We’re not looking at a “violent minority” or a “hijacking”. The people on the roof and the people smashing windows are the same people who feel their actions were the best way to be heard. If yesterday didn’t go a bit “Lord of the Flies”, we wouldn’t be lavishing these column inches and this airtime on it. And the issues would get a polite mention topped and tailed with a yawn-inducing commentator.

The only inadequate policing I witnessed was that of the TSG in full riot gear charging batons-high at placard-carrying, vuvuzela-tooting students. Including one in a wheelchair. You can’t balance the violence of the oppressor w the violence of the oppressed. One leads to the other, and violence isn’t always just a punch in the face.

Any calls for a reasoned argument are bunk. Cuts to education, welfare and public services are not reasoned. They scar our society deeper than anything we can hope to embed in George Osborne’s skull.

I chanted “you say cut back, we say fight back” thirteen years ago – before Labour introduced University fees. I have friends who marched in 1989 when the Tories froze grants and introduced loans. 1989. The students who marched yesterday were screwed before they were born. No wonder they’re angry. No wonder they’re afraid.

Anger and fear is what galvanised people to march yesterday. Anger and fear is what drove some to criminal damage and is what will drive more to take more drastic measures in future. And why not? If this government takes everything from us, we have nothing to lose.

===
This article was originally published on The Comment Factory, 11 November 2010.

CREDITS
Director, Producer, Presenter, Camera: Leah Borromeo
Executive Producer: Claire Lewis
Editor: Katrin Maria Escay
Music and Colour Grade: Moshe Ladanga

This clip was submitted to Sheffield Documentary Festival’s Meet Market forum.

Learning Mandarin Chinese is easier than working out the finer threads of the News Corp/Shine Group/BSkyB/News International tapestry. The basics are that they are linked via a network of relatives and close friends last seen in the days of the Hapsburgs. To avoid treading on the world’s anti-monopoly laws, they’ve carefully divided control of each unit.

We’re all too aware of the monopoly of one Sergio Berlusconi. Murdoch the Elder is not doing a large-scale version of Italian media. Under Berlusconi, everything from newspapers, magazines and television is dictated by one man whose sole purpose is to hang on to power and escape prosecution for dodgy dealings. Murdoch is a businessman addicted to acquisition – he has a typical collectors mentality of wanting to have everything with little regard for the consequence. Being able to pull the puppet strings of business and government is one of the benefits of his unique position…but it is not his drive.

Life under Murdoch, at least my erstwhile parish Sky News, is not the plot to Tomorrow Never Dies. Rupert does not have a secret phone to editorial footsoldiers on newsdesks. When I was on the foreign desk, producers invoked the muscle of John Ryley, Head of News, when they were trying to swing the editorial eye. “John’s very keen” is a line often heard. Clever editors rebut with “let’s give him a call”.

Critics of Murdoch bias will invariably bring up the Adam Boulton and Kay Burley affairs during the last General Election. Casting personal opinion of these strong-willed stakeholders aside, let us look at the facts.

In Adam’s case, as Political Editor he was the pivot point for Sky’s election coverage. He is also a workaholic who hadn’t slept for days. When pitted against the stable and calm winds of Alaistair Campbell, Adam buckled. A moment of abandon – to be seen by all on YouTube.

In Kay’s position, a gaggle of demonstrators took advantage of Sky News having an open broadcasting stage as opposed to the BBC’s enclosed one. It’s like offering a crowd a large screen and a live Twitter feed. Someone is going to abuse it for a laugh.

Gaza, the Israeli raids on it and Sky News’ refusal to run the subsequent DEC Appeal is the only time I truly felt a corporate hand muzzling the mouth. And that on the day both the BBC and Sky said they would not be running the appeal, Sky News correspondent Emma Hurd opened a news item with a wide shot of the Gaza Strip and the line “this is the scene of a war crime”.

