Tag Archives: Olympics

China releases most SFT activists, documentarians

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I’ve just received the good news that my friend Brian Conley, and most of the other independent media makers and the activists they were documenting, have been released and are heading home.

The so-called “Beijing 6″ were ultimately sentenced, through an extrajudicial proceeding (they did not get to go to court), to 10 days of detainment. As some of us guessed, it turned out to be shorter, with the end of the Olympics.

I received a message via Facebook that one of Brian’s colleagues, Jeffrey Rae, called his father to say he and others were being put aboard an Air China flight to Los Angeles.

I haven’t had the time to summarize and annotate my thoughts on the media coverage of the detainments. I’ve been trying to help make some connections between Brian’s family and the media, and hold down the day job as well.

I suppose the short version of such thoughts would be this:

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Citizen Journalism / Brian Conley held by Chinese Authorities

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What is a non-citizen journalist? A correspondent from abroad?

I think “citizen journalism” has become a bogus term. (The synonyms that Wikipedia currently suggests are mostly better.)

To me, one can reduce it to either you’re doing journalism or you are not. Journalism does not have to mean professionalized, dispassionate, (allegedly) neutral stuff that one hears about from the lofty offices of the broadcast networks (paid for with what, anything less than socially acceptable hush money from sponsors?). It does have to mean getting your facts straight, it does mean independent thinking, and challenging unsupported assertions before you endorse them as fact. Some of the most revered journalists in American history were often also called activists. They had credibility because they were still independent, and the facts they reported held-up.

Before the term citizen journalist was born, members of the DC Indymedia center (such as it was at the time), were accredited by the Washington Metropolitan Police Department with press credentials. I point this out only as a way to say that I think since then, “citizen journalist” has only served to make it easier for people actively trying to contribute to community media to be marginalized further than they already naturally were (by way of not having thousands or millions of dollars to back them). There is now what is seen as lesser category to cage people in, regardless of their work product, before getting to “real journalist.”

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Of course it’s political

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A declaration that something is not political in itself will highlight the politics of the thing.

The New York Times quotes a Chinese Olympic official, Qu Yingpu, in response to the protests of the Olympic torch tour as saying “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.”

His own apparent belief that he can say that with any authority is politics.

Never mind the inherent nationalism that is always present at the Olympics.

What is poorly articulated in the most well-intentioned statements of this sort is a widely shared desire for the Olympics to be a unifying experience, despite the nationalistic undertones, and generally not a polarizing sort of experience.

That’s great, but there is no getting rid of the politics.

I get the feeling that not all the statements are well-intentioned, and I don’t just mean the ones from Chinese officials this year. I think the Olympics are something of a business, and business is always political too.

That aside, it seems futile to to me to achieve an ideal by proclamation, attempting to exclude voices of the real controversies and atrocities of the world—particularly those in which the hosts, and implicitly more powerful than most other participants in the given year’s games, have a role.