From Amanda Vanstone

It is a fairly simple test, but much of what we hear in the media and from some politicians fails that test. The constant denigration of politicians as a class contributes to the diminution of our civil discourse. Of course, when a politician fails to live up to a required standard, that should be pursued vigorously. But what damages all of us is the endless undermining of our democratic institutions by the seemingly daily presentation of politicians as feckless, self-serving users. Is it any wonder that a Lowy Institute poll shows a worrying proportion of young Australians are not enamoured with democracy? The constant denigration undermines the institutions we enjoy and for which people from all corners of the earth are willing to die.

a new "Citizen Media" outlet... (February 2014)

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/

It made me laugh... As the Sydney Morning Herald touts "Independent Always" to characterise its news, the Australian (Weekend) touts its own line of crap:

"THE MOST PROVOCATIVE, NON-ABUSIVE POLITICAL COLUMNISTS Paul Kelly / Judith Sloane / Chris Kenny / Peter Van Onselen / Grace Collier / Casandra Wilkinson / Greg Sheridan / Dennis Shanahan"  

Impressive list of witless neo-writers for the neo-fascist capitalists, led from the back room by their own Uncle Rupe. One name is missing here in that list of self-agrandised pen-pushers — Janet Albretchsen. Possibly because she is now on the board of the ABC (once more? — appointed by Abbott?) and the boffins at News Limited do not want to push the JOKE beyond the incredible.

I could believe that this "new" slogan was written as a counterpoint to Mike Carlton's behaviour on his responses to readers who abused him and the Herald for having an article basically condemning Israel in the latest war with Hamas.

Now the Australian Muslim groups are threatening to boycott the Herald... But this is another story.

Basically, despite the self-promotion for being non-abusive, I can show you where the News Limited writers (for The Australian, and the Telegraph) have been sneakily lying as well as being destructive to serve their master — and may say in the past they may have been abusive by simply ignoring the truth. One does not have to shout rude words to be abusive. All one has to do is destroy the truth, which these writers are very clever at. It's an abuse of power, thus THEY ARE ABUSIVE.

And this is Team Rupert here at work:

Peter Jukes has written a fascinating account of the News Corp hacking trials, which he had live tweeted throughout. Former Murdoch right hand man, Rodney E. Lever reports.

Watching reports of the phone hacking trials in London in 2011 and 2012 seemed like an unreal experience for me because, knowing the central figure as intimately as I did, I knew that a particular person was missing, never attending the trials, making few comments, continuing his escalating career on the other side of the globe, and pretending that he knew nothing except for the legendary 'one rogue reporter', while his employees took the brunt of British justice.

I had personal experience of how Rupert Murdoch used other people to do his dirty work, always keeping his own hands clean. That is why I walked away from him many years earlier.

Some 60 years, before I had followed with equal interest the Nuremberg Trials, reported in intensive details in newsreels and in the daily newspapers. Adolf Hitler had shot himself in the head in 1945 to avoid his responsibility for the crimes carried out by his trusted followers under his own clandestine and often unspoken instructions.

The London trials of 2011 and 2012 were sparse with information for people in Australia. Our monopolised newspapers seemed to shy away from the expositions that brought them into universal distrust. We turned to the internet and to some of the English papers so we could follow the proceedings in London. The Daily Telegraph (UK) described it as the 'trial of the century', pushing Nuremberg, 1945-1946, off into a well-forgotten past.

There is a fundamental difference between an ad hoc war trial and a British justice system that has slowly developed over a thousand years. British justice was largely copied into early Australian precedent and statutes, so that in Britain and Australia the weight of evidence attempts to balance the guilty against the innocent. The scales of justice in both countries weigh slightly in favour of the innocent and most – though not all – accept that. Lawyers in both countries have made a comfortable living protecting the rights of the guilty and the innocent. Some have become very rich indeed.

IA contributor Peter Jukes, formerly an English TV writer of drama, became our most prolific source during the hacking trials, attending the daily hearings and reporting on them day by day. Now Peter has turned out a book, with the interesting title Beyond Contempt, that completes his intensive coverage and adds a great deal more to the whole story.

Read more: http://www.independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/news-corp-beyond-contempt,6757

In Ferguson, Missouri this week, the public has turned the notion of “see something, say something” back on the state, via a digital tool of enormous power: online pictures and video. Their efforts – which began days before reporters descended when Twitter user @TheePharaohposted pictures immediately after a police officer killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown – have helped bring international attention to both Brown’s death and law enforcement’s disproportionate response to the ensuing protests.

Antonio French, an alderman in nearby St Louis, spent days posting to Twitter pictures and a series of videos of the demonstrations and police actions that he captured on his mobile phone – and was reportedly arrested and then released on Wednesday evening. He is a citizen journalist of the best kind: a credible witness who has helped inform the wider public about a critical matter. Can anyone plausibly doubt that he and the two professional journalists who were briefly taken into custodyafter police demanded they stop recording were targeted because they were documenting law enforcement actions?