Should a takeover occur, broadcasting standards aren’t what journos at Osterley will be worried about. They’ll wonder if they’ll still have their jobs. As the axes fall, hacks will keep their heads down, produce the breaking news they’re so good at and pray they’re not next for the chop. Emails will be sent about how to cover stories on the cheap, deals and alliances with sister broadcasters will be forged to pool manpower. Quality of content won’t matter as much as appearing to tick the right boxes. Fear is a good way of keeping the rats in the hold.

Arguments against a Murdoch monopoly are usually based on events in print. Sky News knows it can’t get away with blanket bias on air. They can’t declare an allegiance to a political party like their ink-stained counterparts. Actions are watched closely by Ofcom and if one side of an issue appears to be getting too much air time, balance is restored one way or another.

Because television is not “self-regulating”, quality and content are dictated by public interest – or an editor’s perception of it. It’s hard to break truly original journalism in broadcast because editors closely monitor their competitors to see what they’re running – and run that. The process becomes a mobius strip of information dependent on precedence of events.

What I am worried about is what will happen elsewhere. Business-wise, a monopoly like that planned should a takeover occur is frightening…it will send shockwaves into other industries – healthcare, property, construction, natural resources. That’s what we should really be concerned about.

======

This article was originally published on the Index on Censorship, 17 June 2010, and in a different version on The Comment Factory.

One of the most flagrant of these illegal uses was in London in April 2004, involving 840 people.

Fourteen police forces in the UK including the Metropolitan Police, City Police and Thames Valley misused powers on 40 separate occasions between 2001 and 2008. The Home Office said a number of “administrative errors” led to police chiefs not getting the proper authorisation to carry out searches. The Act allows officers to stop and search people without having any “reasonable suspicion” they are about to or intend to commit an act of terrorism.

The errors involve paperwork. Someone didn’t sign something or fill in the right bit. The errors came to light after the Metropolitan Police had to dig around its archive thanks to a Freedom of Information request.

If you define terrorism as the systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve a goal, then you can make that definition fit police actions whenever they invoke Section 44. The European Court of Human Rights ruled the blanket use of Section 44 across London was unlawful. The law is too loose and open to abuse.

Home Office admission to the illegality of stops and searches under Section 44 does not mean a government admission to the illegality and inhumanity of that very act. Messing up on an administrative level only means that police forces around the country will tighten up their bookkeeping. It does not mean they will cease stopping and searching members of the public they arbitrarily deem a threat to the status quo.

It doesn’t take guts to question what a police officer is doing to you once he invokes Section 44. It takes knowledge.

So what can you do?

• You do not have to give your name and address or explain why you are where you are. You can’t run off, but you can go limp and stay silent.

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This article was originally published on the Index on Censorship, 10 June 2010 and subsequently republished on The Comment Factory.

When we meet, he is ankle deep in cut-out letters, spraymount and a scattering of UK election campaign propaganda. He’s recently finished a two-storey high paste up outside Shoreditch’s Cordy House in support of the Robin Hood Tax – a simple suggestion whereby .05% of profits made by big business gets allocated to social services and charities. To erect the behemoth on brick, it took one scissor-lift, twelve hours and a sea of paper and paste.

“So this is where the magic happens?” I ask.

“Hardly. I don’t really work like that.”

Known for altering a billboard of Amy Winehouse with the words “I hear Duffy’s selling coke” and likening Tony Blair to Darth Vader this most unlikely graffito is unconvinced of his status as a street artist.

“Artists lock themselves up in studios and create something from nothing. I drive past a billboard and think up gag lines. I have a quiet chuckle and I come here and knock something up”.

It doesn’t take long.

“I drove past a nice low billboard advertising the UK Independence Party on the M4. I got some paint and parked up a lay-by. Walked – in the rain – and painted ‘Kilroy Silk Woz Ere’ then fucked off.”

You can probably see it as you land at Heathrow.

“I work on my own. So I’m carting along ladders, buckets, paper, everything. And a camera. It’s not that I don’t have any friends – though that’s true too. Just that nobody I know fancies heading out at three in the morning in the London piss to put posters up.”

