News From Below was conceived in the spring of 2001. We published and distributed two print issues across the usa in the spring of 2002 and 2003.
The first editorial written for the magazine focused on the events of 9-11, and remains an important bookmark for why we need a media movement worthy of a democratic people, not only inside but beyond the shores of the united states, from which newsfrombelow was first conceived.
Our Spring 2002 issue was entitled democracy@ground zero, and one of the editorials was entitled "citizen tv."
"The terrorist attack of 9-11 obliterated the prevailing fashion of cynical journalism.
On TV, America saw the distance between witnesses and reporters, between sources and talking heads collapse in a hurricane of emotion. Reporters hugged those they interviewed, desk anchors struggled to avoid breaking down in tears. Correspondents became servants transmitting the unfiltered voices of people in search of the missing. The stark contrast between real-time reality TV and normal programming led some networks to suspend advertisements for several days.
"The news was so important it could not be manufactured, and the networks went on a massive search for the raw video footage and photography produced by citizen eyewitnesses and freelancers. There was a radical reversal of form: the cream of the media's coverage came from-below. the radical shift in the framing of the message of the medium was so loud and clear, it was as if local unions had seized control of the cameras. Non-stop, round-the-clock coverage zoomed in on the firemen and policemen and women, and the doctors, nurses, and medics evacuating the wounded, recovering the dead, and searching through the wreckage for survivors.
"The Democratic Faith was rediscovered, if not resurrected, at the apocalypse of Ground Zero. America was able to see with telephoto clarity the foundation of our civil society: people serving people, and people caring for people, for reasons having nothing to do with the selfish pursuit of private or illicit gain. We were living in a war zone, where humble sacrifice was an ethical imperative, random acts of kindness flourished, and genuine human solidarity was everywhere present.
"Not since the nonviolent protests of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s had the pure spirit of democracy-in-action been on such vivid display through the medium of American commercial television.
"In those days, corporate gatekeepers did not yet fully understand the impact of such images on the public mind. Later, through their coverage of the war in Vietnam, they learned that images of American soldiers sacrificing their bodies in defense of empire could operate as powerfully on the public imagination as those of an oppressed people seeking liberation from racism. TV media have since become more consciously selective in serving up visual food for the popular conscience
"Of course we knew the media's magic 9-11 moment could not last..."
Like a rock-n-roll band, the small group which helped me launch the publication was unable to sustain the momentum, and i was unable to continue publishing the print edition at that time due to other circumstances beyond my control.
We expect to print special issues of the magazine as we continue our work going forward, and also to grow newsfrombelow into book publishing.
The mantra remains: seeking to inform those who continue to believe "another world is possible," while searching for "signs of the democratic faith in action."
Launched in an age of artistic and intellectual postmodern skepticism, surrounded by corporate-driven pop cool-cynicism, we are particularly inspired by the global movement against warrior and corporate imperialism, the revival and resurgence of indigenous peoples, and the citizen pioneers, engineers, and activists of the new green economy and culture of sustainability.
News From Below is a postimperial review of politics, culture, and commerce, and more broadly, in the spirit of the media movement in popular democratic globalism.
Several years after our print magazine launch, there remains a need in this media-gone-mad world of the internet for the distinctive perspective which motivated us in the months prior to the terrorist attacks of 9-11.
News From Below is also about the focus on painful and inconvenient truth. and nothing is more inconvenient a truth than what really did and did not happen on the day of september 11, 2001www.911blogger.com/node/12988
