Introducing his film The Lost Signal of Democracy, screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 7 April, director Yorgos Avgeropoulos began by describing the film as more than merely a document of the closure of Greece’s public broadcaster, ERT, by the government:

“I would just like to say that this film is not just about a public broadcaster that has been shut down by the government and the 2,656 people who have lost their jobs, but it shows rather the bigger picture that democracy is the first victim of the [economic] crisis and information is the second.”

Speaking on the evolution of the project, Avgeropoulos claimed that it was never his intention to create a documentary solely on the closure of ERT, however, “after the decision of the Supreme Court, the way that the government reacted to this decision, the national outcry, the international outcry, we thought that we have to make a story about this”.

On whether ERT’s closure was representative of a wider trend across Europe in countries such as Spain and Holland, Avgeropoulos, while quick to deny a wider coordinated ‘conspiracy’, did accuse governments throughout Europe, and especially in Greece, of ‘playing politics’ with public services.

“It is pure politics. Nowadays we have a huge confrontation between the private and the public and we can see it in many countries across Europe. We can see it in media, health and education sectors. It is a fight between the public and private.”

However, at the heart of the government’s relationship to media lies a contradiction, which for Avgeropoulos becomes fundamental in understanding the motivations behind the closure of ERT.

“Ironically, the government is controlling the private media, but it is not able to control . . . it couldn’t control, totally, ERT. So there is a paradox here.”

When asked to elaborate on exactly how the government was able to control the private media, Avgeropoulos said that it was a question of funding. Private TV stations, through the support of the government, have access to this funding in the form of loans, with the consequence that there is one line being repeated by all private media channels, extolling the ‘good government’ of Antonis Samaras and supporting the austerity measures as the only course of action available to deal with the crisis.

In response to this and in what Avgeropoulos calls a ‘new and good experiment’, 40 former ERT journalists have rejected the control of private media and begun to self-manage the branch of ERT in the north of Greece, transmitting in direct violation of the government.

“They are broadcasting analogue and through the internet. They have left their families and for 24 hours a day they are operating and broadcasting and keeping this thing alive.”

While this kind of self-managed media platform has similarities with the 2005 Oaxaca strike in Mexico, where (mainly) women took control of the means of information production and dissemination, the current ERT movement represents “another level”.

“This is the first time, I think, this kind of experiment is happening in Europe.”

When questioned over the comparison between ERT’s output and other public service broadcasters across Europe such as the BBC, Avgeropoulos was quick to cite strict government intervention even before ERT’s closure.

“On the other hand, within ERT you still had some small islands of freedom of expression.”

However, during the four moths of self-management in Athens and now in the north of the country in Thessaloniki, removed from any form of governmental regulation or control, output now includes “every voice on the planet”.

“You can see every colour, every opinion, it’s a multi-idea thing. I can’t describe it. It makes you happy . . . it’s freedom.”

What is more, this new self-managed ERT has, for now, remained unaffected by direct government intervention. The national and international outcry has made the government weary of repeating the mistakes of the original ERT closure.

“The government does not want to repeat again these ugly images, because I think, for me the most symbolic picture of what we are living through is the last photograph in the film – of the handcuffs closing the gate of ERT.

 

“Mitterrand used to say that politics is about the way in which you use symbols, so in that sense the government messed up totally.”

By Sara Elizabeth Williams

The West’s reaction to 9/11 was excessive and misguided, wrongly influenced by hubris, hysteria and ignorance. Ten years on, we are still mired in a mess largely of our own making.

Last night’s First Wednesday Special: Changing world – conflict, culture and terrorism in the 21st century, which was in association with BBC Arabic, looked at how the decade post-9/11 has reshaped our world. Chaired by presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House, the discussion at the Royal Institution of Great Britain turned to the question of what we learned – and how could we have done things differently?

For all their differences of opinion, the five members of the panel – journalists Mehdi Hasan, Isabel Hilton and Michael Goldfarb, ex British diplomat and founder of Independent Diplomat Carne Ross, and co-Founder and executive director of Quilliam and Founder of Khudi, Maajid Nawaz were in agreement on the most critical point: the reaction to 9/11 was a wrong one.

The response to non-state terrorist action should no be a declaration of war against individual states, but action against the non-state organisations.

The state-directed violence employed has destabilised entire populations and brought about some of the very things it sought to eradicate. Homegrown radicalisation comes at a devastating cost, and it is one we are becoming all too familiar with in the Islamic world and in the US and Europe.

Nawaz, who was formerly on the UK national leadership for the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir, reminded the audience that the process of radicalisation is the result of a political awakening, not a religious experience. For this reason, the right reaction would have been to support democratisation. But this wasn’t on the policy agenda:

“For decades we have been following a policy of sponsoring dictatorships and human rights abusers, and we ended up with a choice: support dictators or terrorists. But there was a third way: we could have supported civil society.”

