open Democracy News Analysis - openDemocracy: a farewell salute, Isabel Hilton - Comments

willow28 on "openDemocracy: a farewell salute"

willow28 — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 08:53:55 +0000

openDemocracy has certainly benfited from your extensive experience, as, I'm sure, will chinadialogue.net. Perhaps, if Mr Maher wants to find his idea of 'another point of view', he should stick to Fox News and Soldier of Fortune ;-).

maher_colin on "openDemocracy: a farewell salute"

maher_colin — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:30:11 +0000

Dear Isabel Hilton I have often read OpenDemocracy, especially articles by your favourite writer Paul Rogers, so as to study the point of view with which I have grown to disagree with. I might be more sympathetic to Rogers' unceasing campaign to denigrate the President, were I ever to read on OpenDemocracy a counter point of view written by an equally competent analyst. I was surprised too by your rather catty comment about the well resourced BBC, in comparison to your own less resourced website. All I can say is thank goodness that the British government is willing to resource the BBC, quiite rightly with help from the public TV taxes in the UK, but nevertheless allowing the world public access online free to many excellent documentaries. The BBC from time to time even bites the hand that feeds them, and I admire the Brirish government for being big enough to accept this independence of BBC journalists of the calibre for example of John Simpson. What I most like about the BBC is different views on "Have Your Say", and also listening online to forum discussions with opposing points of view, which can be heard on all kinds of subjects from Iraq to climate change. This is where OpenDemocracy has failed. You are NOT open to letting another point of view be published, eg on Iraq. I have yet to hear Paul Rogers describe what he thinks would really happen if all US troops are withdrawn.. Does he really think that once there are no more US soldiers to target in Iraq, by either the insurgent Sunni ex-Saddamists, Al Queda, or Iran backed Shi'a paramilitaries, Iraq will become peaceful? That sectarian fighting will cease, that criminals as well as extremists will stop blowing up oil pipelines and sending suicide bombers to kill innocent civilians? No wonder Paul Rogers cannot find a job as an objective journalist. He is too onesided to see reality or realistically anticipate events. He has his 'agenda' and doubtless gets away with it at Bradford University, brainwashing his students, who if they do not agree with him will fail his course on "Peace Studies". I just hope your successor will allow other points of view to be published by competent writers. Then at last OpenDemocracy can become true to its website name. I look forward to your reply. Sincerely, Colin Maher maher_colin@hotmail.com

barryshears on "openDemocracy: a farewell salute"

barryshears — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 08:59:34 +0000

.......above, but is oD meant to be a crusader? I think not. Should it change? For example, should it try to amuse us? Should it get into satire? I think not! (there is plenty of that elsewhere - and some good stuff about our leaders on a site called johnproblem.com). Please continue as is and thanks.

bartschoonbaert on "openDemocracy: a farewell salute"

bartschoonbaert — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 21:42:43 +0000

Thanks to Isabel Hilton for her work at OD. Good luck with Chinadialogue, it's a fantastic enterprise.

Keith.Moss on "openDemocracy: a farewell salute"

Keith.Moss — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 00:53:12 +0000

Best of luck at chinadialogue.net and thanks for your work at oD, it's always a truly fascinating read.

musicweaver on "openDemocracy: a farewell salute"

musicweaver — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 22:33:52 +0000

Just a note to wish you good luck. Had a quick look at chinadialogue.net - terrific. Also read George Monbiot's terrifying piece on climate change and the end of the Holocene. But openDemocracy goes from strength. Thanks to the team and Isabel Hilton, and all best wishes to the latter (as well as the former). Dr Brian Robinson, Bucks, UK

paul.carline on "openDemocracy: a farewell salute"

paul.carline — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:20:25 +0000

The somewhat self-congratulatory tone (not specifically personal - the 'self' is meant to refer to OpenDemocracy as a whole) of Isabel Hilton's farewell speech is only partly justified. To be sure, OpenDemocracy publishes many articles which can be classed as more radical than the fare routinely served up in the mainstream press and TV. But that doesn't necessarily mean a lot. The real question is: does OpenDemocracy really challenge the centres of power and manipulation, or only pretend to do so? Where, for instance, is the radical questioning of the official stories of 9/11 and 7/7 (and a series of other supposed 'terrorist plots')? Type 7/7 into the search engine and one will find earnest analyses of the event and its effects exclusively in terms of the official story - despite the clear evidence that this cannot be trusted. If the story is flawed or false, then all the well-meaning analyses are practically worthless. Why has OpenDemocracy not examined the evidence - for example, that the only image of the four alleged bombers (supposedly taken at Luton Station that morning) is a clear forgery? Why has no-one asked why this is the only CCTV image available from a city which is the world capital of CCTV density? What is the value of articles on Islamic 'fundamentalism' when the basic facts of the bombings are in doubt? The same can be said about the event which "changed the world" and led to the obscenities of Afghanistan and Iraq - 9/11. The same depressing failure to examine the mountain of conclusive evidence pointing to an 'inside job'. No moderately intelligent person with a mind sufficiently open and questioning to look at the alternative conspiracy theories could fail to come to the conclusion that the official story is hogwash. So why the silence? Why the effective complicity in what was a high crime and the most destructive lie in recent history (only the mos heinous in a long line of lies used to justify wars and aggression)? OpenDemocracy's track record actually reveals it to be a rather conservative organisation, careful not to rock the boat or really challenge the powerful. But perhaps I shouldn't expect anything better: in a world in which the word 'democracy' itself is a cover for the continued dominance of a liberal elite, why should an organisation which uses the same word in its title be any different? But Isabel is right in one respect: there are plenty of things worth reading on the Internet. But sadly, for anyone who has a passion for the truth, OpenDemocracy would never be the first choice.