My first encounter with Dr D was thru an East End billboard reading “HMP London / Open Prison / I.D. must be carried at all times”. At the top right third was “dr.d”. Being an anorak of the vandal variety, seeing someone new sparks the curiosity. Seeing someone good sparks inspiration.

There were rumours. Questions over Dr.D’s identity, gender, even whether Dr.D was a group or an individual. The same sort of buzz that surrounds any really successful vandal who hides under a pseudonym. But Dr. D was no Banksy. There wasn’t a constructed mystery wrapped up in a commercial venture. You had billboards, and you had the occasional poster knocked up for sale for a tenner at a group show. Whoever Dr. D was, they or he weren’t in it for fame or money.

I found more and more billboards doctored with a laconic back-of-the-class-with-a-peashooter wit. Evening Standard street displays that weren’t all they seemed. The Olympic rings with blood spattered on them reading “Made in China”. Police adverts changed from “Make a Visible Difference” to “Make a Risible Difference”. Dr.D was tipping the axis of how I viewed the streets of London by a few degrees. His humour was no different to me scrawling on toilet doors but D was scrawling on the walls of a bigger bog.

This glue-stained scarlet pimpernel is, in my eyes, delivering overtly political messages with the aim of encouraging people who see his work to rethink their socio-political spaces. He’s less convinced.

“You say it’s political, but I’d rather let the paper do the talking. I’m more of a piss-taker and a chancer. Politics and politicians are asking for it. They spend thousands on campaign posters begging for votes to get a job in Parliament. But they way they put themselves forward is totally laughable.”

The last time he was caught by the long arm of the law, he was customising a then-new David Cameron “Year for Change” poster.

“Must’ve been a pretty sharp copper because I was there in full hi-vis, all the kit and all the gear to make it look as if I’d been working. But he obviously spotted something that wasn’t right – the fact that that poster had been up for a few days. He came over, had a word and well… most of what I was trying to put up is in that pile over there.” He indicates towards a smattering of letters on a counter.

When he’s not covered in paper and glue, slipping under police radar he’s “a rat catcher. And if you bought any burgers out of a burger van in the East End in the mid-90s, you probably bought them off me. Not that the rats or burgers are connected.”

I tell him that he doesn’t make life easy for himself. Is there a Mrs. D? “Who’s to say I’m not Mrs. D?” And where did the name come from? “It’s an old DJ name. Works nicely these days because Dr. D can also scan as ‘doctored’.”

I’m taken to an alleyway behind his surgery. Stencils litter the earth floor and he picks up one of a cut-out man like the ones you see indicating the men’s loos. Beneath are the letters WC.

“It’s World Corruption. I put a few of these up in the Foundry toilets in Old Street on copies of the Financial Times. I’m experimenting a bit more with stencil and lettering. My dad was a typesetter so I suppose that’s where my obsession with letters comes from. Oh…and an old art teacher knocked my grade down when I made a piece that spelled “magic” with a “k”. The national curriculum in this country seems to say that you can’t make good art unless it’s spelled right.”

He’s reluctant to push himself as ‘the next big thing’ but walks about his studio with a quiet confidence. He makes good work that makes people laugh…and then think. As unassumingly humble as he is, he says the best feeling is when artists say he’s done something that’s influenced them.

“I find it weird when I’m asked where I think my art will go because I don’t see myself as an artist. I wish I was. I wish I could paint and draw freehand but I can’t – the closest I’ve been to being an artist is living in a squat with artists.

I got into paste-ups after reading Naomi Klein’s No Logo and was shown the work that Ron English does with pop culture and billboards. Those two ideas came together and Dr. D was born – it’s a low skill way of expressing myself. Nobody else does it like me because it’s stupidly complicated, hugely inconvenient and a ball-ache. It’s a long way to go for a bit of a chuckle.

What I do is a problem-solving exercise that comes out of pragmatic laziness. How can I adapt a board to say something in the easiest possible way? The logistics is what influences how the final piece looks.

What makes me different is not just the scale of what I do but the fact that it’s not my job. We all know artists who are under personal pressure to create, to come up with something new. They spend hours crafting, devising et cetera. I don’t. I see a billboard and think of ways of making it funny. Or I pick up on funny things my friends say.”

