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Quotes

The walls have ears. Your ears have walls.
- Graffiti, May 1968

A free press can of course be good or bad, but, most certainly, without freedom it will never be anything but bad.
- Albert Camus

In every sphere -- television, film, radio, the music industry, publishing -- a few giants in the media and the cultural 'industries' are almost totally dominant. The saying "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one" reflects the reality well, and not only where newspapers are concerned. The situation might be compared to a huge sports stadium. Everybody is free to have their say -- so the dominant ideology claims -- but the established system owns and controls the loudspeakers, the video screens, the action on the field, the rules of the game, and the stadium itself, while we, the people in the stands, have only our unamplified voices with which to make ourselves heard. Not exactly a 'level playing field'. And then, what happens if we decide that we don't want the game at all, let alone the existing rules? What do we do if we decide that we don't want to sit in a stadium, subjected to loudspeakers, watching someone else's game? What if we want to transform the stadium into a park and talk to each other and play our own games instead of watching?
- Connexions Annual

Connexions Resource Centre:
Focus on Arts, Media, Culture

Recent & Selected Articles

This is a small sampling of articles related to arts, media and culture in the Connexions Online Library. For more articles, books, films, and other resources, check the Connexions Library Subject Index, especially under topics such as media, culture, arts, music, film, censorship, media criticism, ideology, propaganda, and alternative media.

