Yesterday I listened to a 90 minute interview of Kim Stanley Robinson by journalist Ezra Klein in his podcast. It’s the first time I’d listened to Klein – I had never even heard of this seasoned American journalist. But the interview was impressive from both sides. Klein, who says that Robinson’s Ministry of the Future was the most important book that he’d read that year managed to ask questions about many of the central features of the novel, and, in response, Robinson spoke about topics like Eco-Marxism, which is an ism that I hadn’t heard of.
I live very much on the periphery of ideologies, though of course the ideas trickle down through alternative social media and even mainstream media. Wikipedia has a comprehensive article on Eco-socialism. In the interview Robinson describes Marx as a good historian but a bad science fiction writer “like all of us” – because it is so difficult to predict the future. Of course, this is a bit ingenuous, because Marx would have been trying not passively to predict but to shape the future. If the analogy doesn’t seem ingenuous to Robinson, it would be because he too is trying to model and to promote scenarios in which we might beat the climate crisis.
It’s interesting that Robinson, in his novel, gave comparatively little space to the role of the news media. Perhaps, as a novelist, he can afford to stand somewhat outside the media and its influences, though of course he needs it as a platform to speak about and sell his books. The podcast was a good example. As a novelist and a science fiction writer (“cli-fi” is another of the terms I have just heard about), Robinson has greater freedom than journalists or even non-fiction writers, to speak about ideas like eco-terrorism, and to assign a role to these in the coming years.
The degree to which journalists enjoy freedom depends upon where they are situated and who they work for. The journalist Jonathan Cook yesterday published a critical article about the Guardian’s George Monbiot. Monbiot is one of the newspaper’s most important voices and he specializes in climate change. Cook challenges him not on climate change but on his lack of interest in the case of Julian Assange.
Assange, I think Cook would agree, is probably the world’s most important/iconic persecuted journalists: a person whom the US government wants incarcerated, if they can’t assassinate him first. The Guardian reports on his case because it has to, but without much enthusiasm, and Monbiot, one of the more radical journalists in the Guardian’s employ, ignores the case. Cook says it’s because Monbiot is an “owned man”, in the pay of the Guardian and the Guardian is, in turn, in the pay of the establishment.
Cook has an even more potent example – the recent series by Al Jazeera on the character assassination of Corbin and the way this was used to promote a more moderate figure like Starmer. He says, justifiably, that the Guardian, together with other British newspapers, have almost totally ignored the story in the attempt to get it squashed. He also asks why it took a Qatari paper to uncover the story in the first place.
I recently subscribed to Jonathan Cook’s Substack account, as well at to the nonpaid part of Glenn Greenwald’s Substack. These are two journalists who decided to leave the pay of mainstream media and to go-it-alone, for similar reasons: they think that in order to do the kind of the journalism they are interested in, they need a greater degree of freedom than is accorded to them in mainstream media. Greenwald even felt obliged to leave the alternative media outfit that he helped found.
Cook, Greenwald and others like them are doing a good job, but we, and even they, still need mainstream media, obviously. They need it to get their stories out, even on a freelance basis. We need it because independent journalists can only cover a smidgeon of stories – those that are of interest to them.
We still need Big Media, just as we need nation-states and all the other apparatus of the establishment, even as we try to change it. But in order to get a fresh and independent perspective, as in the example above, we need to look beyond our country’s mainstream news media. Al Jazeera certainly isn’t free or independent. It’s owned by Qatar, a corrupt, undemocratic oil state. But on some issues, they can talk freely and provide a different perspective. They can give us the dirt on Britain’s Labour Party. If we want to learn about Qatar, we will need to look elsewhere. If it’s Ukraine? Al Jazeera follows pretty much the Western line, as far as I’ve seen, with some editorial exceptions. “Editorial exceptions” we can find even in the Western press, though.
If we want to form a balanced view, it’s crucial for us to look outside the prison of our own cultural perspective and deliberately hunt for different points of view, wherever we can find them.
Robinson, in his novel, does not ignore the influence of social media. His Ministry of the Future even creates a new, non-corporate version of it. He seems to be unaware of already existing phenomena like the Fediverse. Unfortunately, the Fediverse, like mainstream social media, is a mixed bag when it comes to the expression of independent voices: Just as on Twitter or Facebook, the Fediverse has influential people who are in thrall to the established opinions that they have picked up from mainstream media. The dialogue, or lack of it, around Ukraine is a recent example. The war is being followed like a football match, with everyone rooting for the same team. Very few people are actively seeking an end to the war. If they do so, they can, as in one post I saw, face being censured like Pope Francis for piping up “just when Ukraine seems to be doing well.” Western leaders are, in the meantime, happy to see Russia humiliated, while their weapons industries benefit from this new lucrative market.
Accepting that culpability is seldom equal, each party goes into a conflict with its own set of needs. The way out, when there is a mediation process, is not necessarily a compromise. For example if Ukraine is demanding territorial integrity and the ability to make alliances independently of Russia, but Russia wants guarantees that its security needs will be respected and that it will not be encircled by hostile powers, a way can be found to meet both of these needs. I’m just speculating. But the best way to end this is not by penalizing, squashing or obliterating one side while championing the other, even if that’s our fantasy.
Besides being out of step with our times, the war has been a crime against the earth at the most critical time in the history of our civilisation. We have to find a way of stopping it immediately, as well as to discover a formula to prevent future wars like it. We cannot afford to fight on two fronts at this time.