Dr. D’s stock in the street art world seems to have risen. In reputation at least. One of the outfits he works with recently told me that D is their “golden boy…does the best stuff around.” Asked about this, the doctor hesitates.

“Sometimes I wish the guys who could paint, the ones I’m secretly jealous of, had more of a message that comes out in their work. Arty people are so…arty. I’ve hung shows where guys would turn up and not even have a screwdriver.

And a lot of street art people don’t really get what I do. I know I’ll never sell huge amounts and most of my work is off the streets within weeks. And it’s big so you can’t nick it. That makes me a non-commodity. I don’t push to sell limited edition canvases or prints because that’s not really what I’m about.

I think like an ad-man but I’m not promoting a product, I’m working for my own ends. And often times it’s just so I can drive past a board I’ve done and smile to myself.”

Most of what I have written is true. But I have changed some details to ensure the good doctor’s work can continue. The messages, the jokes, the subversion – all of that will stop if I let my lips loose. The need to keep D as anonymous as possible is greater than any truth I can offer you. As of now, the doctor is in.

===

This article was originally published in Who’s Jack Magazine, June 2010.

But there’s an elephant in the museum. As you move from room to room laid out with videos and photographs by the likes of Walker Evans and Bruce Nauman, look up into the corners. What do you see? The Tate’s own CCTV. “When people go into a gallery, they expect to be watched. There’s a lot of expensive work here and it has to be protected,” said Simon Baker, Tate’s new curator of photography. Well, it obviously works for the French. By failing to directly address the security setup in the Tate Modern’s own halls, they’ve undermined what is otherwise a beautiful, intelligent and informed show. The Tate has accepted that we’re indifferent to living under the gaze of a Panopticon and is wholly complicit in it.

No one knows how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK. The best estimations put the number at 5m, or one camera for every 12 people. That’s 20% of the world’s CCTV cameras on a whingey North Sea island. It used to be that we were only six feet away from a rat. Now we’re only six feet away from a camera. This exhibition showcases everything from super-secret American military bases, aerial landscapes of the Kuwaiti oil fields after the first Gulf War to people dogging in cars. It shows the theft of privacy and questions the basic notion of privacy.

Early photographic subjects were ignorant as to what was happening to them. Faces of people in early albumen prints resembled deer in headlights, intrigued but unsure what that man behind a box with a cloth on his head was doing. Ignorance became acceptance as the power of the camera became a tool for the media and the state. We grew aware of the gaze. A photograph of the artist Edgar Degas leaving a pissoir echoes its way to a snap of Paris Hilton crying pathetically in the back of a police car on her way to jail. A surveillance photograph of militant suffragettes used by police in 1913 bears an uncanny resemblance to modern police spotter cards used to identify “potential troublemakers” at demonstrations.

Launching the show in London highlights and mocks our current indifference to surveillance. The Tate boasts of the show’s timeliness “due to the increasing availability and use of street surveillance and mobile phones”. It celebrates and attacks our voyeuristic culture.

If you feel dirty viewing Gilles Peress’s images of the Rwandan genocide, you should. If you’re captivated by Merry Alpern’s sneaked shots through a bordello’s window, brilliant. If you feel the horror in Jonathan Olley’s photo of a static oppression palace, the Gold Five Zero watchtower in South Armagh, good. You’re meant to be shocked, and you’re meant to think.

But where is Wikileaks’ Collateral Murder video? Curators say that it’s a testament to the strength of the show’s message that everyone who comes can think of other things that should also feature. Not having the most current and devastating piece of surveillance in the public domain in a show that purports to provide a “provocative perspective” on the “iconic and taboo” is negligent. This show is the closest the BP-sponsored Tate will come to being overtly political. They usually wait until an issue has become vanilla until they wield a sword of topical criticism.

The show is not so much timely, but backtimed. It uses history and reflection in the hope people will be clever enough to flesh out topical issues the Tate is too cowardly to tackle head-on. It is politicisation by proxy. Then again, the Tate is a bit slow. They only opened a modern art museum 10 years ago.

