Indymedia. Degradation of the newswire.

by Eoin maher Wed Apr 24, 2002 10:12 eoin_maher at hotmail dot com

Well said A99.

IMC is fast becoming a hate fest for people to sling unfounded hate or criticism on people politicians they dont like, particularly against (or in favour of) Israel. As a critic of Israel and also of Arafat, there is nothing more damaging to trying to achieve peace and a palestinian state in the middle east than vicious racisits from both sides spouting unfounded crap such as:

Suicide bombers are not terrorists

or

"The Jews took no-ones land"

Both are laughable and should not be given space.

Lets try and make this site what it is supposed to be: A news website.

P.S. A99, you could start by having the balls to write your articles with a name attached.

yours,

Eoin Maher

by Brian Durney=A99 Wed Apr 24, 2002 10:50

i got plenty of balls to share!

by ciara Wed Apr 24, 2002 12:57

I have put this point accross before... I think international "news" such as the demo in washington example, has no national significance and no place on an Irish news website. when at all possible it would be great to see news being posted about whats going on in our own country. With plenty of activist groups and political parties using the website to post ads for their groups, what we need is some independent thinkers out there willing to post news of Irish relevance and not another slate on Israel as its easy for anyone of us to do that and us sitting thousands of miles away. There is enough crappy politics and scandals in our own country. For example, it'd be cool to see people covering stuff like the church scandals independent of newspaper editorial control. I know you'll all say why don't I do that myself... I do when I have time! Anyway, Fair play to Brian, Its true, and may everyone start to take the newswire on indymedia to mean 'news', the fact that its open publishing does not mean that its a free fo all.

by EOIN MAHER Wed Apr 24, 2002 12:58 eoin_maher at hotmail dot com

GOOD MAN BRIAN

P.S. WHY A99?

by Eoin Maher - [email protected] Wed Apr 24, 2002 13:25

I agree Ciara. The reason i appear so much on the discussions on Israel is my personal anger at the situation and my general interest in the area. It is just so frustrating to see people dispense lies about the situation that i must try to counter these wih responsible comment and journalism.

Lets try to give some more coverage to Irish issues in the future.

Yours
Eoin Maher

ps feel free to email me

by Terry Wed Apr 24, 2002 15:01

The degradation of the IMC newswire with sloppy replies,
badly filed news-stories, and just plain lies by those who
seek to destroy it, remind me of the way many of the newsgroups
and email discussion lists went down hill rapidly in the early
days of the Internet.

I think this is probably inevitable and without some sort of
'filtering' process, this is what will happen.

However filtering leads to censorship, which is exactly what
we are trying to avoid, no matter how good or well intentioned
the 'moderator/editor' is.

Therefore the best (any other ideas welcome) solution may be to
democractically elect a group of people to do this, but again
the problem is who will vote and who won't bother -this will
introduce bias. Besides there is probably virtually no-one who
can devote time to this task at the level required and for it
to work, the 'moderator' would need to be changed regularly, so
that the same person or persons are not in this 'authoritive'
position for too long -since power corrupts.

And when you examine each newswire item, different people will
have different views to should be posted and what is irrelevant.

So other than asking people to use the service properly which is
not going to happen, it is hard to know what to do, but I think
this area requires some further discussion.

Perhaps in a true anarchist society (i.e. non-authoritarian),
people would have time to devote to this essential service which
is to maintain a truly democratic news service.

On a final note, maintaining a good news service is probably the equivalent
in some ways of a living cell trying to fend off all the potential
attacks from bacteria and viruses and still carry out it's own
functions without being 'infected' and 'taken over'. And to do this
it always has to assign some resources to defending the integrity of
the cell itself.

by Andrew Wed Apr 24, 2002 15:33 The Struggle site

I'd suggest the 'real' problem is not the various junk being posted to indymedia. The nature of the page is that if 10- 20% of the posts where good then we could just ignore the junk.

The real problem is that almost no body is writing content on local events for the site and no one is taking pictures etc. So rather then looking for ways to restrict the information that is appearing people would be a lot better off if they spent some time writing unique and mostly local content.

by C. Wed Apr 24, 2002 16:28

The newswire is not that bad at the moment.

