Noam Chomsky, Robert Fisk, and George Monbiot walk into a bar; bartender says, “What is this, some kind of joke?” But of course it’s no laughing matter what these three revered authors have all come to Vancouver recently to say. Not many people knew, for example, that Vietnam is compelled to keep paying reparations payments to the United States resulting from the war that took place in Vietnam, ended three decades ago, and by the general consensus as a loss for the US. It was Chomsky who revealed this utter grotesquery of justice, adding that Democratic president-with-a-heart Bill Clinton eased the burden somewhat by offering to deduct from the bill any new spending on education that Vietnam initiates. Ain’t that kind?

Revelations by the two British journalists were just as striking. But it must be a peculiarly annoying British trait that accords respect to journalists who haplessly get into all sorts of trouble in the oddest corners of the far-flung world. In both their introductions to Vancouver audiences, written by themselves, both Fisk and Monbiot laid heavy emphasis on their Evelyn Wough creds, drawing attention to police beatings and jailings they have suffered, exotic insect bites they have endured, and in Monbiot’s case, the cerebral malaria he caught, causing him to be pronounced dead in a hospital somewhere in northern Kenya. That certainly tops most other British journalists’ stories, but Canadian audiences might be more impressed by a journalist able to describe how he caught no weird deadly viruses, got bit by nothing dangerous, and avoided all skull-crushing encounters with police. Note to all British journalists: on this side of the pond, you just sound careless when you rattle off all the injuries and accidents you have suffered while doing your job.

Aside from that, what Monbiot offered Vancouver audiences last week, and Fisk a couple of months ago, and Chomsky sometime last year, adds up to a pretty grim picture. The global climate is very near to crossing the threshold that brings irreversible warming, said Monbiot, mostly due to abject failure of political leadership to recognize the problems brought by unrestrained economic growth and industrialization, particularly in the wealthy West, lead in particular by the Americans. The wars for dwindling resources, particularly energy resources and the capacity of the Earth to absorb environmental degradation by the burning of fossil fuels, are on now, says Fisk, lead by the wealthy West again, in particular America. And most people who might have the democratic ability to demand a different, more sensible and sustainable, approach to both problems, says Chomsky, lack information because of a woefully conformist press, and anyway they don’t have enough democracy enabling them to act even if they knew they had to, because the political systems of the wealthy West, in particular those in America, offer only a (sophisticated) façade of democracy.

Time is short, what to do?

Monbiot parted with one final shot in his hour-long presentation: it’s up to us to do something. That’s the subtext running through pretty much all of Chomsky’s work too: democracy can be a powerful tool for creating progressive and sustainable state policy, but it has to be used, and that can only happen when the media plays its proper role. But the prospects of that happening anytime soon, according to both Monbiot and Fisk—among the highest regarded media journalists in the English world presently—is slim so long as media remains monopolized in the very few hands of the very rich.

So the solution—and there must be a solution, or we’re for sure doomed—begins it seems with a media liberated from the clutches of those few rich guys so that the public can be more fully informed and motivated to use their latent democratic powers to force their political leaders to act more certainly in their interests and to beat back the big business interests and their shameless shills who are using their undemocratic political power to strangle the Earth’s prospects for survival for the sake of blind shareholder return for those same few rich guys.

The problem, as I’ve found it, is that if you so much as mention Noam Chomsky or Robert Fisk and their media critiques in any gathering of journalists, you are met with utter contempt and cynical dismissal. It’s partly because knee-jerk dismissal of everything, if you squint your eyes enough, can be made to appear as sophisticated skepticism, a prerequisite for journalists. But genuine, informed skepticism is hard to acquire, hence the handy and very cheap imitation. Only a buffoon in the sciences would stand around at a cocktail party and breezily declare Einstein got it all wrong or was incomplete in his analysis or didn’t really mean this energy or that matter, yet at parties of journalists, those who cannot even properly construct a paragraph feel boozily confident enough to dismiss Chomsky. Most of what he says to journalists therefore tragically falls on intentionally deaf ears; anyone who tries to repeat what he says or directly apply to their craft what he prescribes, is heartily laughed at. A junior cub reporter knows more than Chomksy, Fisk, and Monbiot combined, or so the prevailing attitude among journalists seems to be. No one, therefore, is willing to try to practice what Chomsky and the others are preaching.

But even this article, a slight directed at journalists, will be dismissed with a curt “blaming the journalists again!” tsk’ing. That’s only fair though: I do think big corporate media is at the root of all evil, and the journalists who make it all possible are as guilty and thoughtless as the moms who screw nuclear warheads on missiles at the munitions factory in Iowa so they can take their kids to Disneyland.

This issue of The Republic completes six years of our efforts to create a liberated and independent media, and we can certainly reply to Monbiot, Fisk, and Chomsky with a laundry list of problems encountered by anyone trying to fulfill that key requirement for democracy and sustainability they all set out. On the other hand, as battles to save the planet go, it hasn’t been that hard.

See the article in this issue about how you can become a member of a real editorial board and help create an actual print newspaper supplement in ten weeks—an experience, once you are taken through it, that you’ll be able to repeat on your own or with friends as many times as you wish on into the future.

You decide how much it's worth to you: