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G8 SUMMIT: As Bloggers Will See It

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jun 28 2005 (IPS) - For news on the summit of the Group of Eight leading industrialised nations, Red Pepper, the British magazine “of the green and radical left,” is inviting people around the world to forget the usual media channels and turn to coverage by its “grassroots writers” instead.

Its web log, or “blog”, aims to present “live and uncensored coverage of the summit, the counter-conferences and protests from inside the heart of the global justice movement.”

Red Pepper has its own way of keeping up with the international campaign “Make Poverty History” – its campaign is to “Make the G8 History”. The blog (opinions and information posted directly on to Internet websites by individuals) is accompanied by Red Pepper’s special G8 July magazine, which it has titled “The new scramble for Africa”.

Its alternative take on the July 6-8 meeting of the G8 will come from activists from groups such as Dissent!, Make Poverty History and G8Alternatives, alternative media activists, as well as its own journalists.

From a relatively modest circulation of just a few thousand copies, Red Pepper magazine aims to use the Internet to challenge the dominance of conventional news media. “Hopefully, we will have our views and the information we present seen by people all around the world,” Alex Nunns from Red Pepper told IPS.

The blog aims to occupy a space between the official G8 output and the kind of counterpoint posed to it by rock star Bob Geldof and other celebrities. “The celebrities are not looking at issues, and at the heart of matters they should be coming up with,” Nunns said.

“Bob Geldof has done a very good job of getting a lot of attention to the problems,” Nunns said. “But they are pursuing a very narrow agenda. They are presenting Africans as people suffering from natural disasters all the time, where no one can help themselves. They are generating feelings of charity, but the real problem in Africa is the economic system.”

Appeals to the G8 are misplaced, Nunns said. “They are expecting G8 to come up with a solution when G8 is itself the problem. This is like petitioning Hitler to help the Jews.”

These alternative groups are also not challenging the British government position enough, Nunns said. “They are not challenging Gordon Brown (British chancellor of the exchequer, or finance minister) on trade issues. The EU is still dumping goods on the African market.”

Britain, he said, is at the forefront of water privatisation schemes in countries such as Ghana. “The government here still believes that privatisation is the solution to all problems.”

Many such issues will be raised by a host of independent groups around the summit. Red Pepper says it will pay particular attention to “counter-summits, events, actions, demonstrations, and offer instant unfiltered reaction to the G8 communiqué on July 8.”

The magazine to be available online plans to work closely with other alternative and independent media in Scotland to counter “the uncritical coverage of the UK government’s G8 agenda, and the press’s persistent demonisation campaign against anti-G8 protesters.”

Several commentators plan also to post their views on events directly to Indymedia, a website that allows bloggers to “upload a written, audio and video report” without any editorial filtering.

Commenting on some fears that the police are threatening to seize Bristol Indymedia’s server, Red Pepper editor Hilary Wainwright said: “We condemn all attempts to silence the independent media and we join the National Union of Journalists, Liberty, Statewatch, Campaign against Criminalising Communities, International Federation of Journalists, Reporters Sans Frontieres, Privacy International and many more groups in expressing complete and unconditional support for Indymedia at the G8.”

Indymedia film footage, photographs and testimonies are playing a central role in the prosecution of 28 police officers in Italy for the attacks on activists during the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001.