===

This article was first published on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, 28 May 2010 and subsequently republished on The Comment Factory.

Over 40,000 people had limbs amputated in field hospitals much like the one I worked in a couple of weeks after the quake. Medical emergency relief charity Merlin’s setup was in a disused tennis court in one of Port au Prince’s hardest hit areas, Delmas 33. My role was media coordinator, the press monkey charged with finding stories amongst the patients and doctors on site to raise Merlin’s profile. One of my ‘case studies’ was a gregarious 8-year-old girl called Dayana. With her was a woman called Nadije, 23. Not her mother, but a guardian whose story has been taking hold of my life.

Our meeting was unremarkable. She was the adult-ish figure behind the little girl I was getting to know so I could offer her story to interested journalists. I have frames of her in video I shot and in photographs I took. As I moved along the wards, she asked me for my email address. I gave her my business card and moved on. A month later, she emailed me with what I thought was a begging letter. My reply was “Sorry, I have no money to give but perhaps you would like to tell me your story.” What followed is a continuing exchange of emails and online chats – the reality of poverty told in the virtual ether.

Marcel Izard from the International Committee of the Red Cross says, “Rape is common for migrants and there are many refugee camps in the Dominican Republic where people living in them have been deported. It’s quite hard gauging numbers of Haitian refugees pouring into the DR. We mainly work in conflict zones so we don’t have an official programme to cope with this influx.”

Finding figures for Haitian refugees has been difficult. The US Coastguard only holds stats for those they find at sea – around 400 as of April 2010. Other NGOs and aid agencies say their statistics only reflect the real people they see on the ground because clocking illegal migration from a country that kept less than accurate census stats is like asking how long a piece of string is.

So with that blur of facts, figures, statistics – all the things that impress people who like Powerpoint presentations, I bring you the letter I received from Nadije. And her picture. It says more than anything I could help to collate – and more than anything you could help to understand about a natural disaster that’s shafted a people shafted by its own.

“Before 12 January, we all had dreams. I was always told that I could be somebody…for my family, my country. Now there are no more dreams. No future for us. The conditions in which I was living became so critical I could no longer bear them. There was no support.

One thing happened after another. I couldn’t find anything to eat. I had nothing to wear. The whole world sleeps under beautiful stars, but we young girls cannot because rapists lurk in the day to day. This is another disaster. I spoke with a French coordinator who worked for an NGO. I told him everything. He told me “Lady, let me be frank with you. I am here as a doctor. But I can speak to someone who knows more about aid and tell him your story. Your situation is very unfortunate but I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

So I spoke with this other man. Told him my life. I started crying. He said, “Don’t cry. There’s always tomorrow.”

I told him “I know there will be a tomorrow. But this is not my future. I will not have a chance to see my future because I have reached my end.” He said I shouldn’t lose hope because life is good. He asked, “What do you want to do with your life?” I said I wanted to continue with my studies. He noted this down. So…I got the same response of nothing. I’m always on the lookout to see if there’s anything new. But it is always the same.

One beautiful morning, I woke up with the idea of leaving my country to go to the Dominican Republic. I spent the day walking through the markets. I met a lady who gave me work washing dishes, washing everything. Just for something to eat and somewhere to sleep. I got to know some of the people in the area and they offered me more work. Cash in hand. One day, one of these people said he wanted to take me to Santo Domingo. I said yes. I thought he liked me and simply wanted to help me. So I thanked the lady I was working for and left.

What disappointed me deeply was that I was raped and beaten by three men. It is the most deathly pain I have ever known. Afterwards, I spent two days wandering, telling everybody I met my story. Like a blessing from God, I found a job as a maid at an apartment. I thought things were getting better for me. Then one morning, Hernandez, the husband of the woman who hired me offered me 100 pesos to fuck him. I refused. That evening, I didn’t know how to tell his wife that I no longer wanted to work there. So I threw myself out into the street.

