Medialternatives

DESPITE claims to promote online freedom, to represent the “public interest” on the internet “when our freedoms in the networked world come under attack,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation started by mavericks Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow is impotent when it comes to jurisdictions outside of the territory in which it is based.

A recent complaint about having an online post unilaterally deleted off this very blog, by a host based in South Africa got the following response from Gwen Hinze, EFF International Policy Director: “We are simply not able to provide legal advice outside of the country in which our lawyers are licensed.”

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Getting the M&G online staff to do anything is a bit like sucking egg out of a sausage isn’t it? Take my heartbreaking efforts to get the robotic hacks to correct the F-up where my entire blog suddenly migrated to amagama, (sick) without any prior warning! After neglecting to provide me with a new login, they started sending me sarky messages saying my blog had been deleted, this after a nasty episode in December in which one of my more controversial postings was destroyed after a complaint from a former BOSS agent and NIA apartheid spy.

Not the first time I’ve been censored, but getting censored by the M&G is like getting censored by a buch of prune farmers in brakfonteinspruit. After numerous appeals, protestations, fulminations and phones calls in the middle of the night, I lost my cool and sent out the following email on Tuesday, 4 September, 2007 2:41:41 PM

To Whom It may concern,

In December last year the M&G online, deleted a posting made on the M&G Blogspot and blocked my access to my own material. I protested and the resulting correspondence can still be seen online Limitations of free speech go too far January 24 2007 and Don’t mention the war January 22 2007.

After speaking to Riaan Wolmeraans, the M&G Online editor, I eventually got the right to respond to the allegations made by a former NIA spy.. The matter would have stopped right there, but instead three things happened:

1. Amagama.com was formed

2. The Mail& Guardian got into bed with Media24, a company accused of racism and antisemitism

3. I was denied access to amagama while my entire blog migrated and was then deleted.

I am therefore forced to protect my property and to ask a court to establish that copyright exists in my work. Even though numerous complaints have been made, the M&G acts as if it is above the law. Frankly I don’t give a fig if the racist press in this country is regulated, or if SANEF collapses entirely because corporate media hacks have shown that they are as dishonest, capable of fraud, and hypocritical as their counterparts were during apartheid.

Example, 12 months after my allegations of racism and antisemitism against Media24 and there has been absolutely no attempt to uncover the truth. The Cape Times has published fraudulent stories conveniently forgetting I have any rights, and I stand absolutely no chance of getting my labour case into court since the Cape Bar has shown itself as racist and antisemitic as the law of the past.

Lets regulate the media in favour of individual rights to self-ownership, copyright, and so forth.

David Robert Lewis

Then, just as just about to hand over my hard earned cash for petty lawyers letters and getting into bed with Don Corleone while filling out neurotically charged legal forms in a nearby police office, okay, okay, I wasn’t online at the time, at Tuesday, 4 September, 2007 3:08:36 PM and yes, barely 27 minutes later, (and after 8 months of badgering) in what must rate as world record for responsive robotics by Vince Maher the following email mysteriously arrived:

Fwd: your blog details

As we discussed over the telephone, again. Here are your login details which allow you to export your blog and delete it.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Vincent Maher <vincent@vincentmaher.com>
Date: Jun 7, 2007 7:07 PM
Subject: your blog details
To: ethnopunk@yahoo.co.uk

Hi David

Your admin address is:
http://davidrobertlewis.amagama.com/wp-admin

Your blog address is:
http://davidrobertlewis.amagama.com/

username:davidrobertlewis
pass:***** (please change this once you’re in there)

Let me know if there are any problems.

–
Kind regards,
_________________________________

Vincent Maher
Strategist, Mail & Guardian Online

“Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal
insult” – Don Corleone

Blogs: http://www.vincentmaher.com
Tel: +27 11 250 7359
Mobile: +27 84 583 5412
MSN: flobby1@hotmail.com
Skype Name: vincentmaher

I’ve attempted to decode its inner meaning and ethereal beauty but for the life of me, I cannot figure it out, except, I guess that means I’m here, in foreign territory, while I still languish under SA copyright law — the merest intention of writing for publication in SA means the publisher owns your copyright. Since I’ve been published by nearly everybody in the deep south, that probably means I’m flat broke, and can’t even afford to pay the fees to regain the rights to my own domain. If anyone else out there is planning on hijacking my work and ransoming off the outcome, I doubt if anyone is willing to pay for the kind of stats I was getting on average 100 people per post. Better off getting published in the real world, now there’s a thought.

Would love to know what bloggers think, or if any amagamarati have followed me, also your thoughts on the the Media24 racist saga and INM fraud.

