IndyMedia in a Snit With CNN
By Farhad Manjoo



To listen to Aaron Schlosser, a high school student in Andover, New Hampshire, the whole thing began very innocently a couple weeks ago: A few people were hanging out in an online chat room on CNN's website, and when one of them happened to type in the word "indymedia" -- referring to the news website run by the Independent Media Center -- the message didn't go through.

Schlosser heard about this apparent ban, and he decided to see if it was true. Using two browser windows, he logged in to CNN's chat room with two different nicknames. Schlosser wrote messages into one window and monitored what showed up in the other. And sure enough, when he typed in "indymedia" -- or "indy media" or even "1ndym3d14" -- he noticed that his messages weren't being sent to everyone.

Apparently, CNN was "censoring" its chat rooms, Schlosser decided, because -- as he later wrote in an article
 http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=79356
that appeared on the Indymedia site -- the cable channel wanted to "protect its interests from the likes of nasty, decentralized, non-profit organizations like the Independent Media Center that are composed of regular, working people."

To hear CNN tell the story, however, the folks at Indymedia are throwing around dangerous words like "censorship" and "bias" without being entirely truthful.

Yes, CNN has banned the word "indymedia" from its chat room, according to Edna Johnson, a representative for the company. But that's because Indymedia fans were spamming other people in the chat rooms, constantly telling chatters that they should get their news from the independent site.

"We did it after many, many, many incidents of advertising," Johnson said. "CNN (chat rooms) do not permit any advertising -- so that means if users repeatedly try to advertise in our chat rooms, we will block that, and the warning is posted on our site."

The notice Johnson is talking about is pretty plain. "No advertising of any kind, including nonprofit organizations, is permitted," it said.

But she said it is generally enforced only when the advertisers are egregious in their plugs -- when their comments add nothing to the conversation, when they become an annoyance, when the messages smell like spam.

"For example, if you were in a CNN chat room and you said, 'Go to Wired News and read all the latest Internet information' -- that's advertising, right?" she said. "And if you began doing that repeatedly, or if everyone at Wired did that, we would definitely block it."

"Now, let's say someone said, 'Did you read such and such article in Wired News?' And someone else said, 'Yes, that was interesting," or, 'I loved that.' Now, that's not advertising, obviously, that's a discussion."

So did Indymedia spam CNN?

Not in any organized way, according to Ryan Giuliani, a member of the organization in San Francisco: "We don't have time for that. If you want to say that people who are core organizers ever have the time to go to the CNN website chat room and put ads on there, that's not possible."