  1. Funding for Non-profit Media or Public Interest Activities (February 15, 2010)
    A group that launches, or even refocuses, an independent news media project – or raises money for just about any public-interest activity – will probably have success in fundraising if it does the proper research and targets a unique audience. It will need to demonstrate that it offers an important public service, such as providing in-depth coverage of local political, economic, and social issues not covered adequately by other media.
  2. Independent media advocates must develop creative news sites (February 1, 2010)
    We should be able to come up with two or three practical models that can be used to set up sustainable news and information production and delivery systems.
  3. Could a 'mini-paper' nip at the heels of mainstream press? (January 21, 2010)
    A mini-paper would be incredibly inexpensive to publish. There would be no requirement for newsprint, a huge printing plant or large delivery system.
  4. How Alternative Media Provide The Crucial Critique Of The Mainstream (January 20, 2010)
    The closeness of the mainstream to dominant economic, cultural and ideological forces means that the mainstream largely functions to promote the interests of the military/industrial/political complex. Yet within advanced capitalist economies, the contradictions and complexities of corporate media have provided certain spaces for progressive journalism.
  5. Creation of Sustainable Free Media Would Be Huge Breakthrough (January 12, 2010)
    Independent media organizations would approach news differently compared to the coverage provided by corporate-owned media.
  6. Canadian Media in Crisis (January 10, 2010)
    How so-called "business journalism" is often biased and tends to give readers a distorted picture of the news.
  7. Why Canada must limit the influence of corporate media (December 16, 2009)
    Traditional news departments follow unwritten but well-understood guidelines concerning what they should not cover. Most people in the newsrooms have been so thoroughly indoctrinated in corporate ideology that they seldom suggest a story that falls outside of the guidelines.
  8. Canwest latest ‘media giant’ to exploit news operations (December 8, 2009)
    Media corporations claim to care about quality journalism, but they’ve deceived Canadians for decades -- censoring news to protect their profits, pandering to the interests of the corporate world, and neglecting to invest adequately in their news operations. For decades powerful media corporations have decided what news Canadians should read, hear, and see. By reading just about any Canadian daily newspaper it’s not hard to see how the values of corporate-owned media are quite different from the values and interests of the majority of Canadians.
  9. A Comparative Review of Flat Earth News and Newspeak (November 20, 2009)
    A comparative review of two recent books about the media, one a mainstream view, the other using the propaganda model of media control.
  10. Connexions Archive seeks a new home (November 18, 2009)
    The Connexions Archive, a Toronto-based library dedicated to preserving the history of grassroots movements for social change, needs a new home.
  11. Chomsky in Mexico (October 2, 2009)
    September has been a big month for La Jornada. To celebrate its 25th birthday, the National Lottery offered a commemorative ticket as did the Mexico City Metro subway system, rare mainstream honors for a lefty rag, and notorious U.S. rabble rouser Noam Chomsky came to town to help cut the cake - along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez (a founding investor) and the much-lauded Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. The Jornada was founded in 1984 by itinerant journalists who had bounced from one short-lived left periodical to the next.
  12. Toronto Declaration: No Celebration of Occupation (September 2, 2009)
    As members of the Canadian and international film, culture and media arts communities, we are deeply disturbed by the Toronto International Film Festival’s decision to host a celebratory spotlight on Tel Aviv. We protest that TIFF, whether intentionally or not, has become complicit in the Israeli propaganda machine.
  13. Media Capitalism, the State and 21st Century Media Democracy Struggles (August 9, 2009)
    Robert McChesney talks about contemporary media capitalism and 21st century media democracy struggles to understand and change it.
  14. Mainstream Media And The Propaganda Machine (July 24, 2009)