So there we are. I might as well not exist. If I have a future, I dare not dream or imagine it. My life is completely destroyed. I know misery. Pain. Ignorance. I now know it all and I have survived it all. Please help me. Help me by any means. I have a life like everybody else. I want to study. I cannot be abandoned like this. I want to be someone in my life, for I know what is misery.

Thank you and all those who reach for the skies.”

Her first email was in Spanish. Subsequent ones have been in French. She wants to learn finance or journalism. Bilingual with a knack for turning a phrase, she’s clearly no idiot.

I have nothing but photos and the fading memory of a meeting to remind me that this woman is real. Naïve trust borne from her persistent communications about her day-to-day and a gut feeling to tell me she’s genuine. She’s also one of thousands – but she is still someone. What would you do?

========

I’ve submitted this to the Guardian International Development Journalism Competition. The first time I’ve ever entered any sort of “hey look at me” shizzle. It won’t win.

It has also been selected out of over 1500 contributions for the first issue of 48hrmag and republished on The Comment Factory.

UPDATE: 48hrmag has won the Knight-Batten Innovation in Journalism award. [19 July 2010]

UPDATE: Contributors and readers to 48hrmag had two days to vote for the pieces they thought were best in Issue Zero. This was one of them. Thanks. [13 August 2010]

Over 50,000 members of the “I Only Fly to India” militia will descend on Copenhagen over the next week to demonstrate over a shopping list of demands longer than J-Lo’s rider. Attendees are an international who’s who of the best-branded campaign groups from Oxfam to Action Aid to superglue and D-lock specialists Plane Stupid. Lesser-known groups like Brazil’s Land Reform Movement will be there to boost everyone’s ethnic credentials.

Developed countries like the USA and the UK have pledged to cut carbon emissions (on their terms) by 2020 alongside developing nations like China and India cutting their carbon intensity (on someone else’s terms). The finer points over who does what by how much and who’s going to police 192 countries will also be debated.

A sore point has already come up with the leak to The Guardian of the ‘Danish text’ – a leaked draft agreement that gives rich nations more power, marginalises the UN’s role and abandons the Kyoto protocol. All the jaw jaw about making a difference to the world’s global temperature becomes hot air in the cold Copenhagen wind.

The feeling that a potentially powerful global movement is being hijacked by some very slick PR is keeping me away from Denmark. The talk around and within the conference seems to be an exercise in appearing to make a difference without actually changing a damn thing.

Initiatives like the 10:10 campaign (who recently accepted missile makers MBDA onto their scheme with the lines “Of course arms manufacturers can reduce their emissions by 10%. What they do with the rest of their time is a different matter, on which we couldn’t possibly comment”) ask individuals and companies to pledge to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010. I had a recent Twitter debate with one of their worker ants, @malchadwick, who failed to see the hypocrisy in cosying up with a firm whose business it is making things that kill people.

If it makes you feel better about yourself turning off a few lights and flushing the loo only for solids, just be aware that the bandwagon you’re joining broke down a long time ago and your cooperation is helping corporations wash their sins away in the green haze of a well-run publicity campaign.

This weekend and next week will see a range of so-called direct action protests. How direct and effective will sitting in a street getting water-cannoned be if you’re an Indian farmer considering suicide to get out of debt because your crops failed?

What’s needed is justice. Fair rights and fair pay for workers and bold international policing of commerce and corporate structures. Grass roots movements that tackle tangible goals, not semantic abstract concepts. Proper justice and action directed at those who use and exploit. Not branded climate justice and a spectacle only likely to achieve hypothermia.

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This article was originally published in The Guardian, 11 December 2009, and republished on The Comment Factory.

Whether they feel this is a “revolution” is an issue for debate. Do they want to overthrow Ahmadinejad or the Ayatollah? What is clear is that they feel the democracy they were offered was ersatz. That the powers that be (in this case, the incumbent) held an election they’d already determined the result for and took the people along for a ride to make it look good.

Opposition candidate and reformist Mir Hossein Musavi has launched a formal appeal to cancel the election results announced in favour of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by the Interior Ministry. His appeal was lodged with the Guardian Council, a group appointed by the Supreme Leader whose remit is to interpret and implement Iran’s constitution.

