when the wind blows his brain cells rattle around like two ball-bearings in a vacuum cleaner

Tabloid journalists sometimes seem to view protesters/leftists as idiots who can be lied to and about easily and with impunity, something worth doing if it will allow them to generate stories following the familiar formats, which tends to mean they denigrate, marginalise and/or help criminalise any kind of radical dissent, often very broadly defined - ‘feminists’, ‘the student Left’, I remember a tiny piece in The Australian which stated that the MSA was funding ‘terrorists’ because of a vote to donate to the Organisation of Women’s Freedom and to help with a tour of a rep from (what is often referred to as) the Southern Oil Workers Union.

A little while ago, a ‘journalist’ - OK, a journalist, since it is not a word with any connotation of integrity or Woodward-Bernstein commitment to tough investigative reporting - named Justin Vallejo started trying to contact ‘Arterial Bloc’ - blamed/praised and occasionally even defended for violence at the Melbourne anti-G20 actions - and sent the following letter through a Left contact, addressed to the pseudonymous AB participants who wrote a post-G20 text discussing that protest, its logic and aftermath. In a style designed either to ‘foil ASIO’ or to imply to the recipients that he is a paranoid cretin, Vallejo wrote:

To Gertrude and Fuchsia, two uncitizens of AB.
I am a journalist with the Daily Telegraph, you might remember me from covering gee. Twenty. activities last year.

My name is Justin Vallejo, check my credentials and from past stories on this and other issues, and my subsequent legal battles wit-feds, you will see that I sympathize with neither side of any debate.

What I am interested in is writing interesting stories that go beyond the normal reactive journalism that was seen during g. twnti and will be seen in Sept.

In our current stage-managed climate, the message that gets out to the Australian public is often the one that has the best team of media managers behind it. I loath being a part of those machinations and am keen to break away from the pack in covering meetings in Sydnemy in two month’s time.

I can’t speak for the paper and how they choose to cover the event. I am just one of a number of journos that will be covering, so can only speak for myself. What I can do, however, is provide my bosses with stories that they can’t choose to ignore.

What I propose is that we work together and provide a counter-balance for the usual propaganda that will be coming from spokespeople on the other side of the fence.

Before and after what happened in melbourne, most if not all coverage was focused on their quotes etc.

Lets meet, talk and see how we can mutually benefit by casting aside the usual restraints between “us and you”. I hate the word embedded, but I was thinking something similar for Sept.

I can be reached through any of my contacts below or on 0403 004 360. If emailing back dn’t use key. Words. Never know.

Regards

Justin Vallejo
Journalist
The Daily Telegraph
ph: +61 2 9288 3726
fax: +61 2 9288 2608
email: vallejoj@dailytelegraph.com.au

Vallejo had indeed written of the anti-G20 actions, and if you read this you will get a sense of what his ‘coverage’ amounted to. Seriously, read it - you will then understand why it appears slightly bizarre that he thought protesters set to travel to APEC would want him “embedded” with them, or that he would pretend to be something other than a tabloid hack whose work is vitriolic toward exactly these protesters - and vitriolic without any serious pretense to ‘even-handedness’, to what might once have been thought to be implied by the term ‘journalism’, or even to the minimal standards of intelligence expected of its writers by say Hustler.

they all should do it
Vallejo also gave us this, a piece about the Sydney teenager, Ali Ammar, who was charged with stealing and burning an Australian flag, and who went on a very long walk through Papua New Guinean jungle in partial penance - though Vallejo notes that this was “after critics said he could never learn the values of the flag he so infamously desecrated”.

Vallejo ends the article by saying: “My thoughts, they all should do it.” He doesn’t say who ‘they’ are, leaving it to the reader to project whatever version of bigotry or reaction they favour, but if you look at the comments below you’ll see that the readers made assumptions about what he meant and he doesn’t seem to have bothered to contradict them.

Vallejo also pulled this stunt, the consequences of which he absurdly refers to as proof of his lack of bias - being critical of both sides. Read it and think about that one, about what he is campaigning for there and why, what fears he is trying to use. All-in-all it is unclear whether he is just stupid, or if he thinks protesters are stupid, or both.

So unable to sleep, as usual, and feeling like I wanted to express some fraction of an appropriate amount of conempt, I drafted an e-mail to Vallejo, without being specific as to whether I was involved in AB, since of course I wasn’t.

My e-mail to Vallejo:

Justin

Holly forwarded your proposals regarding September and ‘embedded’ journalism to people who were involved in the previous protests to which you referred; the ones you wrote about in The Daily Telegraph last year.

I spoke about this proposal to some other people who were involved in anti-G20 organising. Sorry it took a while to get back to you,. but we felt we should talk about your proposal first.

We looked back over one of the articles you published - ‘An acute political aneurism’, from November 20 last year.

