December
2001/January 2002
Guerilla
Newsworthy: The Satya Interview with Anthony Lappé
By Anne Sullivan
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Founded in the summer of
2000, Guerrilla News Network (GNN) is a multi-media news organization
whose mission “is to expose people to important global issues through
guerrilla programming on the web and on television.” GNN produces
NewsVideos, which are mini-documentaries that combine high-impact imagery,
tracks from top recording artists and interviews with leading experts
about important issues underreported by the major media outlets. Topics
have included the CIA’s involvement in the drug trade, the importation
of Nazi specialists by the U.S. to conduct mind control experiments,
and the suppression of Peter Dale Scott’s war conspiracy theory.
Additionally, GNN is hosting its own guerrilla film festival in San
Francisco called “Battle Ground,” featuring The Battle of
Algiers and Kippur, two films that go beyond the traditional Hollywood
representation of war.
GNN’s Executive Editor Anthony Lappé is a writer and television
producer whose articles have appeared in various publications including
The New York Times. He has co-produced a documentary for
MTV’s True Life series, among other projects. Anthony took a break
from his busy schedule to chat with Anne Sullivan about his experiences
as part of both the mainstream and alternative media.
GNN NewsVideos are technically brilliant
and stylistically amazing to watch. Who’s responsible for the
content, research, and ideas for the stories?
There are several different sources from which
we draw information. The main core of GNN content comes from Creative
Director Stephen Marshall and I and then we have a small group of writers
and partners who supply us with stories. Stephen is the creative genius
behind the videos, which have become real cult hits. Josh Shore, Executive
Producer (and co-founder, with Stephen) is the glue that holds us together;
he always has a million ideas of how to package things.
We have a small group of cool writers we work with. We had this
guy writing dispatches from Colombia who was using a pseudonym
because
he’s
a reporter for a major news organization. He was giving us the real
deal on what was going down. We have a San Salvador Bureau Chief, Tom
Long, a crazy journalist who moved there and hasn’t come back.
He writes for the New York Times and CBS radio. And there’s Michael
Ruppert who’s been writing probably the best, most hard-hitting
stuff on our war in Afghanistan, bringing to light things like the relationship
between the Bushes and the Saudis and the bin Ladens. We also
have a reciprocal relationship with a new lefty Belgian magazine called
Mao, and Adam Porter—an investigative reporter out of London who
has his own magazine called Year Zero. So we’re all hooked up in
this sort of nexus trying to do the same thing—a lefty kind of
writing with a little bit more attitude than you’ll find in
a magazine like The Nation.
Where do most people learn about GNN
and see your videos?
On the Web site. We have over 70,000 viewers a month, but in a
world of six billion, it doesn’t seem that much. We are reaching a core
group of people who are looking for alternative sources of information
and cool videos. We launched the site this past March and have been
progressively adding things, like our “Counter Intelligence”
section which features interviews with forward-thinking people. It’s
pretty cool in the sense that we have literally invested no money in
it. We don’t owe any money, which I think is important; we
owe only favors to our contributors.
As the dot com world continues to bust, more dot com survivors
who have been working in unfulfilling jobs that no longer exist
have been
calling
and asking how to get involved. We’re sort of a phoenix rising
out of the ashes of the dot com industry—sort of a “dot commune.”
One of the challenges we’re trying to figure out is how to
build a network and how to get people involved in different aspects
of the
projects.
Can you tell us a bit about the “network”?
It’s an ever-forming concept. We’re constantly trying to think
up new ways to bring people in. It’s a tricky balance because we
want to build a larger network but at the same time, we don’t want
to create an open situation where anything can come up on the site and
it becomes overburdened with information. We’re already seeing
our forum overrun with plagiarized cockney conspiracy theories. We don’t
have the time to manage the content that comes in every single day.
So we’re trying to figure out how to create a network that
is both democratic and open but where only a handful of people
are responsible
for the content. We want to get people to create this themselves
instead of just reading and watching our stuff.
We have a hardcore group of committed kids on the site, in our
forum, where we normally get more than a hundred postings a day. We’ve
instituted a program called “Guerrilla Operatives” where
we send them out to make videotapes and get them to distribute
them to their friends and get their communities activated
around the site.
Do you envision GNN as being the alternative
CNN one day?
I think it’s entirely possible, though I don’t ever see us
on CNN’s level. But with the continuing advances in digital video
and wireless technology there is no reason why alternative news networks
will not emerge, whether it’s ours or someone else’s.
I believe we have our finger on the pulse of people who could fill
24 hours on
our own GNN channel or have a niche on another channel. That is
a dream in our minds.
In the meantime, let’s say
you could air something on MTV, PBS or the BBC; is that something
you would
do?
