A new kind of mediawatch appeared today on the Melbourne Independent Media Centre website. Here is the article, authored by Damien Kincaid:- Media beat-ups are accelerating for the silly season by Damien Kincaid The corporate media have begun publishing regular beat-ups to discredit any expression of dissent by members of the public during the Commonwealth Business Forum in Melbourne on October 3-5 and the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Brisbane on October 6-8. The latest beat-up is in The Australian today, August 28. Reporter Martin Chulov has a beat-up in the Australian (page 3) today, entitled "Security alert for pre-CHOGM business summit". Chulov's story begins thus: "Security agencies believe the same groups that targeted the World Economic Forum in Melbourne last year will try to violently disrupt the precursor to October's CHOGM conference, the Commonwealth Business Forum." Chulov also writes: "Police and intelligence officers have been monitoring up to 10 websites set up by protest groups, with many urging demonstrators to converge on the Melbourne forum on October 3 before going to Brisbane for CHOGM three days later." He continues: "One website, established by a group calling itself oh-three, is headed Call to Arms and asks demonstrators to send business leaders an anti-globalisation message. . . He also asserts: "Europe-based organisers are trying to lure to Brisbane demonstrators from the violent G8 protest in Genoa earlier this year." And so on . . . Unfortunately, Martin Chulov does not have a good record as an analyst of public debate. But he does have a record as a beat-up merchant, as he showed 12 months ago. Martin Chulov had a beat-up in The Australian on 19 August 2000 (a few weeks before the World Economic Forum in Melbourne), predicting that, immediately after the WEF, S11 protesters from Melbourne would go to Sydney to disrupt the Olympic Games. The Melbourne protesters, Chulov predicted, might prove the Olympic security organisers' biggest headache. Chulov said: "Surveillance of websites and email has uncovered plans by some members of S11 and UK-based anarchist organization J18 to try to block entry to the Homebush Bay stadium and disrupt the days of the spouses of corporate chiefs." In fact, nothing like this happened at the Olympics. Meanwhile, Chulov (and the other Murdoch papers, led by Andrew Bolt of the Melbourne Herald Sun) kept up the barrage during August-September 2000, with beat-up after beat-up. On 31 August 2000, Chulov co-authored another pre-Olympic beat-up in The Australian, re-iterating that "Olympic security organisers were anticipating violent protests staged by demonstrators fresh from the World Economic Forum in Melbourne". Chulov, like the Melbourne Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt, is not very intelligent when it comes to discerning what the global justice movement is campaigning about. Chulov's story of 19 August 2000 stated, wrongly, that the S11 protesters were "oppposed to globalisation". In fact, however, the protesters want a globalisation of democracy and decent working and living conditions, as distinct from merely a globalisation of corporate profits. The global justice movement does not describe itself as an "anti-globalisation"movement, but the likes of Martin Chulov and Andrew Bolt find it convenient to do that. If Chulov is obtaining his information from "intelligence" officers, some of them (plus Chulov) are displaying a lack of intelligence. In Chulov's story on 19 August 2000 about S11 and the Olympics, Indymedia was listed as one of the protesters' websites, but the story gave the address of Indymedia as "indymedia.com" instead of "indymedia.org". How intelligent is that error? And if someone is conducting "surveillance" of these websites, that's terrific. The more readers these non-corporate sites get, the better, even if some of them (e.g., Chulov and Bolt) don't have much "intelligence". Meanwhile, during the coming weeks, yours truly will be conducting "surveillance" of the Martin Chulovs and Andrew Bolts of this world, noting particularly all their lapses in "intelligence". SOURCE: http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=15412&group=webcast _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Archived at http://www.cat.org.au/lists/leftlink/ Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