spamlet on "openDemocracy: a farewell salute"

spamlet — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 18:06:12 +0000

Good Luck

openDemocracy: a farewell salute, Isabel Hilton

robert.cawston@opendemocracy.net — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:00:00 +0000

The other evening, a friend and colleague announced, with the certainty of a man whose mind was made up, that "There is nothing worth reading on the internet". Were he a man given over to football, or another trivial pursuit, I might have shrugged and let him be. But this was a journalist of distinction, a man who had seen the world, who had covered important stories and who knew a thing or two about politics, revolutions and the broad sweep of human affairs. His books are well researched and favourably reviewed, his opinions worth engaging with. How was it possible that he had failed to read, for instance openDemocracy, let alone the less demanding if far better resourced sites of the New York Times or the BBC?

My only conclusion was that he represented a generation of journalists and public intellectuals for whom no words have weight unless they are delivered in a familiar shape and held in the hand. No other media - not television, radio or the internet carries the same value. I felt a faint stirring of memory.
Isabel Hilton was successively editor and editor-in-chief of openDemocracy between March 2005 and July 2007. She is editor of the bilingual Chinese-English website on environmental and climate-change issues, chinadialogue

Isabel Hilton has been contributing to openDemocracy since June 2001, a month after we went live. Among her twenty-seven articles, interviews, introductions and profiles are:

"Semper Fidel"
(25 September 2001)

"Torture: who gives the orders?"
(13 May 2004)

"Five principles for a safer future"
(8 February 2005)

"China and Japan: a textbook argument" (20 April 2005)

"Letter from wounded London"
(7 July 2005)

"Álvaro Uribe's gift: Colombia's mafia goes legit"
(25 October 2005)

"Beijing's media chill" (15 February 2006)

"The Economist and Britain's future"
(3 February 2007)

"Peacework: lessons we have failed to learn" (4 June 2007)
When I arrived as openDemocracy's editor in March 2005, after a career largely spent in print and broadcasting, that view was common amongst my former colleagues. It was not that none of them read online, more that they were faintly embarrassed to admit it, as though real men did not learn anything on the net.

At openDemocracy we kept a tally of distinguished print journalists whose latest articles were thinly reprocessed versions of something that we, or other sites, had published - material that had been plundered unacknowledged, in a manner that would have been unconscionable for the same guilty parties had the source been in print. Anything on the internet, they seemed to feel, was not only free to read, it was also free to plagiarise. Polite emails would go out, requesting that they acknowledge the source of their inspiration.

This process was not without its ironies: the conventional view of the relationship of new media to old is that new media are parasitic on old, that without the newsgathering and professionalism of the old media, there would be nothing for the bloggers to blog about and that all the noise on the net is but a confusing echo of the real sounds made by print.

Our experience at openDemocracy was rather different. Since in almost all cases we published material that had not appeared elsewhere, since we commissioned original articles on subjects of public interest, since we found writers whom old media had not discovered, and since we encouraged writers from the global south, we soon found ourselves a source of ideas for radio and television discussion programmes: researchers and producers had us bookmarked and the cast of characters in an on-air discussion would often bear a startling resemblance to the authors we had published on a theme. Could they, as Private Eye would say, be related? Cross-fertilisation is a good and healthy thing in a culture and we were and are of course glad of this evidence of influence. My point is that the traffic between old and new media is two-way.

In my time at openDemocracy, old media - faced with static or declining in sales - have scrambled to catch up with the possibilities of the web. Newspapers' websites now rank equally in importance with the print version and attract more readers, therefore more advertising. Few publications now imagine they can survive without a web presence. For openDemocracy, the challenge has always been to find a place through innovation - editorially and organisationally.

Now I am leaving openDemocracy, after two and a half years, to concentrate on the growing demands of www.chinadialogue.net - a very different, but to me, equally valuable and urgent challenge - that of establishing a constructive dialogue between China and the rest of the world on climate change and the environment. It has been an extraordinary and exciting period for me to be (successively) editor and editor-in-chief of openDemocracy, a chance to be part of one of the best networks and communities in the world: those who have written for us, those who have read us and those many people who have contributed advice, attention and comments. The staff I have worked with - both on the editorial and the technical side - have been remarkable for their dedication and professionalism. The freedom to choose how we would approach an issue and how we would try to understand our world has been a constant stimulus. openDemocracy is a work of many, many hands. It has been a privilege to be one of them. As to my friend, perhaps he will never know what he has missed.

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