Ferguson isn’t the first example of this kind of citizen journalism, which has been going on for years in any number of other places including Iran, Egypt, Occupy Wall Street and Syria. But the videos, blog posts, tweets, and photos from French and others on the ground have complemented the work of the traditional journalists on the scene – and have reminded us of what is becoming a civic duty in today’s America.

It’s a sad comment on the state of law enforcement, but I now encourage people who see the police doing something that seems out of the ordinary to document it with pictures or video and save it (if not post it online). I say that reluctantly, because law enforcement is not, per se, our enemy: “To protect and serve” is deeply honorable motto, and communities are vastly better off where it is followed in good faith. But law enforcement today too often violates the civil liberties of those they are sworn to protect, and the increasing militarization of American law enforcement (an offshoot of the Wars on (Some) Drugs and Terror) is poisoning the trust of many citizens. (For others, particularly in minority communities who have borne the brunt of the “broken windows” model, that trust died long ago.).

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/16/fergusons-citizen-journalists-video

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Back in the 1960s, I took some pictures of police bashing people on the head with truncheons at a political meeting... Of course, the police demanded "if I was shooting pictures"... But because it was so black (it was approaching midnight and there was one 25 Watts bulb lighting an area the size of a soccer field) I said that it was far too dark to get a shot... And proceeded to press the click button without looking through the viewfinder... But that PARTICULAR night I was testing a new black and white film by Kodak called "Recording"... It had a rating of 1000 ASA but could be boosted beyond 4500 ASA "in the baths"... Working in the retouching/photographic business, I had access to a photo lab where I pumped up the ASA rating by raising the bath temperatures to more than 45 degrees Celsius and left the negative for about twice the normal time for "processing". 

That night, in my haste I had coiled the negative badly in parts on the spool but when dried I had quite a few good shots, one of which is on this site somewhere... The search engine on this site has gone to the dogs, so I don't know where to find it...

But there was no follow-up or protest after this incident and I was too scared to show the pictures... and in those days WHERE?... There was no CITIZEN-MEDIA and most of the press was in bed with the government (nothing new)...

It’s extremely rare to have the genesis of a political smear campaign uncovered for all to see, just like it is uncommon to read the correspondence between senior government officials and media backers to attack opponents and critics. And yet, that’s exactly what is unfolding in New Zealand.

New Zealanders are currently witnesses to an expose of unprecedented proportions. These details are contained in investigative journalist Nicky Hager’s new book, Dirty Politics: How Attack Politics is Poisoning New Zealand’s Political Environment. The work has caused an earthquake, entrapping more players every day. New actors like Kit Dotcom are revelling in the outrage, and US journalist Glenn Greenwald has been invited to speak in Auckland a few days before the September poll.

The story revolves around prime minister John Key, the conservative leader facing re-election. Hager has obtained information, emails and Facebook messages from the files of right-wing blogger Cameron Slater, founder of the Whale Oil website. The documents show a deep and intimate connection between Slater and Jason Ede, former senior advisor to Key.

The situation is made worse by the allegation that a senior cabinet minister, Judith Collins, established close ties to Slater to bash enemies. Hager claims that the blogger, with the assistance of Ede, breached an unsecured opposition party Labor computer to obtain private information. Labor party head David Cunliffe says the allegations are “the closest New Zealand’s got to its own kind of Watergate”.

Hager is an experienced journalist with a history of receiving leaks from deep inside the establishment. His 2011 book, Other People’s Wars, was an explosive examination of New Zealand’s extensive involvement in conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and the “war on terror”. A close association with Wikileaks, along with constant attempts to challenge the country’s outward perception of being a quiet nation with few geo-political ambitions, places Hager as a leading, independently minded reporter getting past the spin so dominant in modern politics. He shows how smear, fear and arrogance have become key ingredients of Key’s administration.

...

Without a central leaker, Hager would have no book. He salutes their bravery. “We mustn’t fall for the idea that whistleblowers are doing something wrong. They are the natural reaction to undemocratic government.”

The same applies to Australia. We desperately need a healthier leaking culture to uncover the murky dynamics between corporate, media and government interests. It’s a shame so few journalists are willing to foster this environment and protect sources beyond the reach of intelligence agencies so keen to monitor dissent.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/25/dirty-politics-new-zealands-own-house-of-cards-is-collapsing

Meanwhile we are warned of unsavoury overtaking of the web, away from its"democratic ideals" :

No wonder, them, that Berners-Lee recently took a pop at Facebookagainst taking over the web. "There's this huge corporate pushback," he warned. "We're seeing things in the balance." What he excoriated most was internet giants like Facebook and Twitter treating certain kinds of online traffic differently from others. He calls for net neutrality, which means that internet service providers would be obliged to treat anything – from emails to websites – equally, rather than charging users more for access and services, making it harder for us to communicate freely online, to share data and so make stuff there incomprehensible to those whose minds are dominated by the profit motive. He rounded on Facebook, which has made a lot of noise over its plans extending web access to the developing world for making such connectivity conditional on facilitating the greater domination by Facebook of the digital world. Or as he put it pithily to Zuckerberg: "Don't you dare make a phone that can only go to Facebook.com."

