Indy Media Watch

A major earthquake has caused tsunamis across South-East Asia and killed tens of thousands of people.

This is a humanitarian disaster.

What's the Independent Media reporting on? What do you think?

I visited numerous IMC websites and picked articles which were timestamped with a local-time after the disaster.

• San Fransisco - Interview with Sarah Kerschner of Jews for a Free Palestine
• Philadelphia - The Israeli Slaughter at Sabra and Shatila
• Oklahoma - The Israeli Slaughter at Sabra and Shatila (Look familiar?)

In the interests of brevity, I shall not bother list more of the Israeli Slaughter article which appeared on nearly every site I visited. The spammer was obviously too busy to notice that thousands of people had been killed and this time, it wasn't Israel's fault (unless perhaps you ask Joe Vialls).

• Ireland - Christmas in the Occupied Holy Land
• South Africa - Pre-Holiday Black Chronicle with relevant news like this:
  

Pregnant female dog was found in forest Graberje in Kustosija (Zagreb). Dog was chained to a tree and left to die of cold, hunger and thirst. Luckily, reporter of Croatian radio found the dog and is now looking for a new home for the dog and her puppies that will be born very soon. This is only the beginning of this pre-holiday black chronicle.

So. Once again, we can see that Indy Media is totally useless as a source of 'news', preferring to concentrate on pregnant female dogs or biased tellings of incidents over 20 years ago (don't get me started) to vilify Israel. What the hell does everything have to do with Israel anyway?

So, how would Indy Media management defend itself? Let's guess:

"It's a volunteer effort, we don't have the resources of CNN" - That didn't stop your volunteers reporting on other stuff (cough Israel) in a very timely fashion did it?

"You keep arguing that sites aren't localised, why should South Africa report on news in Asia?" - I don't know. Why did South Africa report on pregnant dogs in Croatia though?

"We are being diverse. Corporate news sources also report on other material besides the disaster" - Yes they do. But they also make considerable mention of it. Many Indymedia websites did not make any mention of it, or where they did, it was well and truly buried beneath other anti-US, anti-Israel or anti-Western propaganda.

Hell, even the Melbourne Socialists were more worried about banal garbage than the deaths of thousands in third-world areas. Unbelievable!

But I've saved the best for last.

I visited Oceania Indy Media figuring it was about as local to the quake as I'd get. It linked to Tokelau Indy Media who had only this to say:

Everything is very fine
and ultimately peaceful here
and we are 100% happy!
We have nothing to complain about,
we are not even bored! No really!

And we thank everybody else on the planet
for creating a greater surf every year!
Faka fetai!

This post on Sydney Indymedia claimed quite accurately: "Oceania Indymedia mock the death of thousands of people".

Update: They are now fighting about this issue here. Note the "Indymediawatch" poster is someone else of no relation to this blog. I see variations of the (obvious really) posting handle from time to time but tend to confine my own thoughts to this blog rather than buying into arguments about whether or not Bush = Hitler". Anyway...

Someone else said:

i reckon it should stay there... indymedia still has room for fun

Well I reckon Indymedia still has room for a lot else. Try intelligent news...