Mutiny in the Mainstream

Introduction

There has been a great deal of commentary about the impact of ‘DIY media’ on the mainstream press and TV in the last few years. Its political status remains profoundly ambivalent, however. Eyewitness mobile phone footage from the 7th July bombings in London reminds us that the reinscription of ‘grassroots’, ‘personal’ footage in mainstream formats by no means guarantees an outbreak of critical ‘reality’. The cheap, freelance footage of terror direct from the eyewitness/victim (‘Know anyone on the scene? Send us your images . . .’) is conscripted as a dumbshow of suffering, passively illustrating the media’s metanarrative of good, freedom loving citizens
assailed by extremist agents of evil.