[IMC-Editorial] crisis/media: the uncertain states of reportage

[Sheri Herndon]

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>Date: Fri, 3 Jan 2003 10:08:43 +1100
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>Crisis/Media: The Uncertain States of Reportage
>
>Sarai-Waag Workshop
>at Sarai-CSDS, Delhi
>March 3-5, 2003
>
>"The hottest place in hell is reserved for those
>who tried to stay neutral in times of crisis..."
>The Inferno, Dante Alighieri
>
>Crisis/Media, is a conference that will bring together media
>professionals, activists, and scholars to discuss crisis in the media,
>and the crisis of the media today.
>
>Since September 11, crises in the media have become everyday events
>and have taken on global dimensions. But what happens when crisis
>becomes commonplace? How can media tell the stories
>behind/beneath the crisis? How are the tensions between local/global,
>mainstream /alternative, event/representation unfolding? In thinking
>about these and other questions, the conference will try to focus on both
>the ways in which media cover/create/manage spectacular crisis
>events, and on the crisis that this reportage has produced for media
>itself. (For a full description See Below)
>
>Key Issues:
>
>* Are the Crises in the Media, the Crises of the Media? Where do the
>lines between reporting in the mainstream and the alternative media
>harden, and where do they blur?
>
>* Has the "broadcast" model, which was the mainstay of the big media
>business, proved to be too bulky and too conservative in a world in
>which things change by the minute?
>
>* Has the internet really made it possible for correspondents to be
>co-respondents to the realties of a changing world?
>
>Sessions:
>
>* South Asia : Bearing Witness to the Truth in Difficult Times
>* Correspondents in the Crossfire : Reporting Situations of Conflict
>* The Crisis of Everyday Life : Dispatches from Global Cities
>* Stories of Earth and Water : Reporting Ecological Crises
>* The Future of Global Independent Media Activism
>
>Special focuses and reports from:
>
>South Asia, Argentina, Australia, the Balkans
>
>Activities:
>
>Plenaries, Discussions, Open Sessions, Screenings
>
>Presentations:
>
>Apart from previously scheduled presentations, the workshop will
>feature some open sessions. If you are interested in making a
>presentation in one of the open sessions, please send a brief
>description of what you want to do to crisis-media at sarai.net
>
>Support for Travel and Accommodation:
>
>In general, we will not be able to cover any transport or accommodation
>costs, for coming to Delhi for the workshop, or for staying in Delhi. If you
>need a letter of support from Sarai, in order to raise funding for a trip
>that
>you are planning, then we will be happy to send you one. Write to
>rachel at sarai.net asking for a letter of support.
>
>Pre-Registration:
>
>If you are not presenting a paper but wish to attend the conference, you
>can pre-register by sending an email to crisis-media at sarai.net.
>
>Webpage:
>
>For updates, notices, and schedules from now until the workshop,
>check www.sarai.net/events/crisis_media/crisis_media.htm  Links to
>various interesting resources and readings are also available from this
>webpage.
>
>For further details contact rachel at sarai.net
>
>Full Description:
>
>CRISIS/MEDIA : The Uncertain States of Reportage
>
>
>Ever since the events of September 11, the image of a  world in crisis is
>something that we have  grown accustomed to. It is not as if crises have
>not had global dimensions before. Perhaps all that is different is the
>frequency, intensity and reiteration of the reportage of  crises, an
>epidemic of images and data of a world out of sorts with itself, which
>marks and distinguishes the contemporary moment on a global scale.
>In times like this to attempt to be 'objective' or 'neutral' is to become a
>mercenary of power, a purveyor of platitudes. At the same time, we have
>little understanding of the complex professional and ethical dilemmas
>that bedevil the act of the media's bearing witness to our world. The
>crisis in the media are the crisis of the media.
>
>The rise of new information technologies has ensured that crises are
>reported and commented upon even as they unfold on our television
>screens, radio programmes, newspaper pages and computer
>monitors. The trailers advertising news programmes have made
>images of war, violence, terrorism and disaster the staple diet of the
>twenty first century's quotidian sense of the world. Each bulletin
>anticipates tomorrow's, or the next bulletin's crisis, the very next crisis.
>So that the breaking news may break even, all day, everyday. And yet,
>often, they are relinquished to the oblivion from which they emerged, as
>rapidly as they emerged.
>
>If the spectacle of the crisis becomes quotidian, banal and
>commonplace, does it make sense to speak of a "crisis" anymore, as a
>temporally distinct phenomenon, a time apart from the rhythms of
>normal time? Or does this overproduction of crises give us an
>opportunity to reflect on the making and unmaking of crises, their
>announcement and forgetting?
>
>Does it allow us to ask questions about media in crisis with
>themselves, about their offerings of uncertain truths to shadowy
>audiences. In what way do emerging alternative paradigms of reporting
>and commenting on crises, like the Indymedia Network, themselves
>become the raw material for mainstream news processing. Where do
>the lines between the mainstream and the alternative harden, and
>where do they blur? Has the "broadcast" model, which was the
>mainstay of the big media business, proved to be too bulky and too
>conservative in a world in which things change by the minute? Has the
>internet really made it possible for correspondents to be
>co-respondents to the realties of a changing world?
>
>To reflect on these and other related issues, Sarai : The New Media
>Initiative at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi and
>the Society for Old and New Media, Amsterdam will be hosting a three
>day international seminar titled - "Crisis/Media :  The Uncertain States of
>Reportage."
>
>This conference will deal with both the ways in which media
>cover/create/manage spectacular crisis events and also how they deal
>with the aftermath of crises. One of the aims of the conference is also to
>shift the focus of reflection away from simply looking at the 'event' of the
>crisis to looking at the structural processes that anchor what gets
>reported as 'the crisis', in everyday life.
>
>Typically, the media crews arrive instantly whenever a "Crisis" hits the
>surface of what is constructed as 'Global Consciousness'. Usually, by
