What is independent media independent of?

At this year's ArtScape, Stephen Roblin and Corey Reidy from the Indypendent Reader gave talks and held a Q&A on the importance of independent media. This is a transcript of Roblin's introductory remarks.

I'd like to take a few minutes to explain what “independent media” is and how it differs from the mainstream mass media.

I think it's best to think of independent media as media projects that are free of institutional dependencies, meaning truly autonomous institutions. A mass media of this sorts has never been achieved in this country, not even during the height of the free press, which may surprise some to learn that it was during the mid-19th century. To achieve it would require nothing less than a radical revision of society's larger institutional structure—a task that would likely have to be undertaken over generations.

But in a weaker sense, we can think of “independent media” as media that is free of government or corporate influence. This is probably what most have in mind when thinking about this class of institutions. And there are plenty of media projects that exisit now in U.S. which exhibit strong independence in this regard.

How this freedom translates into media performance is that journalists, analysts, and ordinary citizens are able to report and analyze past and unfolding events in a way that isn't constrained by the interests of society's major power-broakers—government and corporate. It's this feature that distinguishes independent media from the U.S. mainstream mass media.

Terms like “objective,” “balanced,” and others often thrown around when talking about the media coverage. I don't think they add much clarity to the topic, at least not how they're typically used. A better way to understand the character of media coverage, I think, is to just evaluate it in terms of what facts and perspectives get emphasized or deemphasized, included or excluded. This sifting processing requires determining what's important—in other words, determining what's worthy of making it into print or online, and what's not. And underlying all considerations of importance are values. Pinpointing these values can offer considerable insight into the character of media coverage.

Let's take for example how the U.S. mainstream press largely ignored the findings of a study released in July 2010 on the health catastrophe in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. The study confirmed dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia after the U.S. so-called siege in 2004. One of the researchers reportedly said that while it is difficult to pin down the exact causes, “to produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened.” The researcher went on to say that the prevalence of cancer in Fallujah is greater than Hiroshima, Japan after being on the receiving end of U.S nuclear warfare. So as you can see these are by no means small and insignificant findings.

The findings of this study should have made it to the headlines of all the major press outlets. The fact that it didn't happen reveals an implicit value which underpins U.S. mainstream press coverage—that victims of U.S. illegal state violence in Fallujah are virtually unworthy of mention, much less intense and indignent news coverage.

Now the Fallujah example is just another anecdote of a persistent pattern found in U.S. mass media performance, which Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman revealed in their groundbreaking and popular study, “Manufacturing Consent.” What they found is that the mass media consistently treats victims of violence by U.S. official enemies as “worthy” of intense and indignant coverage, whereas victims of state violence from the United States and its allies are implicitely “unworthy” of such coverage. It's plain to see that this pattern has absolutely no basis in "objectivity" (unless you want to say that it's objectively morally bankrupt), nor can be described as "balanced."  A more appropriate term to characterize the pattern is "propaganda" -- a service the so-called free press routinely performs for the U.S. government.

What's most penetrating about Chomsky and Herman's study is their conclusion that this bias and other biases in mass media coverage are not a consequence of decisions made by journalists working under free conditions. Instead, it's a consequence of the mass media's institutional structure and deeply embedded ideological biases. These factors give way to the systematic production of messages and symbols that aim to “inculcate individuals with values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour” that protect and promote the agendas of powerful societal interests. And protecting these interests entails the marginalization of dissenting opinions—another key feature of U.S. mass media. Chomsky and Herman appropriately call this mode of media production “systematic propaganda.”

The scholars put forth a set of “filters” that together make up their analytical framework – what they call the “propaganda model” – for explaining and predicting the peformance of U.S. media. The filters they identify, which I'll just briefly touch on, are:

• ownership and profit-orientation of the mass media;

• mass media's reliance on advertising as primary funding source;

• the use of “experts” (largely from mainstream institutions—government, major think tanks, universities, etc) and other sources to confirm the official biases;

• the influence of flak or negative responses to a media statement or program, which is often meant to discredit dissenting viewpoints; and

• the role of ideology, such anti-communism, pro-market, and now anti-terrorism (meaning other people's terrorism, not ours).

To varying degrees, independent media projects break from these structural and ideological constraints and experiment with different internal structures and ideological frameworks. By doing so, these projects allow for the reporting and analyzing of events from different perspectives based on different sets of values.

If there's one thing that we can take away from the fact that the U.S. mainstream press has largely overlooked the U.S.-inflicted health catastrophe in Fallujah is that there is a desperate need for institutions capable of elevating such important matters to the level of public discourse—that is assuming a basic respect for all of humanity, including the innumerable victims of our government's crimes.