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| Why do so many at Indymedia hate the Irish Times? national | miscellaneous | news report  Thursday April 25, 2002 10:31 by Puzzled Everytime someone posts an article from the Irish Times, they are told to take it elsewhere. Yet others post articles from other mainstream media and nary a word in protest is uttered. Why is that? Complaints and suggestions are made that people should write their own articles instead of relying on mainstream media, and that Indymedia is meant for such homegrown articles rather than a reguritation of the mainstream. However, if people are not prepared to offer their own raw opinion or reporting, which is understandable given how new this forum is and many are still feeling their way around the place, a way to jumpstart alternative reporting is to post the mainstream article and follow it up with comments. The attitude Irish Times articles are met with here discourages that from ever happening and is an odd attitude to encounter, to say the least. One the one hand, people are complaining that there is not enough Irish based news being posted. On the other hand, when any Irish based news does get posted, it is usually from the Irish Times, and the person posting it gets slammed for using the Irish Times. Is there another agenda at work here? Can those who do not like the Irish Times dispute the contents of the article instead of criticising the posting of it? An Irish based Indymedia needs to be nutured to take off, and some of the reactions here border on the fascist, which is not helpful at all. Why is the Associated Press, for example, more acceptable than the Irish Times? Why are articles from mainstream media on topics that have F-all to do with Ireland more acceptable than articles from the Irish Times about Ireland? Are people that afraid to talk about what is going on in this country, even if they have to use the Irish Times as a starting point of discussion?
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Comments (8 of 8)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8or from anywhere. JUST POST THE LINK and everyone will be happy.
I think that's the main complaint. We don't want to be a mirror site for articles already held somewhere else.
Hi "Puzzled",
There has been proposals put forward on the editorial mailing list about restricting and discouraging postings that are not geographically relevant. This would take care of the AP and other reports that you refer to.
The problem of the Irish Times articles is something different - Irish news that is also available at another site. I, and others, have argued that to believe that these types of articles are part of Indymedia is to misunderstand the very nature of what Indymedia is.
We are not the in house journal of the anti-capitalist movement. We are also not a nice happy meeting place for left wingers to swap news and views. Indymedia is about creating a non-corporate space for news - using the open publishing model.
INDYMEDIA IS NOT A FORUM OR BULLETIN BOARD.
The comments are meant to serve the news, not vice versa - so your idea about starting off a discussion is flawed, to say the least. There is a forum in preparation at the moment, and using mainstream articles as "talking points" will of course be more appropriate there.
And if you look at the bottom of the page, you will see the following. "Indymedia is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage. Indymedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth."
Note the word "creation". Not "duplication".
Maybe Indymedia.ie is a bit premature as it does not seem to be overrun with indpendent media or journalists. Perhaps a mistake was made in targetting the "Left" in Ireland as interested parties rather than freelance journalists or what little independent media that exists in Ireland.
I wish success for Indymedia.ie and understand the difficulties in going through growing pains in public.
Good luck.
I just posted a comment complaining about the copy-and-paste of an irish Times article, but I feel the same about reposts from ANY other easily available news source.
As commercial media go I think the Irish Times is a very good paper and I read it just about every day. This makes seeing the same stuff on Indymedia doubly annoying.
DON'T RE-POST THE MEDIA - BE THE MEDIA!!
In relation to 'don't repost the media, be the media', its up to everyone who posts to do this.... including you. Im not sure how someone can ask 'why does indymedia hate the Times' when indymedia is not one big uniform-thinking beast... everyone has different opinions ion all newspapers and the people who write for indymedia are no different. As Rowan says, the only problem is when people cut and paste. Its ok to refer to an article in mainstream media as not everyone can read every paper every day so if something worthy of discussion is published then I personally would be glad to see a critique or analysis of the the article. but there is no universal hatred of the times at indymedia as far as Im aware of!
Ciara is correct - how about the following compromise solution: If you want to inform readers of Indymedia (often as Ciara points out) very different to daily readers of the Irish Times, about an event that took place in Ireland that you believe to be of value to these readers, and which event may happen to be the publication of an article in another medim such as the Irish Times, then provide an abstract here highlighting the main points in the article and accompanied by a link to the source article.
I have a few more suggestions that I made as a comment to an earlier article attempting to adress this issue of improving the quality of indmedia.
The article was called: Degradation of Indymedia newswire posted on April 24th.
The comment was called:
Self Policing & Quality Control could Do it
posted on Thu, Apr 25 2002, 1:01am
I definitely agree that as irish news papers go, th Times is the clear best for both home and foreign news, but if we keep cutting and pasting articles from the mainstream, we become a discussion group and cease being an Idependent media form.
In my articles i am constantly alluding to comments in the main stream media, which i believe have relevance. I believe a link is more than sufficient.
As we continue to improve the quality of Indymedia we must always remember where it came from, and the important purposes it serves. We must also recognise that the main stream media in this country is not the same as the main stream media in the countries it began in, such as Canada and the US. which, especially in the US, simply push the government line. Although this is also present in the Irish media, it is not there is a matter of concensus among corporate controlled media.
The challenges to independent media in this nation have many similarites with the challenges of other indymedia sites around the world, but we also face challenges individual to this island, making it all the more important that we do not simply emulate Indymedia.org.
why get so het-up about a news paper?
i mean i thought that most thinking people had figured out for themselves by now that the vast majority of papers out there were so packed with deliberate and accidental distortions as to make them almost totally irrelavent.
surely citing a paper like the times (if that's your thing)is no harm 'coz once the source is known and the mental bullshit detector has gone off we're no closer to having been brainwashed than we would have been had we seen the report on a murdoch mouthpiece.
quote who you like i sez (provided you do actually quote) and trust that we know what we're dealing with.personally speaking i think that the only two uses for mainstream newspapers are 1.the crossword and 2.wiping one's arse when out of bogroll(and the times even manages to fall down badly on one of those!)