Meanwhile, Musavi’s wife Zahra has called for peaceful demonstrations across 20 cities from 1600h local time on Monday and a national strike on Tuesday.

Given reports of deaths, beatings, and missing from anti-Ahmadinejad protests in Rasht, Qom, Tehran and other Iranian cities, nobody is sure how many people will answer her call.

As one pro-Musavi voter said “I’m very angry with myself for being fooled so easily. They got us to vote, which gives them legitimacy. Then they manipulated the results.”

My friends in Iran are of the literati – artists, writers, journalists, teachers. They fear chain murders – murders and disappearances of those critical of the religious regime. The last time such killings came to the fore was as a reaction to the election of pro-reform president Mohammad Khatami in 1997.

Their fears are real. Almost all of them have been either under official surveillance, arrested on bogus charges, detained for indeterminate sentences, bullied by the Basij, received death threats etc etc.

What my friend has written isn’t much, but it is a voice among many that is crying out for something new… even though those voices aren’t clear what form that reform should take. As another friend said, “Anything. Anything but this.”

Yesterday, after coming back to my studio from the street revolts, we saw that they blocked all satellite TV. All the internet sites like YouTube, Facebook and… and maybe more. All blocked.

Internet speed was reduced from 128k to 12k. I tried to send you a video of streets to publish on YouTube and… but it is impossible.

They bit and hit people and young on the streets. They fear our power. We trusted them but they abused our votes. We could never imagine such pig minds.

I just sent you this and hope you try spreading this news. Not just from me but from all Iranian freedom seekers. They are banning us. They make us fear and keep us silent.

I cannot be associated with this letter. Or with anything else I send you. Have you heard of chain murders? This is what I fear. Some Muslims. Individuals. The Basij. They call around, find a person easily and cut his neck at night.

Even the person we voted for [Musavi, Karroubi] told us to “be silent because this government has no fear to tear your breasts and spill your blood in all of Persia’s rivers”. The person we voted for asked us to be silent. To forget. He said these people are not Muslim. They are liars.

The police here are like wolves. Religious people in neighbourhoods laugh at and disrespect us as non-Iranian. It is hard.

The government blocked YouTube to stop many Iranians from publishing videos of dangerous streets. We have our ways around this. For now.

The police and the basij  set fires and broke into banks at night to say we, the people, did this. But the people are doing nothing wrong, nothing criminal. We are shocked. We are angry. We just want to know where our votes went. We elected one man and they empowered another. The only people who don’t agree with this are the liars who are scared to lose their regime and their control.

Yours,

[REDACTED]

“Your coverage of the Gaza Holocaust continues to appear biased. How can you be so cruel? don’t you have children yourselves? Why do you carry on giving the Israel officials airtime and refuse similar time to Palestine officials? What about interviewing doctors/ UN Officials/ journalists in Gaza? Why have you not tried to send someone into Gaza to see for yourselves how the children are being massacred? Show some truth. Shame on you!”

Some punter called John Hill on the Sky News website.

That sort of thing shouldn’t and normally doesn’t bother me. Detractions are taken in the same humor as praise. But it’s late at night/early in the morning and I haven’t slept well.

I donned the cap of anonymity and posted a riposte.

The reality is this. A news channel or news organization, especially one whose bread and butter is continuous rolling news, cannot afford to be “biased”. It is far to concerned with getting the raw facts of who what where when… usually before the competition. The why and how come in if there is enough time in the running order. Call it news by time code.

The airtime thing with Israeli talking heads is due to characters like Mark Regev, the Israeli Prime Minister’s spokesperson, virtually setting up camp at buildings in Jerusalem where the major news organizations have offices. When there is an Israel-related story to react to, he hops up and down the building tarting himself out to any broadcaster.

Spokespeople for the primarily Fatah government of Mahmoud Abbas are based in Ramallah. Western broadcasters don’t have offices in Ramallah (unless you want to count Al Jazeera English) due to the unbelievable amount of red tape, logistical nightmare, and expense involved with setting up an office in the West Bank which is, if you pardon the analogy, a stone’s throw away from Jerusalem.

