Warren Ellis » GUEST INFORMANT: Laurie Penny
►http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=13926
►http://www.mao-projekt.de/Bilder/BRD/NS/ORG/SDS/Info_Hannover016.jpg
I thought I got into journalism to tell truths and right wrongs and occasionally get into parties I wouldn’t normally be cool enough to go to. Right now though, with a few exceptions, professional journalism is rarely seen as an exercise in holding power to account.
Justly or unjustly, the media, especially but not exclusively the mainstream, corporate-controlled press, has come to be seen as the enemy of the voiceless rather than their champion. Justly or unjustly, few people believe what they read in the papers or watch on the news anymore, because belief has long ceased to be quite as important as complicity when it comes to the Daily Mail, the Daily Post or News International. On the streets of Athens and Madrid as well as during the London riots of August 2011, journalists have been threatened and attacked by desperate young people making havoc in the streets. Why? Not because these young people don’t want to be seen, but because they don’t want to be seen through the half-closed eyes of privilege.
Those on the ground do not have to wait for the BBC and MSNBC to turn up with cameras: they make the news and the reporters follow. They have grown up in a world of branding and they know how to create a craze and set the agenda. They occupy the media. And the media is starting to worry.
To be an honest political writer or journalist today is constantly to negotiate and re-negotiate the complicated relationship between conviction and orthodoxy, between critical reportage and activism-as-journalism.
So the question is: if all reporting is partial, if the mainstream press is hopelessly undermined by advertising, self-censorship and police complicity, if anyone with a camera phone can create a media sensation, then what is a journalist for? Why is it that in London, in New York, in California, in Egypt and across the world, it is young journalists who have come to be identified, in the absence of named leaders, as figureheads in these new movements? Why not orators, organisers, artists, musicians, singer-songwriters? Why journalists?
Because people are sick of being lied to. Because young people want to be told the truth – that’s why they became part of movements that are, more than anything, about finally speaking truth to power. Because in a world of 24-hour news cycles and instagram, good writing, and good, clear, original thinking, still matter, are still worth something. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself, because I’ve got a good fifty years of rent checks still to make.
Things have changed a lot since Willi Münzenberg ►http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willi_M%C3%BCnzenberg
and John Heartfield ►http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Heartfield
but it is still true that gifted young men and women hold up the banner of hope for the toiling masses. ►http://www.flickr.com/photos/edyson/2847533785
