This image purportedly showing Ivanka Trump and Wendi Deng posing with Vladimir Putin is a digital fake. The original, showing them posing instead with film director Baz Luhrmann at a party in 2015, was taken by Hannah Thompson for Vogue. 

A free media and democracy are inseparable, or so we are told. A complex normative paraphernalia has emerged to describe the key responsibilities placed on media in the emergence and sustenance of democracy: as an independent watchdog and monitor of unchecked power, a tribune of the people, a defender of minorities, a fourth estate and a public sphere.Free media are said to provide the oxygen, the lubrication or indeed the sinews of a fully functioning and robust democracy.

Yet in those liberal democracies of the west where this vocabulary is most deeply entrenched, we are seeing quite the opposite: a media that all too often preys on the vulnerable and bows down before the powerful; a media whose noble crusade for truth and justice has been replaced by a carnival of gossip and spectacle; a media that demonstrates a commitment to consumer, rather than popular sovereignty; a media that is no longer an outlier but a constitutive part of class rule; a media that has adopted the mantras of the free market rather than the difficult practices involved in ensuring free expression, political participation and democratic renewal.

One of the consequences of this degeneration has been a sharp decline in the media’s authority and legitimacy. In 2017, the Edelman Trust Barometer reported that the media was distrusted in 82% of the 28 countries they surveyed and it had dropped to an all-time low in 17 of those countries. Traditional media showed the steepest fall. This collapse in trust is far from unique to the media and is related to the same backlash against entrenched interests that has also eaten into the credibility of neoliberal political parties and politicians. Given that the mainstream media are seen to be ever more closely entangled with elite power, so are they also implicated in the same mire of corruption and scandal.
 

Oversight?

For example, we now know that Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump are great friends. Murdoch was in the room when Trump gave his first foreign interview to a UK journalist. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was a trustee of the nearly $300 million fortune Murdoch set aside for the children he had with his third wife, Wendi Deng. She rescinded this role before her father’s inauguration but significantly after Election Day. This resonates with similar power entanglements in the UK where the closeness of the relationship between Tony Blair and Rupert Murdoch came to light when Wendi Deng revealed that Blair was godfather to one of their children.

The Murdoch-Trump relationship is proving problematic even for journalists at the Wall Street Journal – owned by Murdoch’s News Corp – many of whom believe that the newspaper has held back from more aggressively covering Donald Trump, they suspect, under pressure from Murdoch. This is a media marked by commerce, complicity and caution rather than critique, creativity and a journalism of conscience.

This collusion is not incidental to but intertwined with liberal capitalism of which our mainstream media industries are very much a part: a media where editors and top politicians dine at the same tables, are educated at the same institutions and share many of the same corporate values and ideological agendas; a media that is disaggregated in theory but centralized in practice; a media where the tools may be open source but the where the most powerful networks remain closed. This is a media marked by commerce, complicity and caution rather than critique, creativity and a journalism of conscience. It is not a media that offers us meaningful oversight over the powerful or adequate representation of the conflicts that make up public life.

The collapse in trust, however, goes deeper even than the sordid entanglement between media and political elites. While so much of today’s political journalism promotes a narrow and neoliberal ‘conventional wisdom’, parliamentary democracy itself appears increasingly distant from the lives of ordinary people, while across Europe it has also presided over devastating programmes of privatization, financialisation and deregulation. We are now left with the consequences of a politics of austerity: high levels of personal debt, in-work poverty, precarity and massive inequality.

‘Earthquakes’

These are the conditions in which a series of political ‘earthquakes’ have taken place across the world: the collapse of the main parties in the French presidential elections of 2017, the election of Donald Trump, the resurgence of the anti-austerity politics of Jeremy Corbyn and the decision taken by UK voters in 2016 to leave the European Union.  These events have many derivations – nationalism and racism on the one hand but also the fury and despair of marginalised voices who have used these opportunities to kick back against a post-war party system that has failed them and a professional political elite that has largely ignored them.  

