People’s budgets or the same-old unaccountable ones?

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      The basic message of Fraudcast News is pretty simple, you sort of can’t miss it in the subtitle – How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies. Working from back to front – the bogusness of our democracies is that ordinary citizens get nothing like the influence implied by the word “democracy” – […]

Collaborative news anyone?

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I posted this in response to a LinkedIn question about reporter, collaboratively owned news operations. I dream of these as alternatives to the status quo. I’m sure their time will come.   The best one I came across, before it expired, was this: http://www.newstandardnews.net/ This is what it said about itself: The NewStandard was a […]

What role for government in changing our behaviour?

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Very little, I say, as I explained in a video recorded for a GlobalNet21 debate held in London on Tuesday, July 31. Not least of the problems is the gathering, multiple crises in government legitimacy, at every level from the local to global. There was an interesting array of opinions expressed on the night, judging […]

Worse than “cock-ups and casualties” at Thomson Reuters

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I wrote this comment in response to a commentary piece by ex-colleague and current friend Paul Holmes about recent editorial changes being for the better at Thomson Reuters, despite the recent “cock-ups and casualties”. I disagreed. Patrick Chalmers • I have a great deal of respect for Paul Holmes as an ex-colleague and as a […]

Postcard from SW France

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It’s days to go before the first round in the 2012 French presidential elections. In Montbrun Bocage, a rural backwater south of Toulouse in the Pyrenean foothills, the atmosphere is hardly crackling with excitement. People here certainly know their politics but generally fail to find much passion for politicians. Given the bluntness of occasional votes […]

What’s the point of documentary film festivals?

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I’ve spent some of the past few days working with Glenn McMahon on covering the  Human Rights Watch Festival 2012 in London for visionOntv. We ended our interview series by asking HRW’s Andrea Holley on her organisation’s thinking about the hows and whys of these video fests. Are they preaching to the choir, reaching out […]

Industrial agriculture meets peasant farmers – who wins?

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I’m due to interview Bettina Borgfeld for visionOntv later today to talk about Raising Resistance, a film she co-directed with David Bernet about the fight of the small farmers of South America against industrial agriculture. The subject is one close to my heart, I covered a version of it over many years while working for Reuters […]

Indy media legacy documents Genoa G8 police violence

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNMAhN6PwAE&w=560&h=315]   Carlo Augusto Bachschmidt, director of the documentary Black Block, explains how work by independent media helped piece together the story of unprovoked Italian police violence at the G8 2001 summit meeting in Genoa. (Italian with English interpretation). His film features powerful testimonies by some of the dozens of activists who were savagely […]