What's the Matter with Indymedia?

By Jennifer Whitney, LiP Magazine. Posted July 26, 2005.

In the last week of November 1999, a news website run entirely by volunteers was launched. "Don't hate the media; be the media" was the battle cry of hundreds of people who converged in Seattle to bring about the birth of the Independent Media Center (IMC, or Indymedia). The project promised the democratization of the media, and more: "Imperfect, insurgent, sleepless and beautiful, we directly experienced the success of the first IMC in Seattle and saw that the common dream of 'a world in which many worlds fit' is possible," wrote media activist and Seven Stories Press editor Greg Ruggiero. The idea was contagious. Almost 6 years on, there are 149 Indymedia websites in about 45 countries on 6 continents.

The newborn IMC provided the most in-depth and broad-spectrum coverage of the historic direct actions against the World Trade Organization that fall. Despite having no advertising budget, no brand recognition, no corporate sponsorship, and no celebrity reporters, it received 1.5 million hits in its first week--more than CNN got in the same time. Its innovative "open publishing" newswire meant that anyone with computer access could be a reporter. The user-friendly software allowed people to publish directly online, and since more than 450 people got IMC press passes (and scores more reported from their homes), they provided coverage of the historic protests from every block of downtown Seattle. Audio, video, photos, and articles were uploaded at a breathtaking pace. The site embraced the do-it-yourself ethic completely, meaning that there were no restrictive site managers, editors, or word-count limits. At the time, such restrictions seemed dictatorial, oppressive--counterrevolutionary, even. Now, I find them rather appealing.

The open publishing newswire, once filled with breaking stories and photographic evidence refuting government lies, now contains more spam than an old email account. On many sites, it's difficult to find original reporting among the right-wing diatribes and rants about chemtrails poisoning the atmosphere. Coverage of local protests often consists of little more than a few blurry photos of cops doing nothing in particular, without a single line of text explaining the context, the issues, or the goals of the protest. And forget about analysis or investigative reporting. They tend to be as rare on Indymedia as they are on Fox News.

This isn't to suggest that I've avoided Indymedia as a journalist, or that I disagree with its mission--neither are true. I've worked with various IMCs over the years during big protests, mostly as a reporter, and mostly secondarily to the various actions I was involved with. In 1999, I met early on with some of the founders of the first IMC, who wanted an outside perspective on what they were cooking up. In 2001, I covered the Zapatista caravan for the Chiapas, UK, and Seattle sites; later that year I worked in the IMC during the protests against the G8 summit in Genoa, taking phoned-in reports from the streets, confirming them, plotting movements on maps, and posting the news. In Cancún I did support work in the IMC during the 2003 WTO actions, as well as some reporting. In Miami, during the Free Trade Area of the Americas protests that same year, I reported for the short-lived paper and the website. And last summer in El Alto, Bolivia, I worked with locals on covering an important federal election.

On the anniversary of the Iraq invasion earlier this year, I was in Mexico, trying to get information about antiwar protests around the United States. I looked at IMC sites based in cities where I knew there were actions, and found nothing. Eventually, I found what I was looking for--on the BBC. The experience, unfortunately, is not uncommon. Each time I try and find news among the Indymedia drivel, I ask myself the same question: What happens when--in our attempts not to hate the media but to be it--we end up hating the media we've become?

I know I'm not alone in my frustration with IMCs. "I haven't looked at Indymedia in over a year," says the editor of a nationally distributed radical magazine. "Indymedia? It's completely irrelevant," a talented documentary filmmaker tells me. "I let the IMC use my photos but I don't ever read it," says a freelance photojournalist. More and more, independent media makers (even those who occasionally publish on or are affiliated with an IMC) don't even bother looking for news on Indymedia. And for good reason: Indymedia news "coverage" is often lifted from corporate media websites, with occasional editorial remarks added. Some IMC sites limit this type of reporting to a specific section, and there it can lead to informative discussion and criticism. But most seem to rely on it to fill column space in the newswire. This isn't making media, it's cutting and pasting--relying on so-called experts and professionals to do what you are, evidently, too lazy or busy to do yourself. The few original articles are frequently riddled with unsubstantiated claims, rumors, dubious anonymous sources, bad writing, and/or plagiarism. Rarely is anything edited--and I don't mean by the collective that runs the site. Users themselves aren't editing their own work, but instead are posting 18 blurry, almost identically bad photographs, or thesis-length uninformed opinion pieces that weren't even spell checked. Verified facts are an endangered species on Indymedia, and arguments in support of fact-checking are often met with cries of "Censorship!" To make matters worse, Indymedia articles are usually posted anonymously (and therefore unaccountably), with no way to offer feedback other than the flame-ridden fray of the comments section. If the goal of Indymedia is, as its mission statement says, "the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of the truth," we are clearly falling short.

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