For interviews from Ramallah, we hire a television studio. But the Palestinian Authority do not have a Mark Regev-type creature who has the freedom to slope from TV station to TV station saying, “You guys need a voice on this?”. There’s a rather large wall between Ramallah and Israel. The gaps in the wall are called checkpoints. They can take a very long time to pass through. And you need a permit to get through them. And these permits have a curfew… an inflexible curfew that will not allow you to appear live on the ten o’clock news.

Israel also has a system whereby every journalist working that patch receives text messages on their mobile phone whenever something happens. “Qassam hits Sderot. No injured”, an arrest here, a suspected terrorist there, an update on the shekel-dollar exchange rate. You can wake up in the morning to upwards of twenty unread text messages… none of which actually say anything. The Palestinian Authority has no such service. No such infrastructure for that service.
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Gaza. The western organizations that operate from within Gaza do so cautiously… especially since the Alan Johnston kidnap thing. Firms that have a permanent presence in Gaza usually have an office with its own studio. Everyone else hires studios when they’re needed. And keeps a fixer on retainer. The fixer serves as your eyes and ears… they’ll look out for stories for you and you can call them at inhospitable hours to ask them about the significance of something that is ultimately mundane. Or you ring them with something obvious like, “There are air strikes over Gaza”. They will get you guests, alert you to the latest happenings, and help your team when/if they get into “theater”.

Guests from Gaza on the phone… easy. Getting them into a television studio when you know and they know they are risking their lives by walking out into the street takes a bit more negotiation. Especially if you are trying to get members of an organization called Hamas that a country called Israel is actively targeting with heavy firepower called a missile.

When shit hits fan, Israel pulls the PR guns out of the bag along with the rest of the armaments they have. Newsdesks and producers are inundated with offers for guests, offers for comment….

Palestinian PR? We have to chase them. All the time. Messages left, few calls returned. There is no Palestinian PR machine that kicks into gear once something happens. Journalists detest PR unless it can do something useful, like make work easier for them. At heart, journalists are sloth-like creatures who like things at their fingertips. We like people ready, accessible. Now.

As for why we haven’t sent anyone into Gaza, ask Israel. Gaza is a “closed military zone”. Meaning unless you were in that walled-off strip of land before it was declared a “closed military zone”, you aren’t going in until after the next lot of invading soldiers. And nobody’s coming out either. Everyone is hanging out in the buffer zone. Or sometimes sneaks into the loading bay bit at Kerem Shalom to see the aid trickle through after the previous night’s bombardment.

Ultimately, the pictures gleaned by news agencies like Reuters or the Associated Press do a better job of explaining the reality on the ground than any commentator could. Images of children being pulled from smoking rubble are more eloquent than a man in a suit talking to another man in a suit. Video released from the cockpit of an Israeli aircraft showing people walking around the back of a flatbed truck then going fuzzy after the missile impacts…the mass of humanity and collective wailing at a funeral…kids dirtied by soot, mud and blood.
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Speaking to a doctor who works at Gaza’s Shifa hospital, he had no time to return home… and definitely no time to swan in front of a television camera. The conversations we have are stolen moments when he is moving from one ward to another or when his attempts at sleep prove fruitless. “I’ve dedicated my life to saving life. These people. All these people. They are dedicated to killing. Palestinian. Jew. Killing. Let us say we have an unsustainable relationship,” was the last conversation we had. I’ve heard nothing from him tonight. He was going to try to go home for a day.

If Hamas or the Palestinian Authority want to redress the balance on Western news and get a little bit more “face time”, please reach out to us. Return our phone calls. Keep us in the loop. Don’t depend on “friendly” Arab media stations because you have no idea how hungry we “mainstream” outlets are for you. Our numbers don’t change and our leaders rarely get assassinated. We’ll pay for the studio time because we need your voice. You pay the risk because you need your voice heard.

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This article was first published on The Comment Factory on 31 December 2008. All rights reserved.