group that’s covering entertainment in the same way.

The morning news may be able to send a crew to cover the line outside the Apple store, and show producers can stack Paris Hilton “coverage” where they think it ought to be in their shows. But in both cases, the surface is all that can be scratched, and people intuitively know there is so much more. Consider similar treatments for just about everything “in the news,” and you begin to understand the source power of the personal media revolution. It isn’t at all about amateurs stealing thunder (or jobs) from professionals; it’s about the soul of journalism itself — the story.

I disagree slightly. In my eyes the “soul” of journalism has to be about “truth”, not just about the story. There’s an intellectual core to journalism that is more than just recounting a tale. It is all about selection, priorities and points of view. One of the areas of news that this is most important is in the coverage of “business” and “economics” stories. It is in this area that the unchallenged and mostly unconscious assumptions made by journalists are most in need of exposure, discussion, challenge and change.

To some degree the Hilton story, and all the pages it has consumed, is symptomatic. It’s the coverage of a lifestyle steeped in ostentatious wealth and gross displays of conspicuous consumption. It’s what my old friend Karl Marx calls “commodity fetishism”.

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was….
There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.

Not only do we fetishise news as a commodity — we fail to see the inherent contradiction between the service of profits and serving the public interest — we also fetishise symbolic fairytale heroines such as Ms Hilton. She embodies the life that most of us mere wage slaves have no chance of reaching. But capitalism teaches us to be “aspirational”. Why not, therefore, aspire to imitate the spiritually empty, but commmodity-filled life of Paris and her drug-addled friends who inhabit the wonderland of the US west coast and all points asunder.

What a wonderful piece of bourgeois ideology the phrase “aspirational” is. A respected Australian political scientist, Hayden Manning, has this to say about it:

‘Aspirational voter’ is another way of saying ‘middle class voter’ with one important difference: many voters’ current middle class status rests on the fragile foundation of high levels of personal and household debt. Economic recessions in the mid-1970s, the early 1980s and early 1990s caused widespread employment insecurity and periods of declining real wages. By the late 1990s the mood shifted markedly as many voters experienced steady improvements in their disposable incomes, home values appreciated and, importantly, banks invited their customers to borrow heavily at a time when interest rates reached a 30 year low (Harding 2005). In this environment Australian middle class affluence was, in a fashion, reborn after being shaken during periodic recessions…
A host of demographic, social and economic factors are bandied around to define the ‘aspirational voter’. Objectively, they are middle income earners, upwardly mobile, and may be employed in either blue or white collar occupations. More speculative is the view that they are vulnerable to interest rate rises due to high levels of personal debt (Hewitt 2004). Pundits describe the aspirational outlook as entrepreneurial and individualistic. Aspirationals have been variously described as the new ‘conservative right’—anti-egalitarian and anti-union, favouring tax cuts, driving new cars, and sending their kids to private schools (Carney 2001; Green 2001; Stephens 2001; Henderson 2001; MacKay 2001; Davidson 2001; Hamilton 2003; Burchell 2003; Glover 2004; Manne 2004).

You can see clearly from this how the term has taken on a whole load of baggage. It is used to describe workers who have been sucked in by the churning propaganda and bad journalism that allows such terms to be abused without question. This is MoR and mainstream political science and it’s the fodder of balanced journalism.

Journalists should wake up from their bad dreams, stop worrying about that Hilton girl and start to question some of their own “aspirational” values. If you’re a journalist and you’re reading this, you could do a lot worse than spend the next 45 minutes here with John Pilger. This is “inspirational” and that’s what should be driving journalism today.

If you haven’t got 45 minutes to watch this video, perhaps you’ve got 10 to read Pilger’s speech at Columbia University on 14 April 2006.

That’s too much for your busy life to take? Then cop this; the short, sharp and sweet conclusion to that speech:

What should journalists do? I mean, journalists who give a damn? They need to act now. Governments fear good journalists. The reason the Pentagon spends millions of dollars on PR, or “perception management” companies that try to bend the news is because it fears truth tellers, just as Stalinist governments feared them. There is no difference. Look back at the great American journalists: Upton Sinclair, Edward R Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, I. F.Stone, Seymour Hersh. All were mavericks. None embraced the corporate world of journalism and its modern supplier: the media college.

It is said the internet is an alternative; and what is wonderful about the rebellious spirits on the World Wide Web is that they often report as journalists should. They are mavericks in the tradition of the great muckrakers: those like the Irish journalist Claud Cockburn, who said: “Never believe anything until it is officially denied.” But the internet is still a kind of samidzat, an underground, and most of humanity does not log on; just as most of humanity does not own a cell phone. And the right to know ought to be universal. That other great muckraker, Tom Paine, warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the “Bastille of words”. That time is now.”

media ethics, journalism