You say that you want to be something like “embedded” in September, which would be quite an act of trust and reflection of some respect for a tabloid journo, so let’s take a look at this previous effort at journalism. You:

1. Talked about the killing of a protester in Genoa in order to clearly imply that protesters regarded this death as a terrific opportunity for “attention”. You gave no evidence for this assertion. You called the protesters “rent-a-crowd”. That this rent-a-crowd regarded this “attention” as a “victory” - a slur of your own invention, so far as we can tell - you described as “disgusting”, in fact as “the disgusting low at the height of violence orchestrated by militant protest group Black Bloc”. As if no evidence exists of state or police planning or initiation of violence in Genoa. Thus you managed to not only suggest that protesters were happy with police killing a protester, but that they were responsible for it. (”In a deft propaganda coup, demonstrators in Tiananmen Square orchestrated their deaths at the hands of the military…”)

2. This “attention” you claim those protesters craved was not even “media coverage” or “propaganda”, just “attention”, like a child wanting attention for its own sake. So it fits that in talking of the anti-G20 actions you would say that: “Like toddlers in a temper tantrum, the so-called “anarchists” ran amok around Melbourne at the weekend smashing things and making loud noises so all eyes would be on them.”

3. With no evidence at all, you state that: “the thing they’re most likely to be against is the very same that allows them to protest so freely in the first place: democracy”. What evidence you imagine you have for this proposition, or what you think it means, we can only guess, but with people like this you can get away with saying just about anything, can’t you Justin?

4. You pretend to see an irony in people opposing the global organisation of poverty and oppression using the internet to do so. Now, Justin - that is just childish.

5. And since the G20 claims to be concerned with climate change now, you suggest that “it can only be assumed [anti-G20 protesters] have a beef with environmental conservation, too”. Well, “only” seems a bit strong, doesn’t it? As if anything about the history of the G20 makes it so ridiculous for protesters to display cynicism toward this supposed concern for the environment.

6. You state that Arterial Bloc are “extremists” who “don’t even know themselves” what they are against. Was this based on anything in particular? You suggest that what AB do want is what “didn’t work in the Soviet Union or for the impoverished North Koreans”. Because any slur will do, won’t it Justin?

7. You end by proposing that some ‘us’ of which you are a part should “shift a few Nike, Starbucks and McDonald’s stores to a remote iceberg and let the anarchists smash away on the melting ice while they re-think their views on global warming”. So you think AB should “rethink”, in what way I have no idea, while amusingly drowning.

And you wrote all of this as the commentators, police and politicians were all over the media helping to create a frenzy justifying the repression we have since seen. Can you point to anything you did to “counter-balance” this frenzy?

Which part of this reflects your desire to “go beyond the normal reactive journalism” you note was evident in the reporting of anti-G20 actions, reporting of which this was an example? What part would suggest that you should be taken seriously in your proposal that “we work together and provide a counter-balance for the usual propaganda that will be coming from spokespeople on the other side of the fence”? Which bit of this article was counter-balancing the propaganda of “the other side of the fence”? Which part wasn’t just deploying every anti-protester cliche available?

Seriously, Justin, can you answer any of this in a way which plausibly suggests that this proposal is anything other than a lame trick intended to let you write more of the abusive rubbish you think will help you make a splash as a tabloid hack? Why should protesters want to help the career of someone who publicly states that people critical of capitalism are following in the footsteps of North Korea?

Yours sincerely

Benjamin

Justin wrote back just about immediately, with this:

Mate, that story was a comment/opinion piece on the opinion pages and by its very nature was meant to infuriate and provoke. It is supposed to have people passionately disagree with everything it says. Don’t agree with my comment/opinion, that’s fine. I may not agree with you and your tactics.
In truth, I don’t really care for either your cause or for the causes symbolised by APEC, G20, et al. I am not an activist and I am not trying to ingratiate myself by defending what my opinions are or what I write. Tomorrow I could just as easily write a comment/opinion piece bashing
APEC and defending you guys. I am a journalist, and as such I am interested in stories. I have not approached you for material to write a comment/opinion piece. Though I still may write one. I write lots of them. I wrote one this week on illegal street racers and I’m sure they all hated every word of it also.
But mostly I will be covering the event from a news perspective, as an observer. I will be writing about what happens at apec, of course the protesters and protests. The police response, will they be too heavy handed. I am already working up a story with a Freedom of Information request over the excludable persons list. If you want to quote stories, read over the 2000+ I have written over the past six years then quote back to me.
I myself am facing serious criminal charges for stories I have written criticising the establishment. Quote those back to me.
I am not in your camp, and I don’t have to be. It’s called being professional. If you are worried about negative publicity and want a lap dog that will go native and buy-in to your views, hire a PR woman and don’t email me back.
I’m not looking to change the world, as you may be. But I am looking to be there if and when it happens.
Regards,
justin

gee. Twenty. whiz
So maybe a ‘journalist’ after all. Plus I hate that way of using the word ‘mate’.

I wrote back for some reason, can’t remember why.

Justin

So, nothing you write is to be taken as representing what you think - you don’t even try to be accurate, you just want to ‘infuriate and provoke’?

Why would anyone want to deal with someone who is going to write just anything at random with no regard for reality and call it ‘opinion’? Whose idea of ‘provoking’ is not exactly the same as being ‘thought-provoking’, but just consists of being an idiot and playing to cliche and prejudice?

Mate

Benjamin

update
A week after I sent the above to him, I got a reply from Vallejo:

Didn’t I tell you not to waste my time? Seriously, why are you even bothering to talk to me when you already made up your mind from the beginnig? I know your type, you get a kick out of trying to be a big man. You are deaf to anything other than what you want to hear, what fits your purpose or whatever twisted agenda you are running. Go back to the class room boy.
Kind Regards,
Justin Vallejo

So there you go.