Our elite media tell us that one of the main reasons for these ‘irrational’ acts is that we are surrounded by ‘fake news’ perpetuated by groups on both the left and the right – the ‘guerilla warfare’ referred to by the BBC journalist Nick Robinson in a recent lecture. But the ‘real’ fake news – information deliberately circulated online in order to deceive audiences – is not an exception to but the logical result of a market economy that privileges short-term rewards and commercial impact.

While fake news more generally is far from a new phenomenon, the rise of programmatic advertising and the domination of attention by Google and Facebook – hardly peripheral developments but part of a structural readjustment of the media – have only intensified these market distortions. Popularity, volume, consumption, sales and entertainment dictate the form and content of the internet just as they dictate much of the form and content of commercial media.
 

Fake democracy

The central issue for us, however, is not that we are suddenly surrounded by ‘fake news’ but that we have been living with fake democracy. A democratic facade that promises much but delivers little. It has promised popular rule and self-governance through market exchanges and constitutional guarantees but instead we have a shrink-wrapped democracy that celebrates only the most pallid forms of participation and engagement with all political nutrients removed. The problem is that elite media institutions … rely on the same personnel, the same evangelical belief in algorithms and the same agendas that failed dismally.

So we are now facing a new democratic fakery in which elite media institutions – from the BBC and the New York Times to Google and Facebook – are using the crisis posed by the growth of anti-establishment politics to argue that only they are capable of sustaining a consensual, rational and credible information ecology that can expose ‘fake news’ and protect ‘established truths’.

The problem is that they intend to achieve this by relying on the same personnel, the same evangelical belief in algorithms and the same agendas that failed dismally in their democratic responsibilities (not least in the case of the British press, by refusing independent and effective regulation), that are intimately connected to the neoliberal order.

Attempts to construct a reassuring narrative that contrasts ‘professional journalism’ (based on ethical responsibility and impartiality) with ‘fake news’ (anything that departs from established protocols) are somewhat disingenuous. What we are seeing are powerful media interests conducting a propaganda campaign designed to suggest that only they can be trusted with safeguarding freedom of expression and a commitment to truth, and that only they can be guaranteed to preserve democratic rights. Yet while we desperately need a journalism that is both fearless and rigorous, we have no reason to believe that the existing professional model is capable of delivering it. The interactive and decentralized affordances of digital media ought to make this easier to achieve – but only if they are freed from the same structures of controlling state and profit-maximizing market that have distorted and undermined previous communication ‘revolutions’. Leveson 2 must go ahead.

Instead we need to continue to challenge some of the most obvious abuses of media power – to oppose further media concentration, to expose corruption in media systems (Leveson 2 must go ahead), to insist on independent and effective regulation of the press and to resist the stereotypes and distortions that seek to normalize austerity, racism and militarism – and then to provide an alternative to the crumbling consensus of centrist voices.

But we also need to figure out how to turn the anger and militancy that we see reflected in the votes for Corbyn and Sanders or in the protests against Trump and the Spanish state into progressive projects: projects in which truth-telling and communicative capacity emerge from the bottom up and not through paternalistic diktat or pure market exchange.

A democratic media is going to need a mass movement for real democracy … and that may well be on its way.

Courtesy: Open Democracy
 

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Professor Aijaz Ahmad believes that the US tried to defeat Russia in Ukraine, Syria and contain China in Asia. Both these attempts have failed miserably. Instead, it has brought Russia and China together. The US is now trying to hold the line with its European allies, and sees the emerging Russia-China axis as a threat to its hegemony. Only this explains the US last desperate throw of the dice with the Obama sanctions before he demits office.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