How this ideological struggle plays out remains to be seen. But, given the ruthless success of capitalism, a betting man wouldn't put his money on a guy like Berners-Lee, who isn't in this for money. When his invention went live in Geneva all those years ago, he didn't envisage his open web would become a system of semi-closed platforms that restrict access to their users. Nor did he envisage that his invention would facilitate surveillance on a scale beyond the imaginings of Orwell. At its inception the world wide web seemed to promise an escape from corporate and governmental powers, an egalitarian free-for-all. Now? It has increasingly become a sophisticated extension of them. The hopes once nurtured by the man who invented the web have been not so much abandoned as betrayed.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/24/internet-lost-its-way-tim-berners-lee-world-wide-web

But as one of the comment to this article says:

MarkMK

24 August 2014 10:23pm

The problems the journalist and Tim Berners-Lee raise are not specific to the internet or the WWW, they are just part of human nature.
You could raise the same objection to the invention of Gutenberg's printing press (initially used to print bibles, but subsequently used to print 'Mein Kampf' among other things) or the invention of radio (initially to play music and provide news, but used by Goebbels among others to broadcast political propaganda) or TV.
People will always take something that offers power or influence and use its opportunities to further their own ends. But at least it is easier now for more "ordinary" people to get their message across - before the internet, access to broadcast media was pretty limited.

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One has to shout louder and louder on the new platform to create a citizen media, where science is the centre of information, in which we can distinguish between reality and bullshit... Not as obvious as it seems... as science can be controlled to provide skewed ethical results. This demands some mighty investigation and "healthy" scepticism, even for professional journalists who are fighting a web of deceit (or deliberate profitable dorkiness) from their own masters...

Even the relative concept of sharing information also needs professional journalists — of which I am sad to say, there are less and less — as most new faces on the box (which captures most of the guillible geezers we are) are young greenhorns easily fooled by old political hands for obvious reasons. One needs to have experience blue murder to write a proper piece about it. 

The second community forum organized by the Westender newspaper and the West End Community Association will focus on independent publishing and citizen journalism, and features a panel of independent publishers from across the ideological spectrum, including Independent Australia's David Donovan and No Fibs' Margo Kingston.

According to Kerrod Trott, editor and publisher of the Westender:

“The invisible hand of the market is clearly pointing away from monolithic mainstream media toward a blossoming of small, boutique news outlets that are springing up like weeds to cater to our insatiable appetite for trustworthy news and information."

“What does that mean for us locally?” Kerrod asks.

“Can the old and new media work together? How can the new media survive without a viable business model? Are the old media destined to perish from the face of the earth like the dinosaurs after an extinction event, or can they evolve to suit the new circumstances?”

The forum is your chance to ask these and other questions, to speak to the publishers involved, and to perhaps learn a little more about the new media scene and how it impacts on our community.

6.00pm for 6.30pm
Wednesday 1st April
The Loft
Upstairs at 100 Boundary Street, West End, Brisbane.
More info: 0412 029 663

https://independentaustralia.net/business/business-display/politics-in-t...

See toon at top

WASHINGTON — Nothing has done more to fuel the national debate over police tactics than the dramatic, sometimes grisly videos: A man gasping “I can’t breathe” through a police chokehold on Staten Island, a 12-year-old boy shot dead in a park in Cleveland. And now, perhaps the starkest video yet, showing a South Carolina police officer shooting a fleeing man in the back.

The videos have spurred calls from statehouses to the White House for more officers to attach cameras to their uniforms. While cameras frequently exonerate officers in shootings, the recent spate of videos has raised uncomfortable questions about how much the American criminal justice system can rely on the accounts of police officers when the cameras are not rolling.

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/us/video-of-fatal-shooting-of-walter-scott-reignites-debate-on-police-use-of-force.html?_r=0

Cameras these days are the size of a credit card but slightly thicker. Even my phone with a 3.2 camera, is smaller than a credit card... I sometimes use my cameras to record phone conversation when they tell me the call could be monitored to "quality and training purposes". I of course advise the person at the other end of the blower that I will be recording the call myself "on speaker". This sound a bit like doing some Gus' Big Brother but often when there is a dispute in regard to billings or whatever, it adds more precision to the record of what's what. Works like a charm.

Having camera(s) in the case of a car accident is also useful. Even now, some insurance companies encourage use of email or instant post for pictures ASAP.

In cases involving the police, one may need to be discreet and make safety copies. I've seen police wipe out negatives, in the days of film, but these days it's quite easy to do a quick swap of SD cards "before being caught". The police might smash the camera, but the card can be safely stored away or placed in a small hollow in the ground or a tree, till the frisking fury is passed.

Lucky, at most times the police in Australia is honest and caring — but one cannot be too careful about a rogue officer.