    Mainstream media, especially the American media plays a vital role in shaping the world public opinion.
  15. Twitterers Paid To Spread Israeli Propaganda (July 21, 2009)
    Israel’s foreign ministry is reported to be establishing a special undercover team of paid workers whose job it will be to surf the internet 24 hours a day spreading positive news about Israel. Internet-savvy Israeli youngsters, mainly recent graduates and demobilised soldiers with language skills, are being recruited to pose as ordinary surfers while they provide the government’s line on the Middle East conflict.
  16. Resistance in Gaza: Young Palestinians Find Their Voice Through Hip-Hop (June 10, 2009)
    Making music is a form of resistance to war and occupation, and also a tool to communicate the reality of life in Palestine.
  17. The Left-Wing Media Fallacy (May 8, 2009)
    The issue is not complex, not esoteric: in a world dominated by corporate power we rely on media corporations for news about that world. Future generations will surely be aghast that so few people today are able to perceive the perfectly obvious problem, the very clear source of mass control, that this implies.
  18. The Death and Life of Great American Newspapers (March 18, 2009)
    Journalism is collapsing, and with it comes the most serious threat in our lifetimes to self-government and the rule of law as it has been understood here in the United States.
  19. Justice in the News: A Response to the targetting of media in Gaza (February 20, 2009)
    A mission to Gaza found that media were subject to intimidation and direct military assault and deliberately prevented from working freely. The findings confirm evidence of frequent targeting of media during the operations.
  20. Operation Cast Lead: News control as a military objective (February 17, 2009)
    Control of news in time of war has become a military objective.
  21. Turn off the Canadian Media, Please (January 9, 2009)
    If you want to have the first idea what is happening in Israel/Palestine (or most of the rest of the world), the best thing to do would be to turn the Canadian media off completely.
  22. Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009 (2009)
    Provides a list and indepth analysis of the top 25 stories that were censored throughout the year in 2009.
  23. Intellectual Cleansing: Part 3 (October 15, 2008)
    The tendency to self-deception appears to be greatly increased when we join as part of a group. Groups create a sense of belonging, a "we-feeling", which can provide even greater incentives to reject painful truths.
  24. Intellectual Cleansing: Part 2 (October 7, 2008)
    Most ambitious journalists start out on a daily local newspaper owned by one of a handful of large media groups. There one quickly feels all sorts of institutional constraints on one's reporting. As a young journalist, if you know no better, you simply come to accept that journalism is done in a certain kind of way, that certain stories are suitable and others unsuitable.
  25. Jonathan Cook - Response to Intellectual Cleansing Part 1 (October 5, 2008)
    However grateful we should be to the tiny minority of dissident writers, their relegation to the margins of the commentary pages of Britain’s “leftwing” media serves a useful purpose for corporate interests. It helps define the “character” of the British media as provocative, pluralistic and free-thinking – when in truth they are anything but. It is a vital component in maintaining the fiction that a professional media is a diverse media.
  26. Intellectual Cleansing Part 1 (October 2, 2008)
    Keeping the media safe for big business.
  27. Covering Israel-Palestine: The BBC's Double Standards (April 22, 2008)
    The priorities of the news media mean that the more Palestinians are killed, the less importance their deaths have to news organisations. Conversely, the fewer Israelis killed the more seriousness their deaths are accorded.
  28. A pro-Israel group's plan to rewrite history on Wikipedia (April 21, 2008)
    Electronic Intifada exposes a secret scheme by a pro-Israel pressure group to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.
  29. If I Can't Dance .... (March 25, 2008)
    Rovics asks, why is so much of the left in the US so attached to being so dreadfully boring? Why do so many people on the left apparently have no appreciation for the power and importance of culture? And when organizers, progressive media and others on the left do acknowledge culture, why is it usually kept on the sidelines?
  30. Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents (March 1, 2008)