As I open it i see
3 good irish articles, 1 sellafield, 3 palestine and 1 lunatic, 2 about the newswire.

Totally agree with Andrew - don't censor, write.

Terry - this is more or less the process in place - although people are more pressganged than elected. The IMC-Editorial list monitors the news wire, with an active editorial committe having the password to remove articles that by consensus breach the guidelines. The committee was formed at the last public meeting - and will change (I believe) at the next one.

I don't like the idea of restricting groups or individuals (and also get annoyed at the demands to post full names) - it's not who I am that matters but what i say and whether it's relevant. I post consistently under the same nick, and could quite easily post under any made up name - would it be better if i used Eoin Maher rather than C.? Neither mean anything to people reading this board.

Maybe a seperate bulleting board is needed - just what the internet needs - another board ;-). But i reckon what the site needs most is features - write 150 words - put some links in and send them to IMC-Editorial.

by Terry Wed Apr 24, 2002 17:32

I am delighted to hear that there is a quasi-democractic
collective / committee that removes irrelevant postings and
thus that there are people with time to do this job.

I think some people picked me up wrong about censorship, as
I am not supporting it and I agree everyone is entitled to
add their bit. However I was trying to say that any form of
filtering, as is even done now is a form of censorship. There
will be many clearcut cases where the postings are just not
relevant or that it is plain spamming and or lies, but there
will be cases where this is a difficult one to judge.

To address Andrew's point regarding -if 10 to 20% of the postings
are good, and ignore the rest of the junk, then by implication,
this is good enough - I wouldn't quite agree, because newcomers
to IMC coming from a lifetime of exposure to the corporate press
will still be put off, from their persepective, which is likely
at the initial stages to be one of skepticism and they may be
therefore tempted to go with the 'pre-programmed' propangada
from the corporate press which is dismissive of all alternative
views. Thus the information to junk signal needs to be higher.

My final point in the last posting about the diverting resources
to defend the integrity of the system still stands, as proved
by the fact that there is an IMC editoral committee.

by Conor Thu Apr 25, 2002 02:01 Cork

I agree with most of the above comments and offer the following suggestions:

1. Refine the Editorial Guidelines on an on-going basis to enhance the quality. For example:
a. No verbal abuse and negative foul language (f... word etc);
b. Clearer differentiation between facts and opinions
c. Quoting evidence and sources when publishing facts, and quoting the originator when publishing opinions, analyses and comments.
d. Inroduce a new code of ethics based upon universally accepted codes in the world of honest jounalism. Could used the Code of Conduct - Appendix A of the Rules of the NUJ as a first version.

2. Promote access to these guidelines more prominently. For example: make the link slightly larger on the Publishing Page, and include a link from the About Us section

3. Encourage and make it easier for readers to report to the editorial board when these guidelines are breeched. For example: Provide an easy access link next to each article and comment (top & bottom) that will send an eMail message directly to the relevent editor assigned to this particular responsibility (good idea to rotate). In this way every reader becomes part of his team vastly reducing his workload. (Could even provide a template here to help the policing reader to lodge his complaint in a format that'll make it faster and easier for the editor to process.

4. A further refinement could be to allow the log of these complaints to be visible for all to see (could make interesting reading in and of itself).

by EOIN MAHER Thu Apr 25, 2002 09:47

OK, Fair enough C. you shouldnt have to attach your full name and email to comments, but personally i think you should not post news on indymedia unless you are prepared to put your name to it.

Attaching an email address, if not your name, in my opinion when posting news is giving your readers the chance of contacting you, without using the message board, beneficial to the reader of the article.

You will notice almost all of the mud-slingers hate merchants and liars who post news on the site
do not attach an address, and often write psuedonomisly, thus they can never be tied down to their views.

Not that i think this should be a rule of indymedia. Anything which puts restrictions on even the most irresponsible of reporters is against every principle on which this site is based.

P.S. Lets try to get smart and post well founded articles on all issues including the middle east to counter the well crafted lies and LIKUD rhetoric of writers on the middle east, present on this site, such as Joseph Farah.

Articles such as "Lying cheating Zionist garbage" will convine no one who is trying to use Indymedia to educate themselves on the Middle East situation
that the Israeli government is at fault here.