Absolutely, but the question is, how do we break into the mainstream
while sticking to our guns? All these networks are branching out
and covering international events, because now they have to, but
still
it’s
a very narrow-minded political journalistic culture. Take the whole
issue of civilian deaths in Afghanistan, which has been a controversial
subject in the media. I’ve seen reports from Channel 4, a UK outlet,
that show graphic, hardcore images of civilian deaths. But that’s
true of media from abroad. The difference between CNN international
and CNN domestic is striking. Here in the U.S. we get a watered-down
version of what’s happening in Afghanistan. But the images are
out there. And that’s important.
We are currently talking with a major overseas network about a
show. We all agree that there’s a lot more hope in the UK and overseas.
We’ve all produced projects for TV and I think we’ve come
to the realization that it’s really not worth sacrificing our values
just to get on TV. People are responding to us the way they are because
we’ve opted out of trying to become dot com millionaires or some
TV programming gurus. We’ve stuck to our guns and produced what
everyone thought was a niche. In the last couple of years, we’ve
talked with several major network programming heads and were told that
no one cares about international news, that young people don’t
care about big political issues. Everyone told us we were nuts. Now
the whole world is waking up to what is really going on around the world,
regardless of their political stance. Nobody has a clue and people are
asking questions about the factors behind the present war and why so
many people around the world hate us. That’s a basic question that
many people in America don’t have an answer to.
You’ve worked as a journalist
in the mainstream media as well, written for the New York Times.
What other mainstream outlets have you been involved with?
I worked in the satellite news business, the “belly of the beast,”
which basically moves pictures of global events around the world. It’s
really, in a sense, a shuffling of reality.
So how did this affect you?
Just realizing how idiotic the global news business is, especially the
television news business, had a huge impact on me. I saw first-hand
how the news is just shuffled around and clumped together into reality.
And I saw what the priorities were. Up until September 11, international
news was just a big game of who could get the best picture of Bush getting
off a plane, or a plane crash or soccer riot.
The GNN NewsVideos would obviously
appeal to people who watch MTV-especially young people. How does this
factor into your vision of GNN?
There’s this whole generation for which there isn’t a global
news outlet that is speaking in a way they can connect to. Most kids
don’t have the ability to get into the game with something like
The Nation. I’ve had a lot of direct contact with kids recently
and I’m realizing that there are huge gaps that exist in their
basic knowledge of history and geography. It’s scary and ironic
that channels like MTV just ratchet up the ignorant program, for
instance, a show like Jackass, which is an affront to humanity.
I have a sense
of humor, but a guy swimming in raw sewage is just wrong. They
should have their license revoked.
For Random Intelligence [a music news and alternative culture program
which airs on the cable music channel Much Music], Josh and I went around
and interviewed high school kids. Some of them just echoed the arrogance
of America in their beliefs that people from other countries hated us
because they were jealous; you know, because we have Hollywood and French
fries and Cadillacs. It was both depressing and enlightening. Depressing
in the sense that these kids had so little basic knowledge of history
and geography but at the same time a lot of them had this intuitive
understanding of the conflict, like: “I think it had something
to do with Bush’s dad.” One girl was telling me her theory
that bin Laden had his own satellite that we couldn’t blow up and
that’s why we couldn’t catch him. There are these weird,
half-formed thoughts out there.
Many readers of Satya will
be familiar with your mother, Francis Moore Lappé, author
of Diet for a Small Planet and of her upcoming book, Hope’s
Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam Publishing,
January
2002). She must have played a huge role in your work and current interests.
She has been a major inspiration for what I’m doing with GNN. When
she was 26 or 27 years old, she began writing a pamphlet after doing
some research in the UC Berkeley library where she was auditing classes.
Her research was about food and hunger and she started out with these
startling facts about how there’s enough food in the world to go
around and that hunger is caused by an unjust global economic system.
The way she stuck to her guns and followed her nose and was not afraid
to question the dominant paradigm is something that’s always inspired
me. Keeping your eyes on the big picture and questioning the basic “truths”
that everyone sort of holds as reality takes a lot of hard work—just
having faith to believe in your own voice and to go out there and ask
questions. I feel very blessed in having that as a legacy. I’m
proud of her new book. I think it’s going to be really important
because it goes deeper and looks at more tangible ways that people
around
the world are trying to solve problems and are questioning globalization.
Diet for a Small Planet and the new book deal with food, which is something
everyone relates to. Putting recipes in the book and connecting food
to deeper ecological issues made it very accessible. GNN uses music,
which is universal and something that all young people can relate to.
People picked up Diet for a Small Planet thinking it was
just a recipe book. In the same sense, people may pick up on our
stuff because of
the Web site design or because they like the music in our videos.
Then they’re exposed to the message. There is a parallel there.
To learn more about GNN and watch their videos go to www.guerrillanews.com
or e-mail info@guerrillanews.com.
To order a 45-minute VHS compilation tape of GNN videos send a $20 certified
check or money order made out to Guerrilla News Network, Inc., along
with your address to: GNN Videotapes, 119 Sullivan Street, #8, New York,
NY 10012.
Anne Sullivan is the publicity director for
Lantern Books. She is a self-professed “media junkie” and was Satya’s
resident “Media Watcher” for two years.
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