    Advice and technical tips for the best way to launch a blog and how to get round online censorship. It includes an explanation of how to blog anonymously and contains articles by bloggers, particularly in Egypt and Burma.
  31. Agreement on terms (March 16, 2007)
    I have come to accept that western journalists cannot accurately, let alone objectively, represent the Middle East and the Arab world. The problem is not that journalists do not always adhere to their own professional codes and methods, though that does happen. It is that even if correspondents strictly obey all the rules, they still present a fundamentally biased and skewed picture of the Middle East.
  32. Journalism as a Weapon of War (April 14, 2006)
    On 14 April 2006, the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University in New York brought together John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk and Charles Glass for a discussion entitled 'Breaking the Silence: War, lies and empire'. The following is a transcript of John Pilger's address - 'War by Media'
  33. Media Manipulation (March 16, 2005)
    Media manipulation often involves government or corporate propaganda and spin. Sometimes organizations and governments can feed fake news or politically or ideologically slanted stories to broadcasters which depict them as quality news items and journalism.
  34. The Manipulation of Fear (2005)
    Chomsky discusses the effects of using fear as a control mechanism to manipulate the population.
  35. Challenged Books List (2004)
    A partial list of books subjected to censorship attempts in Canada from the early 1980s to 2003.
  36. When journalists forget that murder is murder (August 18, 2001)
    When Israelis are involved, our moral compass, our ability to report the truth, dries up.
  37. News Media Stifle Ideas and Debate (July 1, 1997)
    Far from providing democracy's oxygen, as they claim, the news media today legitimize a fundamentally undemocratic system. Instead of keeping the public informed, they manufacture public consent for policies which favour their owners: the corporate elite.
  38. Recovering the Sandinista Murals (1997)
    Obliterating the artifacts of the revolution is an important task for those who want to rewrite history. David Kunzle's book, The Murals of Revolutionary Nicaragua 1979-1992, is thus more than a catalog -- it's a weapon in the struggle to keep the promise of revolution alive.
  39. What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream (1997)
    Noam Chomsky shares his approach to analyzing media and reveals the meaning and consequence of the strategic design of communication.
  40. Tracking the News that Wasn’t (1996)
    A review of two books about media bias and censorship.
  41. News and Dissent: The Press and The Politics of Peace in Canada - Review (1991)
    Review of News and Dissent: The Press and The Politics of Peace in Canada, by Robert Hackett.
  42. Connexions Annual Overview: Arts, Media, Culture (October 1, 1989)
    The established wisdom has it that the media are neutral purveyors of news and entertainment, while the arts are about individual creativity and cultural values untainted by the vulgar concerns of politics and economics.
  43. Little Brother Watches Back (June 1, 1987)
    Perhaps the most exciting aspect of working in the margins is the effect on the mainstream. What innovation in radio, television, journalism, or, for that matter, any social institution or relationship has not first appeared on the margin, only to be adapted and adopted. Margin and mainstream in dialectic move society forward.
  44. Radical Newspapers (February 1, 1979)
    A radical newspaper succeeds to the extent that in engages in dialogue with its readers and community, rather than in preaching.
  45. Science fiction is more than just Buck Rogers (February 1, 1979)
    Like most modern literature, science fiction is concerned with the alienated human condition, yet it articulates this concern in a distinct manner, as a form of literature concerned with the implications of the problems engendered by industrial society.
  46. Radio Alice: Radio in Action in Italy (May 1, 1978)
    Radio in action in Italy.
  47. A User's Guide to Détournement (May 1, 1956)
    Détournement means deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something aside from its normal course or purpose.
  48. Politics and the English Language (1946)
    In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism., question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

