International Festival of Whistleblowing Dissent and Accountability
At the festival, Jonathan Cook said[1]:
...the treatment of Assange and Murray has sent a clear message to any journalist inspired by their courage and their commitment to hold establishment power to account: “You will pay a severe price. You will lose years of your life and mountains of money fighting to defend yourself. And ultimately we can and will lock you away.”
Before the Noughties, without a platform provided by a corporate media outlet, journalists had no way to reach an audience, let alone create one. We were entirely beholden to our editors, and they in turn were dependent on billionaire owners – or in a few cases like the BBC’s, a government – and on advertisers.
The fact that a few journalists and activists can so convincingly and easily tear apart the coverage of corporate media outlets reveals how little relationship that coverage often bears to reality.
Corporate media took none of this lying down, of course, even if it was slow to properly gauge the dangers.
Dissident journalists are a problem not only because they have broken free of the controls of the billionaire class and are often doing a better job of building audiences than their corporate counterparts. Worse, dissident journalists are also educating readers so that they are better equipped to understand what corporate journalism is: that it is ideological prostitution. It is reporting and commentary for hire, by an establishment class.
The backlash from the corporate media to this threat was not long coming. Criticism – narratively managed by corporate outlets – has sought to character-assassinate dissident journalists and browbeat the social media platforms that host them. Reality has been inverted. Too often it is the critical thinking of dissident journalists that is maligned as “fake news”, and it is the genuine pluralism social media corporations have inadvertently allowed that is repudiated as the erosion of democratic values.
The west’s elites will not give up the corrupt institutions that uphold their power without a fight. We would be foolish to think otherwise. But new technology has offered us new tools in our struggle and it has redrawn the battleground in ways that no one could have predicted even a decade ago.
The establishment are being forced into a game of whack-a-mole with us. Each time they bully or dismantle a platform we use, another one – like Substack – springs up to replace it. That is because there will always be journalists determined to find a way to peek behind the curtain to tell us what they found there. And there will always be audiences who want to learn what is behind the curtain. Supply and demand are on our side.
The constant acts of intimidation and violence by political and media elites to crush media pluralism in the name of “democratic values” will serve only to further expose the hypocrisy and bad faith of the corporate media and its hired hands.
We must keep struggling because the struggle itself is a form of victory.
Known Participants
26 of the 86 of the participants already have pages here:
| Participant | Description |
|---|---|
| Max Blumenthal | US journalist, blogger, film maker whom the Times Of Israel tagged an "anti-zionist" |
| Jonathan Cook | UK journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001. |
| Andrew Feinstein | Former South African politician who authored Shadowworld, an expose of the global arms trade. |
| George Galloway | Pro-Palestinian anti-Zionist Scottish politician |
| Tareq Haddad | A journalist who resigned from Newsweek because the management suppressed his story about the OPCW letter |
| Nicky Hager | New Zealand-based investigative journalist |
| Jeremy Hammond | US hacker who was convicted to 10 years jail for hacking Stratfor and passing some of their data to Wikileaks. It soon was revealed he had been given the information necessary for the hack from an FBI informant. |
| John Jones | |
| John Kiriakou | The only CIA officer to go to prison for reasons connected to their torturing of suspects - the first whistleblower. |
| Joe Lauria | |
| Lowkey | UK musician and political activist with a focus on Palestine |
| Alan MacLeod | Staff writer at Mintpress, contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and the Grayzone |
| Stefania Maurizi | Journalist who worked on the WikiLeaks releases of secret documents |
| David McBride | Australian Army lawyer who exposed war crimes in Afghanistan. |
| Ray McGovern | Raymond McGovern is a former CIA veteran who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and personally delivered intelligence briefings to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, their Vice Presidents, Secretaries of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff etc. |
| Nils Melzer | |
| David Miller | Founder of Powerbase & Spinwatch and incisive anti-Zionist reporter on world affairs |
| Craig Murray | A UK ambassador to Uzbekistan who stood up and did the right thing when confronted with evidence of torture. Smeared and dismissed by the UK deep state, he continues his activism exposing Establishment lies and hypocrisy. |
| Peter Oborne | A Telegraph journalist who went independent |
| John Pilger | John Pilger, an Australian crusading journalist, has achieved fame in spite of a refusal to kowtow to the establishment by avoiding controversial issues. |
| Ashfin Rattansi | Presenter of Going Underground on RT about stories that aren’t being covered by the corporate media |
| John Rees | |
| Piers Robinson | One of "Assad's Useful Idiots", a deep political researcher, founded the Working Group on Propaganda and the 9/11 global "War on Terror" |
| Prem Sikka | |
| Asa Winstanley | Investigative journalist who quit the UK Labour party |
| Andy Worthington | A UK historian who has focused on Guantanamo Bay. |
