Indymedia Editors Should Lead by Example

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday April 25, 2002 13:44 by Donal Dublin

Hypocricy & Double Standards Degrade the Quality of Indymedia

A number of recent articles about the quality of the Indymedia Newswire along with the comments they have provoked make interesting reading. But perhaps ye have all missed the point:

The Editorial Guidelines listed in this site that aim to provide criteria for removal of inappropriate articles posted by the public at present contain the following 6 points:

1. Comments, not News
2. Duplicate Posts
3. Infactual or obviously false posts
4. Libelous or slanderous posts
5. Discriminatory or abusive posts
6. Advertising or other inappropriate content

Since I do not find any editorial guidelines for the main Featured Articles section on the homepage of this site, I assume that these same guidelines (more or less) apply. Yet a superficial analysis of what I see in this section, shows that almost all 6 of the above guidelines have been broken.

A few examples:

1. News rather than Comments:
News means New, yet of the 9 articles that currently appear in the Featured Articles section, none of them are newer than 12 days old and all of them (100%) are very old. Are there any editors at all?

2. Variety (non-duplication):
Of these 9 articles 7 of them (78%) are about one protest or another from all over the (geographical) world, and include pictures of crowds with flags.

3. Infactual or obviously false posts:
Whilst the fact that a protest took place may be factually correct and unexaggerated, the implicit lies and dishonesty that they contain abound. I am referring to the general messages being broadcast via your medium, amongst others of course, that are full of blatant untruths. This would be less offensive if an honest balance was achieved by also featuring protests by people holding opposite views.

4. Libelous or slanderous posts and
5. Discriminatory or abusive posts and
6. Advertising or other inappropriate content:
Of the 9 articles featured, 3 of them (33%) are about Pro-Palestinian, or Anti-Israeli protests. My first hand experience of these events is that they promote dangerously libelous, slanderous, discriminatory, abusive and racists messages. By broadcasting these in the way that you do, in the language that you do, with the contextual inaccuracies that you do, you define yourselves as accomplices to their crimes. Furthermore, you become advertisers of the worst elements of the corruption end of the 'corporate and capatalist' spectrum that you enjoy knocking so much. Namely the cosy, and stench polluted version of the oil and terror corporate industries being schemed and plotted by the kings, sheiks, dictators and champions of terror.

It's called leadership. If leaders (e.g. editors) behave according to behaviour x (inferior journalism), then followers (contributors of articles and comments) are unlikely to behave according to behaviour y (quality journalism).

Dissenters, on the other hand, will behave differently, and perhaps a little too differently, hence the current scenario: Too many articles from opposite extremes of the pendulum, leading to excesses of emotion and superficial libels, and difficiency in in-depth research, analysis, objectivity and honesty.

In short, my message is to the Editors of Indymedia: The solution to your problem is easy: More journalistic leadership. Less hypocricy.