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Monbiot on Undercurrents and Schnews

(posted by richarddirecttv) | 06.12.2004 14:21 | Oxford

George Monbiot praises Undercurrents and Schnews on their tenth anniversaries

3/12/2004
The Alternative Media

Filed under:

* media
* protest

Undercurrents and Schnews are both ten years old, and still blooming.

By George Monbiot. Published on www.monbiot.com, 3rd December 2004

When most of the media is controlled by people (the rich and powerful) who have an active interest in ensuring that the misdeeds of the rich and powerful are not exposed, the alternative media become critical to the survival of democracy. Rational political choices – who to vote for, which policies to support, which to oppose – are impossible if you don’t understand the implications, and the very information you need most is the information you are least likely to obtain. Unless, that is, you are lucky enough to have discovered Undercurrents and Schnews. There are plenty of alternative media in Europe, but I’ve yet to come across any which are as informative and entertaining as these. If ever I forget why I’m an activist, Undercurrents and Schnews are there to remind me. Both of them are ten years old this year.

Undercurrents is a video and DVD newsreel, and an antidote to everything that’s wrong with mainstream television news. It treats the rich and powerful as objects of ridicule rather than objects of reverence. Its mission is to hold them to account, to expose the injustices they cause and to encourage people to knock them off their perches. This is where it really excels: inspiring hope in situations which at first sight look hopeless. The latest tape contains a remarkable film about a students’ strike at Harvard: the most powerful university on earth. The students locked themselves into the university offices in protest at the pay and conditions Harvard was imposing on its janitors. They stayed there until the university caved in. There’s extraordinary footage of the escape from the Woomera detention camp in Australia, and coverage of the successful campaign against an oil company investing in Burma. There’s also some brilliant animation and a genuinely funny spoof of Bush and Blair’s foreign policy. Fahrenheit 911 and Supersize Me look pretty tame when you’ve seen this stuff. Whenever I’ve seen a copy of Undercurrents, I feel my head’s going to explode with inspiration and new ideas.

Schnews is a weekly newspaper, published in both print and electronic forms. It is funny and wise and well-written. I love its corny headlines, and its ability to convey complex issues with clarity and concision. I receive 300 emails a day, but when Schnews comes out on a Friday, it is always the first one I open. It tackles the issues which should be the stuff of daily conversation, but which the mainstream media generally ignores, such as the government’s refusal to hold corporate killers to account, the scandalous private finance initiative, the new laws restricting protest and civil liberties and the persecution of gypsies and travellers. If our mainstream media had the same commitment to exposing injustice as Schnews does, Bush and Blair would have been be out on their arses by now. And it always has news about successful protests, in Britain and the rest of the world. The latest edition contains the best reporting of Ukraine’s orange revolution I’ve read so far. I think, at last, I understand what’s happening there.

Both of them are run on a shoestring – Undercurrents for example, can’t release another tape unless enough people buy the current one. And yet they have more to say about the real state of the world than any of our lavishly-funded papers and broadcasters.

You can buy the latest Undercurrents, plus the back issues, at www.undercurrents.org/unn.

You can subscribe to Schnews at  http://www.schnews.org.uk/index.html. If you want to see what you’ve missed over the past ten years, it has just published a collection called Schnews at Ten.

(posted by richarddirecttv)

Comments

Hide the following 6 comments

monbiot is an upper class bunteresque shit

07.12.2004 14:12

monbiot has slagged the movement off before, including reclaim the streets, when it really mattered - don't be fooled by his mock radicalism and don't be taken in by his tactical praise for the movement - he can't be trusted he's just a poor man's jonathan porritt and we know what happened to him. rid our movement of this baseless hero worship of people like monbiot, hertz, and, dare i say it, chomsky.

captain skid


That's bollocks...

07.12.2004 16:45

I've read a lot of Monbiot, including Captive State and Age of Consent, and he's a good and innovative thinker, and a very useful journalist.

Unlike Captain Skid here, who seems to have shit for brains.

Major Mistake


Helpfull comment

07.12.2004 16:46

> monbiot is an upper class bunteresque shit

I think the movement you are referring to imploded a year or more ago... thus all he and many other older wizer activist said came true... don’t shoot the messenger is an old saying... RCTS has been dead for many years... a pretty stupid shadow is what he was slaging off not the "movement as such".

I agree with your advice to get rid of hero worship and monbiot and chomsky have sead the same thing many times... now porritt is a different story.

"captain skid" this so called moment needs a diversity of tactics and strategies, the resent compleat GM victory is a good example of actavisam at its best, not one monolithic solution - stop slagging people off and do something practical, affective and useful... at the moment the "movement has lost its way” you might whont to do something creative and most impotently practical about that. If you are in London get involved in Ramparts, if in Oxford Hurst street both real attempts at making a real alternative not just biter, divisive and disempowering words.

Please if you post to IMC can you be more “polite” as your bitterness is very off-putting to the people who use the sight.

thanks

hamish


"the movement"

07.12.2004 18:18

"The movement", "rid our movement of this and that", blah blah. What are you talking about?

There isn't One Big Movement, with rules and regs, and people working to stay on the Officially Acceptable List.

Let him do what he does, and you do what you do, and I do what I do, to change things. And where it makes sense to work together, then let's do.

Corporal Punishment


"the movement"

08.12.2004 18:42

The movement is in "..." which implies I not shore what I mean by this... but the is such a thing... some people are struggling for human liberation some for human slavery... in this the is a social movement that even the more enlightened greens are part of. Though the are those that just whont to replace on set of maicals for anther...

hamish


yawn

20.12.2004 13:13

"the movement" is a bourgeois label tagged on to any autonomous action by dull intellectuals who don't have anything better to do than sit around inventing labels for things.

The implication in Hamish's post that there is a correlation between being older and being wiser is (aside from being immensley patronizing to younger activists) extremely tenuous. Monbiot has admitted being wrong on trade, for example:
 http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2003/06/24/i-was-wrong-about-trade/
Do a google for monbiot and wrong for more.

The original "monbiot is a bunteresque shit" posting was funny and offensive, but not particularly informative - I'd be interested to know some facts rather than rantings, howsabout posting some links? Or more detailed reasons why you've come to that conclusion?

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