>the time this happens, the locally available human, cultural and
>intellectual resources available in that society have been severely
>depleted. This means that the "crisis" is interpreted and made
>intelligible mainly by 'experts'. This also means that the global media
>fails very often to recognize  the varied approaches to "living" the crisis
>that exists on the ground, it also makes the crisis a unique event,
>unrelated to what might be linking it to events and processes
>elsewhere. The "crisis" then gets reported away as an instance of that
>happens to 'other' people and 'other' spaces whose realities are
>fundamentally different form that of those who view the crisis from
>outside. Typically, the crisis is treated as  something that no one, not
>even the people the media crews interview can make sense of, almost
>as if it had no history. Finally, the media brings in celebrity
>intellectuals
>and pop figures to ethically salvage the event for the viewers as a
>cathartic experience and offer redemption as a therapeutic act. Of
>course no one asks the question as to why no one was paying attention
>to the situation when there were people trying to make sense of it before
>journalists, cultural workers, intellectuals, activists, human rights
>groups and other interlocutors succumbed to the crisis that
>retrospectively seems unfathomable.
>
>The problem cannot of course be posed simply in terms of 'local voices'
>versus 'external reportage'. Local voices may be implicated in the crisis
>itself, and may be either acting to fuel it, or be silenced by it - just as
>the
>reporter who flies in from elsewhere may either seek to turn the crisis
>into a unique spectacle, bereft of context and history, or, be the
>'necessary outsider', who can be trusted to listen and report in a manner
>that is true to the facts on the grounds without fear or prejudice .
>
>The imperative of critical, analytical reportage, that tries to weave
>together a complex pattern of voices, motivations, facts and processes
>is a function of sympathy, intelligence, curiosity and a commitment to the
>freedom of information that is neither reducible to 'local knowledge' nor
>to the 'universal' agendas of freedom and justice, but is in each case a
>unique combination of distance as well as intimacy. Each situation
>engenders its own vantage points, which can be identified as the
>centres towards which the truth about the crisis tends to gravitate. The
>conference will seek to understand this dynamic of the shifting dynamic
>of truth and its relation to the tensions between closeness and distance,
>the local and the global, the mainstream and the alternative versions of
>the crisis and how it unfolds, as event and as representation.
>
>The conference will bring together media professionals, activists and
>scholars in order to create a dialogue between different kinds of
>approaches and spaces. We hope to learn from different crises about
>the processes that were similar. We will learn from Kosovo about
>Gujarat, and from Gujarat about Rwanda. We will examine structural
>similarities in the restrictions on civil liberties after 9/11 across the
>world; we will also assess how the media makes sense of the
>continuing economic crisis in Argentina. We will examine how popular
>culture and cinema 'memorialize' crisis situations, or, create the
>conditions for selective amnesia. We will view riots in relation to the
>degeneration of everyday life, and see unfolding unreported crises in
>realities that have to do with water, housing, health and the environment.
>
>Crisis Media will first of all recognize that there is a crisis in and of
>the
>media, and this cannot be addressed simply by calling for less
>reportage and more analysis. Instead we will argue for analysis in the
>reportage, and a disruption of the apparatus of centralized and
>centralizing information networks. We need to break down the same
>images that everyone sees, worldwide, in many different ways. And we
>need to find news ways to tell stories, and to distribute the untold story.
>The problem of critical media analysis of global crises so far has been
>to deconstruct the ownership of media and its ideological agenda,
>attempting to uncover a 'truth' of state and corporate control behind the
>news. The conference takes this for granted, and seeks instead to ask
>how we may go beyond it, and how alternative media too can stop
>looking and feeling like cheaply produced versions of mainstream
>media production. Crisis/Media will be taking place exactly one year
>after the events of Gujarat 2002, a crisis that was extensively reported
>and could be either memorialized or passed over in silence by the
>media as the years go by.
>
>It has become customary in situations of extreme violence to try and
>make sense of the terror in terms of atavistic and primordial passions,
>in terms well rehearsed in the Huntingtonian theses of the 'Clash of
>Civilizations'. In a peculiar sense, this 'normalizes' the crisis more than
>anything else, so the eruption of the crisis is seen in terms of
>irreconcilable differences, and the return to normality is seen in terms of
>generous 'cultural' accommodation and reconciliation. Both these
>explanatory moves, of the eruption and of the return to normality, offer a
>way out of a critical analysis of the situations that turn into crises. They
>also offer a way of returning to the 'business as usual' attitude that
>eventually papers over the crisis as preparations are made to unravel
>the 'next' crisis on the world stage. The conference will search for
>paradigms other than the vaguely cultural to understand situations of
>crisis, so that crises can be encountered intellectually on concrete and
>material terms.
>
>The workshop will have keynote speakers, presentation sessions, open
>sessions, public interviews, screenings, and exhibitions. The event will
>be audio streamed and video fragments will be available after the event
>as streaming files on the website of the Society of Old and New Media.
>The conference will take place at Sarai, Delhi in the first week of March
>2003, after the presentation of the third Sarai reader on February 28,
>2003.
>
>A team at Sarai will document the proceedings of the conference and
>interview the presenters to create a log/journal of the conference.
>Transcripts will be made available on the Waag website. The aim is to
>edit the material into a publication that can become a benchmark in
>thinking about media practice
>
>
>
>
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-- 


In sum, we are an army of dreamers, and therefore invincible.  How 
can we fail to win, with this imagination overturning everything. 

-- Subcomandante Marcos