PS:Check out my story on Zoopy, a new SA video site

http://www.zoopy.com/video_2630_David_Robert_Lewis_My_Story_Part_1.html

http://www.zoopy.com/video_2694_David_Robert_Lewis_My_Story_Part_2.html

http://www.zoopy.com/video_2694_David_Robert_Lewis_My_Story_Part_3.html

http://www.zoopy.com/video_2694_David_Robert_Lewis_My_Story_Part_4.html

http://www.zoopy.com/video_2694_David_Robert_Lewis_My_Story_Part_5.html

http://www.zoopy.com/video_2694_David_Robert_Lewis_My_Story_Part_6.html

http://www.zoopy.com/video_2694_David_Robert_Lewis_My_Story_Part_7.html

http://www.zoopy.com/video_2694_David_Robert_Lewis_My_Story_Part_8.html

http://www.zoopy.com/video_2694_David_Robert_Lewis_My_Story_Part_9.html

http://www.zoopy.com/video_2694_David_Robert_Lewis_My_Story_Part_10.html

http://www.zoopy.com/video_2694_David_Robert_Lewis_My_Story_Part_11.html

http://www.zoopy.com/video_2694_David_Robert_Lewis_My_Story_Part_12.html

JUDGING from reactions to my last posting, its a big crime in this country to question statistics of any kind. Gosh, what happens if those numbers are wrong? Some empiricists could lose their jobs while we all get into a flap about fowls dying of influenza, or mother hens keeling over from the sniffles. Imagine, if we’re wrong, your budgerigar could die.

Aside from not being much of a bird lover (Okay, okay, I do like pelicans and flamingos) I would rather be a dead duck than be forced to believe some bird-brained bullshit I don’t believe in, which is why I am willing to fight to the last penguin standing for my freedom to speak. Call me a common tit but as far as I’m concerned, Independent Group are a bunch of parrots, repeating whatever they find on the wires and unwilling to check the facts.

After being placed under discursive sanctions for questioning AIDS statistics, I was finally banned for my post-911 views on US imperialism and the war on terror. Nobody believes in the War against Terror anymore, but there are sure as hell a lot of people who believe in the Bird Flu Pandemic (50 deaths and counting).

Did I forget to mention AIDS? Used to be a deadly disease until it got downgraded by the Centre for Disease Control after a scientific breakthrough in 1996. Knocked you off your perch, didn’t I?

PS: Aren’t we all terrified about the thought of cows dying from HIV? Did anybody bother to ask them how they feel, or was the last MAD COW EPIDEMIC just another one of those newsroom decisions, one makes on the spur of the moment, and with profits in mind?

PPS: Any guess as to how much is going to be spent on keeping the official death toll from BIRD FLU secret? How much is this story worth to the media in terms of bullshit and spin-doctoring? Public interest organisations that stand to make millions from scare stories about the 1918 flu disaster in a world before antibiotics and vaccines…and the hysteria continues.

WITHOUT legislation to combat censorship and the suppression of opinion, the media will continue to be an exclusive debating club in which ordinary people are excluded on the basis of race, gender and class. In fact the recent debacle involving the Sunday Times and the SANEF Ombudsman proves that the industry cannot be trusted to regulate itself. However such a view is admittedly problematic since it opens the door to legislation that might do anything but garner trust.

By regulating the media’s nasty habit of suppressing information that it doesn’t enjoy — the censoring of alternative views and the stifling of different perspectives the popular press doesn’t agree with — could we be destroying something unique and valuable in our democracy? By some reports, regulation of any sort might just dismantle the independence of media not just from government, but from itself. What then is the correct path to follow?

The solution may be found in our nations constitution. The media are what is in effect a fourth estate*** — a pillar not of the legislature or government but rather of the South African commons, enshrined as “We the People” and awarded special duties and privileges by the invocation of the right to freedom of expression in particular section 16 (1) (a). Great in theory, but to what degree do the media, in particular print media, feel bound by the bill of rights and constitution of 1996?

Ideals such as freedom of conscience, religion, thought, belief and opinion form part of a magnificent bouquet of rights under section 15, but they do not exclude the use of legislation to give emphasis to what for all intents and purposes should be a pillar of society — the institutional challenge of picking apart the inalienable set of rights and principles already within the public domain and given substance by the presence of media. For instance the right of reply (a right which is rarely if ever actually accorded people without power, status and money), is considered one of the hallmarks of a liberal or free press.

In a country that has enjoyed democracy and human rights for little more than a decade, there is a sad lack of tolerance of dissent, and very little precedent with regards separation of powers and the commons versus the state. Bring on the legislators then, to open the door to a more responsible and, one hopes, a freer media.

FOR THE SIZE ISSUE — VISIT US AND VOTE AGAINST MEDIA CARTELS AND SUPERSIZED MEDIA

***The term fourth estate is frequently attributed to the nineteenth century historian Carlyle, though he himself seems to have attributed it to Edmund Burke:

Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all. It is not a figure of speech, or a witty saying; it is a literal fact, …. Printing, which comes necessarily out of Writing, I say often, is equivalent to Democracy: invent Writing, Democracy is inevitable. ….. Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority. It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite.
Carlyle (1905) pp.349-350