G20 - "This is not a riot"

We are definitely living in interesting times. Modes and levels of protest not seen in decades are sweeping many countries in Europe and elsewhere as the G20 leaders meet to discuss our future in London. Here in Greece the country is in the midst of a general strike organised by trade unions to protest the government spending cuts. In Northern Ireland workers have taken over three Ford owned plants, in France bosses of a factory scheduled to close were held hostage yesterday by sacked employees and, of course there have been protests in London.

Yesterday I followed events in Britain via the internet and once again I have come to the conclusion that the mainstream media are being outclassed by their internet rivals. The coverage of the demonstrations by the BBC ranged from the misleading to the trite and once again the established channels blindly accepted the official version given the police and authorities and resorted to long distance reporting via telephoto lens and imported "experts" who no more about what's happening down in the streets than I do here in Greece.

Even the coverge of the events inside the summit amounted to little more than gossip and observation more suited to a beauty pageant than a high level political event. I think I heard the same old statistics repeated hundreds of times. I wonder if anyone went to bother to check out if they are true or just decided that endlessly recycling press releases is easier than doing some first hand research.

Thankfully, I was also following events via Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and blogs which gave me a much more rounded view of events including the excesses of the police whose use of "kettling" (hemming in large groups of people for hours on end) seemed to be tailor made to create tension.



In addition, We also have video footage of the way in which UK riot police went out of their way to provoke violent response from protesters in the Climate Camp in Bishopgate.

Press Freedom:Collateral Damage

I was following the #G20 hash on Twitter in order, like the UK police, to keep abreast of the latest developments concerning the G20 summit protests in London when I came across a short documentary, Press Freedom: Collateral Damage which shows the increasingly systematic harassment of camera operators, photographers and journalists by the police in Britain. As the National Union of Journalists site says;

"The NUJ had already submitted written evidence to the committee’s Policing and Protest inquiry. In his oral evidence, Jeremy highlighted issues such as journalists being denied access to report on demonstrations, the removal and deletion of data and the excessive use of stop and search powers against journalists.

He also highlighted some of the violent consequences faced by journalists going about their work, including details of past physical assaults.

The committee went on to question Jeremy about the surveillance of journalists by the police’s Forward Intelligence Team, which was set up to monitor the activities of people under suspicion of criminal activities."

I remember talking with a reporter here in Thessaloniki and they told me the same kind of thing; that the police have been becoming more aggressive in there treatment of photographers and people with video cameras.

I suppose that this is another spin - off connected with the rise of the internet and the ability of people to post their own stories to a wider audiences. In the past only a few could get their news out, usually via the mainstream press. As a result there were ways of making sure that potentially embarrassing images of police misbehavior could be quietly surpressed with an appeal to the editor/owner's sense of civic duty combined with veiled threats concerning the possible difficulties their journalist could face getting access to police sources in the future. Nowadays, however, such obstacles can be easily circumvented by posting such material on a site which means that everyone carrying a camera maybe a potential "enemy".

In addition the rise of citizen journalism means that many of those who cover demos, protests and the like are not subject to the traditional rules of engagement that covered reporters in the past and so unburdened by a political line set down by the channel/paper/station are free to report what they see.