Selected Websites and Organizations

This is a small sampling of organizations and websites concerned with arts, media and culture in the Connexions Directory. For more organizations and websites, check the Connexions Directory Subject Index, especially under topics such as media, culture, censorship, media criticism, and alternative media.

Other Links & Resources

George Grosz. Germany: A Winter's Tale.

Books, Films and Periodicals

This is a small sampling of books anf films related to arts, media and culture in the Connexions Online Library. For more books and other resources, check the Connexions Library Subject Index, especially under topics such as media, culture, censorship, media criticism, and alternative media.

  1. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
    The Experience of Modernity
    Author: Berman, Marshall
    Berman examines the clash of classes, histories, and clutures in the modern world, and ponders our prospects for coming to terms with the relationship between a liberating social and philosophical idealism and a complex, bureaucratic materialism.
  2. Autonomous Media
    Activating Resistance & Dissent
    Author: Langlois, Andrea; Dubois, Frederic
    Essays written by media activists examining the efforts of communities and social movements to appropriate media technologies.
  3. Avenge But One of My Two Eyes
    Author: Mograbi, Avi
    Israeli director Avi Mograbi documents what he calls the "culture of death" in the psychology of Israel the occupier.
  4. Beyond a Boundary
    Author: James, C.L.R.
    Part memoir of a boyhood in a black colony (by one of the founders of African nationalism), part passionate celebration of the game of cricket, this book raises serious questions about race, class, politics, and the factgs of colonial oppression.
  5. Control Room
    Author: Noujaim, Jehane (director)
    Shows the coverage of the 2003 Iraqi war from the perspective of Al Jazeera, the Arab world's most popular news outlet.
  6. Culture Inc.
    The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression
    Author: Schiller, Herbert I.
    Schiller defends democratic expression and free access to information while demonstrating the ways in which public expression, public space, and public access to information are becoming increasingly limited and controlled.
  7. Democracy's Oxygen
    How Corporations Control the News
    Author: Winter, James
  8. The Empire God Built
    Inside Pat Robertson's media machine
    Author: Foege, Alec
    A profile of the demagogue who become one of the most successful media moguls in the world.
  9. Film and the Anarchist Imagination
    Author: Porton, Richard
    A survey of the depiction anarchism in film — from the stereotypes of bearded bomb throwers, to the early cinema of Griffith and Rene Clair, to the work of Godard, Wertmuller, and Loach.
  10. Global Media Megalomedia The voice of globalization
    New Internationalist April 2001
    The effects of globa media in different parts of the world. Discusses how the media promotes globalization as well as how it is an integral part of the process. How news can get distorted by the structure of the media itself. The hidden history of Western media propaganda and how globalization has affected Singapore.
  11. Inventing Reality
    The Politics of News Media
    Author: Parenti, Michael
    Parenti sets out to demonstrate how the news media distort important aspects of social and political life and why they do.
  12. Inventing Tax Rage
    Misinformation in the National Post
    Author: Patriquin, Larry
    How the National Post created an agenda for the tax cuts that mostly benefits the wealthy.
  13. Manufacturing Consent
    The Political Economy of the Mass Media
    Author: Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam
    Contrary to the usual image of the press and cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitious in its search for truth, Herman and Chomsky depict how an underlying elite consensus largely structures all facets of the news. They analyze how issues are framed and topics chosen, and the way in which the marketplace and the economics of publishing significantly shape the news.
  14. Manufacturing Consent
    Author: Achbar, Mark; Wintonick, Peter
    A film about Noam Chomsky's ideas about the media, ideology, propaganda, and elite control of society's institutions.
  15. Media Control
    The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda
    Author: Chomsky, Noam
    Chomsky begins by asserting two models of democracy—one in which the public actively participates, and one in which the public is manipulated and controlled. According to Chomsky “propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state,” and the mass media is the primary vehicle for delivering propaganda in the United States.
  16. The Missing News
    Filters and Blind Spots in Canada's Press
    Author: Hackett, Robert A.; Gruneau, Richard; with Donald Gutstein, Timothy A. Gibson and Newswatch Canada
    Asks a number of questions, including: How well do the news media filter reality, for what purposes, through what processes and in whose interests? How do newspapers and TV stations choose what news is printed or aired, which letters will be published, or who will be accorded credibility?
  17. Necessary Illusions
    Thought Control in Democratic Societies
    Author: Chomsky, Noam
    An inquiry into the nature of the media and the role of intellectuals in "a political system where the population cannot be disciplined by force, and thus must be subjected to more subtle forms of ideological control."
  18. Newspeak in the 21st Century
    Author: Edwards, David; Cromwell, David
    Revealing the lethal bias in 'balanced' reporting.
  19. The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media
    Author: Steven, Peter
    Peter Steven aims to make readers realize the power and influence of dominant media but, at the same time, also understand that they are not "omnipotent" and that there are alternative forms available.
  20. Sign Crimes/Road Kill
    From Mediascape to Landscape
    Author: Nelson, Joyce
    A collection of thirty short essays by Joyce Nelson, a writer specializing in the politics of the mass media.
  21. Society of the Spectacle
    Author: Debord, Guy
    An analysis of modern society and how it can be changed written in the form of 221 theses. The first thesis reads: "In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation." Translator Ken Knabb describes the book as "an effort to clarify the nature of the society in which we find ourselves and the advantages and drawbacks of various methods for changing it. Every single thesis has a direct or indirect bearing on issues that are matters of life and death."
  22. Taking the Risk Out of Democracy
    Corporate Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty
    Author: Carey, Alex
    The twentieth-century history of corporate propaganda practiced by U.S. businesses and the ways in which such corporate propaganda was exported to, and adopted by, other western democracies especially the United Kingdom and Australia.
  23. Traces of Magma
    An Annotated Bibliography of Left Literature
    Author: Knight, Rolf
    An annotated bibliography of left wing novels which deal with the lives of working people during the twentieth century.
  24. Ways of Seeing
    Author: Berger, John
    Seeing establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.
  25. Weapons of Mass Persuasion
    Marketing the War Against Iraq
    Author: Rutherford, Paul
    Rutherford, an academic and media critic at the University of Toronto, tries to show how the marketing campaign for the war against Iraq was constructed and carried out with the aid of a compliant media.



Learning from our History

Coming soon




Resources for Activists

The Connexions Calendar - An event calendar for activists.

Media Names & Numbers - A comprehensive directory of Canada's print and broadcast media. (CX5857).

AK Press - A worker-run collective that publishes and distributes radical books, visual and audio media, and other mind-altering material.

Alternative Press Center - Dedicated to providing access to and increasing public awareness of the alternative press. Publishes the Alternative Press Index. .

Brave New Theaters - Provides world changers with films and organizing tools to bring attention to, raise money for, and take action around the issues you care deeply about. .

PeaceButtons.info - Buttons, posters and signs promoting peace and justice..

Sources - A directory that enables journalists to find spokespersons of organizations. Organizations that list themselves in Sources signficantly increase their odds of getting called by reporters when they are doing a story of their issues..