While terrorism undermines the rule of law, Ross and Hasan pointed out that the West’s reaction did the same: we failed ourselves and the communities we sought to reach. The price of this mistake, according to Hilton, who is editor of chinadialogue.net.

“Now we have no moral standing to talk about human rights. In the course of the war on terror, we threw away everything that was worth defending. The damage we did to ourselves was greater than that which was done to us.”

Hilton also brought up the language of fear and safety – the American rhetoric over the last ten years. This, again, was the wrong invocation: ten years on, Americans still don’t feel safe. But is the mistake reversible? Hasan, who is senior political editor at the New Statesman, described a “fear industry grown our of control”.

Another cost is financial. Being at war has become normal for Americans. This affects policy: few politicians are willing to question Homeland Security spending. But for how long? Goldfarb, who is an author, journalist, broadcaster and GlobalPost’s London correspondent, answered:

“‘The war on terror’ is the worst phrase ever concocted. It’s a forever concept that can never end.”

The panel also looked at how the West’s misreaction to 9/11 may have paved the way for China’s global advance. Hilton, an expert on the subject, pointed out that China is seeking economic power by securing food, resources and access to water while letting other states get on with the international security agenda. In another ten years, we may consider this anniversary the beginning of a second turning point in the geopolitical landscape.  One of the evening’s most-tweeted comments was made by Hilton, who noted:

“Wars have very, very long tails… they don’t end when the whistle blows.”

For those at tonight’s event, it would seem that the end of these wars will be a long time coming, indeed.

The hashtag for this event was #fcbbca

We will be discussing the "War on Terror" that was waged in the wake of 9/11, the impact of a global battle characterised in terms of "good vs. evil": and asking if it is a war that can ever be won. What has been the impact of both the reality and rhetoric on an increasingly interconnected world? The panel will also be taking stock of the seismic events the world has witnessed in the past decade.

Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House who was living and working in New York on 9/11 and anchored the New York end of the special programme that night for BBC One. Twitter: @paddy_o_c

With:

Mehdi Hasan, senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman and a former Channel 4 news and current affairs editor, co-author of Ed: the Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader and author of the new ebook The Debt Delusion.  Twitter:@ns_mehdihasan

Carne Ross, a former British diplomat, author and journalist. Having resigned from the British foreign service after giving secret testimony to an official inquiry into the Iraq war, he then set up the world’first independent diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat, which advises marginalised countries and groups around the world.  He is author of The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power And Change Politics in the 21st Century. Twitter: @carneross

Maajid Nawaz, co-Founder and executive director of Quilliam and founder of Khudi,  and Founder of Khudi, he was formerly on the UK national leadership for the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). During his 14 years with HT he was a founding member of its Denmark and Pakistan operations. During a four year sentence in an Egyptian prison he renounced Islamist ideology while remaining Muslim. He now engages in counter-Islamist thought-generating, social-activism, writing, debating and media appearances. Twitter:@MaajidNawaz

Michael Goldfarb, author, journalist, broadcaster and GlobalPost’s London correspondent. Goldfarb has covered conflicts and conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, the Middle East and Latin America for NPR and the BBC. He covered the war in Iraq as an unembedded reporter based in Kurdistan. His book on the conflict, Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq was named one of The New York Times‘ Notable Books of 2005. On September 11, 2001 he was live on the air from 10 until noon in the US presenting part of NPR’s coverage and since then has reported extensively on radical Islam from Cairo and Tehran to the streets of London. Twitter: @MGEmancipation

Book tickets here. 

John Simpson is in no doubt over the very real political and regulatory threats the BBC is facing and doesn’t trust either of the main UK political parties to protect the organisation.

The BBC world affairs editor, who was at the Frontline Club on Wednesday night to talk about his latest book, Unreliable Sources: How the Twentieth Century Was Reported, also expressed concern over the anti-BBC posturing from Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, which looks set to gain the most if the BBC loses the licensing fee.

If you missed the event, watch the whole thing here…

Simpson told members and guests at the club:

There is a far greater intensity of people out to get us (BBC), which is something that I have never seen before during my time at the BBC…There’s also a disapproval of BBC programming that I have never seen during my time at the BBC.

Simpson said that in a previous era these "criticisms would be difficult (to deal with) and we would have been able to shrug them off," but warned that "something has happened in politics" since then when it comes to the Beeb.

The veteran reporter said that if political parties messed with the license fee, they would be messing with the BBC’s "heart and soul"; if the licence fee was "top-sliced", there would be a knock-on effect on the quality of BBC content. The corporation would have to decide whether to broadcast to the nation or go to where its supporters are.

Simpson also criticised rival broadcasters, particularly Sky News, which is majority owned by Murdoch’s Sky News:

I don’t like the fact that Sky News execs are arguing very strongly for lifting the legal requirement for broadcasters to be balanced. We have seen the savage effects of Fox News on political argument and political debate in America and they have poisoned the debate…Who can be certain the same wouldn’t happen here?