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एस्‍सार कंपनी ने अख़बारों को आज पूरे पन्‍ने का एक विज्ञापन दिया है। विज्ञापन कहता है कि एस्‍सार ने अपनी कंपनियों एस्‍सार ऑयल और वादिनार बंदरगाह की बिक्री कर है जिससे 85,000 करोड़ रुपये प्राप्‍त हुए हैं। कंपनी का दावा है कि यह भारत में हुआ सबसे बड़ा एफडीआइ यानी प्रत्‍यक्ष विदेशी निवेश है। इस सूचना के नीचे नरेंद्र मोदी-पुतिन की मुस्‍कराती तस्‍वीरें छपी हैं।

उसके नीचे की पंक्ति कहती है कि यह एक ऐतिहासिक दिन है जो दोनों देशों के बीच ज्‍यादा साझीदारी के लिए दोनों नेताओं के साझा नजरिये को साथ लाने का काम करता है। सवाल उठता है कि क्‍या एक निजी कंपनी के बिकने को एफडीआइ का नाम दिया जा सकता है? क्‍या देश की एक कंपनी अपने विदेशी कारोबार को बेच दे तो उस पर राष्‍ट्राध्‍यक्ष को गर्व होना चाहिए?

सवाल इससे भी ज्‍यादा बड़ा है क्‍योंकि अख़बारों की इस सौदे से जुड़ी ख़बरों में भी इस बिक्री को एफडीआइ बताया गया है। बिज़नेस स्‍टैंडर्ड की ख़बर में एस्‍सार समूह के निदेशक प्रशांत रुइया के हवाले से कहा गया है कि इस बिक्री से आने वाला आधा पैसा समूह की कर्जदारी को निप्‍आने में खर्च होगा। रुइया के मुताबिक इस बिक्री से आने वाला पैसा विदेशी और स्‍थानीय देनदारों का कर्ज चुकाने में खर्च होगा, जिसकी राशि 88000 करोड़ रुपये है।

अगर कोई कंपनी अपना कारोबार बेचकर कर्ज चुका रही है, तो यह पैसा एफडीआइ कैसे हुआ? अख़बार इस सौदे को ''विन-विन डील'' बता रहा है। अख़बार प्‍वाइंटर में कहता है कि यह देश का सबसे बड़ा एफडीआइ है जिससे एस्‍सार का आधा कर्ज समाप्‍त हो जाएगा।

देश के सबसे बड़े कारोबारी अख़बार दि इकनॉमिक टाइम्‍स की ख़बर के मुताबिक क्रेडिट सुइस का अनुमान है कि एस्‍सार समूह एक लाख करोड़ की कर्जदारी में है जो उसे देश की तीन सबसे बड़ी कर्जदार कंपनियों में शामिल करता है। इस ख़बर में असल बात इस पंक्ति से ज़ाहिर होती है: ''एस्‍सार के साथ यह सौदा क्रेमलिन की कूटनीतिक विजय के रूप में देखा जा रहा है जो पड़ोसी देशों के प्रति रूस के विस्‍तारवादी रवैये के खिलाफ़ मॉस्‍को पर पश्चिम के प्रतिबंधों का असर हलका करने में मदद कर सकता है।'' ख़बर कहती है कि एस्‍सार ऑयल के खरीदार रोसनेफ्ट कंपनी के चेयरमैन इगोर सेचिन पुतिन के करीबी सलाहकारों में से एक हैं।
   
Courtesy: Media Vigil
 

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A month ago, this column predicted that Russian hard-liners were on the verge of seizing total power in a “stealthy” coup. Twenty–six days later, President Boris Yeltsin stunned the world by resigning and handing over power to a junta of KGB “Chekists” and senior generals led by former spy and now acting president, Vladimir Putin.

Yeltsin agreed to resign in return for immunity for himself and his family from prosecution for massive corruption. The era of Weimar Russia was ended, and the West’s $100 billion–plus investment in Yeltsin’s “democratic Russia” a total loss. The Clinton administration and its media backers tried to cover up the magnitude of this catastrophe by echoing Russian propaganda claims that Putin and his cronies were “clean”, “youthful reformers,” “covert democrats” and crusaders against terrorism.

