Reclaim your media
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It’s not even really a debate anymore. It’s almost gotten to the point of cliché. Just about everyone with even the slightest activist leaning and even many who don’t have one knows that the corporate media does not represent all sides or show a complete picture of any story. Getting a progressive message into the press is itself a culture-jam.
In response to this and aided largely by the internet, there are new independent grassroots written, radio and even TV media springing up all the time.
Democracy Now was one of the first in recent memory to break with convention and achieve success and recognition by presenting an unfiltered take on the news. Indymedia and it’s Quebec version CMAQ are another good example. These have inspired others to do likewise. Groundwire is a new monthly national Canadian radio news show put together by the National Campus and Community Radio Association and its member stations across the country, such as Montreal’s CKUT. There are also countless blogs and sites hoping to and succeeding in breaking the corporate stranglehold on widely distributed memes.
While these outlets do plenty to reclaim the news for ordinary people and activists, they don’t change the situation for arts coverage? It still, in large part, remains in the hands of the powers that be. Many artists with something to say that goes truly against the grain and in many cases challenges the very institutions that traditionally are resources for arts funding still don’t have a loud enough voice in the mediasphere.
That, in a nutshell, is the raison d’être not only for this blog, but for our two sister blogs The Talking Stick and Le baton de parole as well as infringement TV, which is currently running a loop of videos from infringement artists, activists and culture-jammers (including OTL) and will be premiering live on Thursday, September 22nd at 7pm.
Hopefully more such projects will follow, because artists need to reclaim their media, too.
