Authentic Journalism as Civil Resistance

This month marks ten years since Narco News (www.narconews.com) began publishing “on the drug war and democracy from Latin America.” Launched as a means to publish reports from Mexico by Al Giordano – New York native and community organizer-turned-journalist – Narco News fast grew into a vital radical news source in seven languages with hundreds of collaborators who walk alongside social movements and report on civil resistance, organizing campaigns and official corruption throughout the hemisphere.

Four months after its inception, Giordano and Narco News, together with veteran Mexican journalist Mario Menéndez Rodríguez, found themselves as defendants in a lawsuit brought by the National Bank of Mexico (now part of Citigroup) in New York (Banamex v. Mario Menéndez, Al Giordano and Narco News). In December 2001 they won the landmark decision from the New York Supreme Court extending First Amendment protections to Narco News reporters and, by extension, to all Internet journalists, paving the legal path for the online journalism that exists from so many corners today.

The global attention from that court case - together with the daily reports on social movements from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Venezuela, from all 31 states of the Mexican Republic and so many other parts of the hemisphere - brought a wave of emails from young journalists, community organizers and change agents throughout the world asking if they could come work or intern in Narco News’ offices. Not having an office, Giordano and colleagues decided instead to form The School of Authentic Journalism, which has trained scores of communicators from more than 40 countries in investigative and online journalism, documentary film production, community radio and the creation of viral videos on the Internet.

Giordano, who during his final year in New York (1996-97) authored “The Medium is The Middleman: For a Revolution Against the Media,” a document that applied anarcho-syndicalist, Situationist and other histories and philosophies to “the problem of media,” comes to the Brecht Forum on April 14 to talk about the philosophical underpinnings of what he calls “the authentic journalism renaissance."

In the ten years since Narco News was born, social movements have grown to rely on producing their own media to be heard and seen and to communicate among their participants, and the mass media has become increasingly dependent on citizen journalism to cover international social conflicts. The act of reporting coherently, freed of the corporate constraints of “objectivity” and obsessions with the machinations of those in power “up above,” of using a cell phone as a video camera, of editing a viral video, and of deploying other decentralized weapons of communication to report on the struggles from “down below,” has itself become a form of civil resistance. Giordano will be joined at the Brecht Forum by invited graduates of the School of Authentic Journalism to help lead the conversation, where they will also discuss the urgent responsibility of radical communicators to grow “faster, better and more coherent” at covering news in ways that make authentic journalists part of the struggles they report, and that help, and not harm, those movements' prospects for victory.

 Contact narconews@gmail.com to inquire about some scholarships available to independent journalists and community organizers to be able to attend gratis.