Far from reform, what we are seeing in Moscow is the seizure of political and, increasingly, economic power by a younger generation of KGB officers, like Putin, from the old First Chief Directorate (Foreign Intelligence). Forget the beetle–browed KGB thugs of the 1950s. These ’80s– and ’90s–vintage agents are hard–edged, sophisticated, worldly professionals.
Putin and his junta gained power by whipping up traditional Russian racial and religious hatred for Muslim Chechen, then launching a merciless campaign to exterminate the Caucasian rebels. Moscow, in the usual style of international malefactors, used the Christmas/New Year holidays to mask its attempted storming of the Chechen capital, Grozny, and laying waste to the rest of the tiny republic of 1.5 million people.

The valiant Chechen mujahedin, however, refused to surrender. Some 1,500 Chechen fighters dug into the ruins of Grozny have managed to defend the city against ferocious assaults of some 60,000–80,000 Russian troops for the past month.

Russian generals claimed they would conquer Grozny two weeks ago. Russian forces are mercilessly pounding the city to rubble with massed batteries of heavy artillery and rocket launchers, as well as carpet–bombing and strikes by ground–attack aircraft and helicopter gunships. Forty thousand Chechen civilians are trapped in the city, cowering in shelters with little food or water.

Russia is violating all norms of warfare and numerous international conventions by making extensive use of fuel air explosives delivered by aircraft and rockets. These weapons release a fine mist of explosive fuel over a target, then detonate. The resulting blasts are of enormous destructive power second only to tactical nuclear weapons. All of the oxygen under the blast zone’s footprint — the size of a football-field — is burned up, sucking the air out of the lungs of victims. Devastating overpressure ruptures internal organs and kills anyone sheltering in basements or bunkers.

Grozny and most other Chechen towns have been blasted to ruins by fuel air and conventional explosives. The Russians have showered tens of thousands of anti–personnel mines in Chechnya’s mountainous south in an effort to seal the border with Georgia. Foreign journalists are being kept out of the war zone lest they report details of Russia’s latest slaughter of the rebellious Chechen. Almost all news on the conflict comes from Moscow’s propaganda organs, which keep repeating the mantra that Chechen are “Islamic terrorists” — where have we heard this before? — who must be “cleansed.”

Ironically, while the U.S. wrung its hands over the possible threat of terrorism during millennium celebrations, Russia was committing one of the worst acts of international terrorism of our era in Chechnya.

Washington issued a few tut-tuts over Russia’s brutal actions, but continued to back Moscow with diplomatic support and billions of cash.
As Russians poured shells on the Chechen for daring to seek independence from 300 year’s of brutal colonial rule by Moscow, President Bill Clinton actually described Russia’s siege of Grozny a “liberation.” The same Clinton hailed Yeltsin as “a Russian Abraham Lincoln” after his forces massacred 100,000 Chechen in 1994–96.

Why this nauseating sycophancy? Because Clinton agreed to give Moscow a free hand in Chechnya in exchange for Moscow allowing the U.S. to keep bashing away at Iraq. Clinton’s key financial backers want Iraq destroyed.

Meanwhile, bands of fierce Chechen fighters continue one of our era’s most heroic struggles. The courage of these mountain men is almost beyond comprehension. They are lightly armed, surrounded, low on munitions and supplies, hopelessly outnumbered 100-1, under constant bombardment … and forgotten.

Clinton has hailed the Putin regime as “new, democratic Russian leaders.” In fact, the Chekists and generals now running the Kremlin look very much like the old, brutal Soviet Russia, only this time less ideological and more efficiently ruthless.

(Reproduced from The Ottawa Sun, January 10, 2000. We are grateful to Asif and Ahmed Shaikh for drawing our attention to the above article. E-mail: as@alumni.indiana.edu)

Archived from Communalism Combat, January 2000. Year 7  No, 55, International

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