Independent Media Center

The Independent Media Center, also called Indymedia or IMC, is a collective of media organizations and journalists. It was started in late November, 1999, to cover the protests of the anti-globalization movement against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Washington. By 2002, there were 89 local IMCs around the world spread between 31 countries plus the West Bank and 6 continents. The country with the most IMCs is the United States with 39, followed by Canada with 11. See also the list of IMCs.

IMCs produce print, audio, and video journalism, but they are most famous for their open publishing newswires: internet weblog sites where anybody with internet access can publish information. Between 1999 and 2001, they were focused almost exclusively on up-to-the-minute coverage of summits where anti-globalization movement protests were occurring. As they expanded, though, they have added more news and analysis, with a strong anti-corporate and leftist bias. Their coverage is often unique: for example, during the economic/political crises in Argentina in 2001 and 2002, many of the groups which helped in opposing the government used the IMC as a place to publish information regarding their activities and pictures from the protests.

The IMCs' open newswires have generated some controversy. In early May 2003, after receiving numerous complaints about newswire stories that referred to the Israeli military (IDF) as "Zionazi forces" (example) or to Israeli Zionists as "Zionazis" (example), Google decided to stop including the IMCs in Google News searches. This spawned a PetitionOnline petition, which has probably amassed as many bogus signatures as real ones, and promises that content the Indymedia community finds offensive will be removed in the future. The IMCs are still included in normal Google searches, however.

Table of contents

1 Structure
2 Role among International Media Networks
3 Independence from Governments
4 Reputation
5 See also
6 External links

Structure

Local IMC collectives are expected to be open and inclusive of a variety of different local left-wing activist organizations, so that even those without internet access can participate both in content creation and in content consumption.

The structure is non-hierarchical in terms of political power relationships, though there do exist de facto hierarchies, due either to control over physical resources (e.g. servers); access to fundfix broken link; accuracying; the fact that certain "global" functions are needed; or simply because it makes sense to coordinate within geographically close regions, without any formal link to geographical borders. However, the existence of numerous redundant communication channels (such as publicly archived mailing lists [1], wiki pages and local face-to-face meetings) makes it difficult for those at the top of these limited hierarchies to have much coercive power.

All Indymedia collectives are expected to have a locally chosen, but thoroughly discussed, editorial policy for determining features for the center column of the local site. They also have to find ways of dealing with deliberate vandalism.

As they have grown and matured, Indymedia collectives have developed diverse methods of internal formal and informal governance. The general principles of non-hierarchical structure and consensus-based decision-making still leave quite a bit open to the imagination.

As an example of different models for collective internal organizing, the DC IMC (one of the older IMCs in the network) adopted a different and more formal model of organizing as a Coop. Members pay small monthly dues (waived for any who need it to be) and put labor into a volunteer task of some sort that helps with the day-to-day needs of the coop. In contrast, other IMC local collectives are totally informal without any formally-defined membership and very minimal policy and organizational structures.

While Indymedia is an amazing and grand experiment in widespread, democratic media production, the significance of it as a social experiment in creating a non-hierarchical, consensus-based global network is perhaps equally if not more intriguing than the media content itself.

The Indymedia community's preference for non-hierarchical organization has caused conflicts over the involvement of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (now generally considered to be associated with Yasser Arafat's Fateh movement) in the Palestine IMC, because they brought with them an authoritarian organizational style and a requirement that all members adhere to a Marxist line.

Role among International Media Networks

Indymedia is sometimes considered by its supporters to be a competitor to the large international media networks, such as CNN, News Corporation, ABC-USA or the BBC. However, it would be more accurate to say that Indymedia is an example of an open publishing news network/community of particular interest to left-wing anti-globalization activists (though a small number of right-wing, libertarian activists also participate). Because of its open organizing structure and its internal rules that no Indymedia center can become a commercial or for-profit organization, it is unlikely that it can be bought in a take-over bid.

Independence from Governments

In September 2002, the Ford Foundation, proposed funding for an Indymedia regional meeting. This was refused because many volunteers, especially those from IMC Argentina, were uncomfortable with accepting money from the Foundation, which they believe to be linked to the CIA.

This appears to have been a watershed issue for the organization. While it solidified a resistance to government-linked funding, the animosity and difficulty the group had with this issue resulted in a serious stumbling, if not outright abandonment, of global networking and collaborating on finance and far-reaching, network-wide decision making. For good or bad, it cast Indymedia in a model where all substantive decisions were at the community level, and any meaningful global network and organizing substantively set aside.

Some IMCs in Europe have faced legal action or threats of legal action related to questions of libel or hate speech. They took local, autonomous decisions to temporarily suspend the site while the different activist groups reorganized to find a consensual, constructive method of dealing with these problems and to increase openness and non-authoritarian organizing methods.

Reputation

While Indymedia has a good reputation amongst its target audience, this reputation is not universal. Its critics often claim that since anyone can publish with little to no editorial process, opinions and conspiracy theories often are published as fact, along with inaccurate (sometimes wildly so) and anti-Semitic articles. A response to these critics is the fact that Indymedia is similar to other open projects like Wikipedia, and shares both their vulnerability to vandalism/sabotage and many of their methods of responding, with the additional element of being strongly rooted in local left-wing groups who can take autonomous, transparent action against what they see as sabotage, though not necessarily the same things its critics take issue with.