-Caveat Lector-
News media and protests, part two
By Carla Binion
On C-Span2, Thursday 1/11/01, organizers of Bush inaugural protests said they
expect a huge turnout of demonstrators. Media critic Michael Parenti has
written that during Civil Rights protests in the 1960s, rightwing groups
(including neo-Nazis) sometimes infiltrated demonstrations and acted
violently, triggering police backlash against peaceful protesters. By all
means, attend the protests if possible, and at the same time be alert for
shenanigans.
Jesse Jackson said recently that Republicans sent thugs to pose as
spontaneous demonstrators in Florida. Jackson reported that the GOP ruffians
violently disrupted peaceful demonstrations.
Tom DeLay (R-Tx) also sent Republican operatives to Florida to pretend to be
grassroots protesters. The astroturf group pounded on the doors of the
Miami-Dade canvassing office and shoved innocent bystanders in an effort to
suppress the vote count.
The TV networks initially reported that the Tom DeLay rowdies were a
grassroots group, and no network followed up and investigated Jesse Jackson's
comments about the other Republican infiltrators. How will the TV networks
cover protests of the Bush inaugural?
A number of reputable liberal media critics have written strongly documented
books on: (1) Why mainstream news media organizations (especially television
networks) tend to be conservative, not liberal as Rush Limbaugh would have us
believe, (2) Why TV news consistently favors corporations over average
Americans, and (3) Why corporate-owned TV networks often fail to cover events
that put corporations and the wealthy in a bad light.
In "Rich Media, Poor Democracy," media critic Robert McChesney writes about
the sparse media coverage given to last year's Seattle protest
demonstrations. McChesney says:
"There was no week of prime-time special reports on the cable news channels,
despite the fact that what was transpiring touched on the most central
political and social issues of our age. Indeed, Seattle was not given
anywhere near the attention that Elian, Monica, O.J., or JonBenet got....The
sad truth is that the closer a story gets to corporate power and corporate
domination of our society, the less reliable the corporate news media is."
The Seattle protests were about corporate conglomerates taking important
labor and environmental decisions away from the people and our elected
representatives, and placing those decisions in the hands of an unelected
body, the World Trade Organization. Did the mainstream media convey that
fact to most Americans?
For most members of the corporate-owned news media, whether a story is given
saturation coverage (as O. J., Monica, JonBenet and Elian were) or virtually
no coverage (as in the case of the Seattle protests) has nothing to do with
the event's importance. No matter how important an event might be, any story
that threatens to expose systemic flaws in the corporate domination of
society receives little or no coverage.
C-Span is sometimes an exception. On C-Span2 last Thursday, the organizers
of the upcoming Bush inaugural protests said that over 500 law professors
support the protests and will place an ad in the New York Times opposing the
Supreme Court's decision to suppress the vote count. That is significant
news. Will the talking heads on Fox, MSNBC, CNBC or CNN even mention it?
Brian Becker of the International Action Center said on the C-Span program
that Bush's selection by the Supreme Court has served as a catalyst for a new
Civil Rights and mass social justice movement. Liz Butler, Coastal
Rainforest Coalition National Organizer, said various activist groups share a
common grievance. What the various groups have in common is that they all
feel their government no longer represents average Americans, but instead
serves only corporate interests.
Justice Action Movement's Linda Schade said regarding the Supreme Court's
selection of Bush, "The people's choice has been overruled." Mara
Verhyden-Hilliard, attorney and co-founder of Partnership for Civil Justice,
said among the protesters will be legal observers coordinated by the National
Lawyer's Guild.
The views of the various activist groups, including thousands of
environmentists, Civil Rights and civil liberties advocates, concerned
educators, attorneys and others, are worthy of extensive, in-depth news
coverage. The issues they raise directly impact the lives of most average
Americans. Will Chris Matthews or Hannity and Colmes conduct in-depth
interviews with Becker or Verhyden-Hilliard or any of the professors of law
protesting the Supreme Court's decision?
As far back as 1988, journalist Mark Hertsgaard (On Bended Knee: The Press
and the Reagan Presidency) wrote about the media's reluctance to cover people
allegedly outside the political mainstream. Hertsgaard quotes media scholar
Daniel Hallin: "Journalism becomes, to borrow a phrase from [social
theorist] Talcott Parsons, a 'boundary-maintaining mechanism'; it plays the
role of exposing, condemning or excluding from the public agenda those who
violate or challenge the political consensus."
Robert McChesney says that the mainstream media routinely ignore subjects
that might harm the economic elite. The public does not get media coverage
of military spending, corporate welfare, the widening gap between rich and
poor, or serious affronts to civil liberties (when those affronts benefit the
very wealthy.)
After the Seattle protests, David McGowan, "Derailing Democracy" (Common
Courage Press, 2000) attended a FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting)
meeting in Santa Monica, California. Various speakers, including California
state senator Tom Hayden, gave first-person descriptions of police violence
against Seattle protesters.
According to Hayden and the other speakers, peaceful demonstrators were
repeatedly shot with rubber bullets, tear gassed, assaulted with batons or
slammed into concrete. Around 600 people were arrested -- none for violence
against another person. Most of the mainstream media ignored the story.
Worse than mainstream media's omissions regarding Seattle were their
commissions of slanted reporting. McGowan says on December 1st and 2nd, the
LA Times wrote of "police who battled rampaging protesters." The vandals who
"rampaged" were a handful of infiltrating anarchists not associated with the
vast majority of orderly demonstrators. The infiltrators (knowingly or not)
served a purpose similar to that of the Republican-hired thugs in Florida,
because they gave both the media and the police an excuse to justify violence
aimed at peaceful protesters.
On Thursday's C-Span program, International Action Center's Brian Becker said
the news media should not demonize peaceful protesters or lump them in with
infiltrators, but should instead investigate and describe the behavior of the
real perpetrators of violence. In Seattle, those perpetrators were often the
police, stated Becker.
Media critic Michael Parenti ("Inventing Reality:The Politics of News Media,
St. Martin's Press, 1993) says:
"The basic distortions in the media are not innocent errors, for they are not
random; rather they move in the same overall direction again and again,
favoring management over labor, corporatism over anticorporatism, the
affluent over the poor, private enterprise over socialism, Whites over
Blacks, males over females, officialdom over protesters, conventional
politics over dissidence, anticommunism and arms-race militarism over
disarmament, national chauvanism over internationalism, U.S. dominance of the
Third World over revolutionary or populist nationalist change."
"The press does many things and serves many functions," says Parenti, "but
its major role, its irreducible responsibility, is to continually recreate a
view of reality supportive of existing social and economic class power."
The idea that the mainstream media "invents reality" has to do with the fact
that for many Americans, an event did not happen at all unless that event
appeared on television news. However, the reality invented by the mainstream
media would have people believe that the stories of O.J., Monica, JonBenet,
and Elian are meaningful to their lives, while issues raised regarding
Seattle and the Bush inaugural simply do not exist.
Even when good alternative media organizations tell the public the truth, the
majority of people still only believe what they see on TV news coverage. Do
the majority of Americans understand how Bush came to power or why it matters?
Rolling Stone (2/1/01) has an excellent article by Eric Schlosser, "The
Taking of The Presidency 2000: How the Republicans Lost The Vote and Bullied
Their Way To Victory in Florida." The article details the errors in the
Supreme Court's decision to suppress the vote count.
Another alternative publication, "The American Prospect," 1/15/01, has an
article by Harold Meyerson, "The Purloined Presidency." Meyerson, Executive
editor of LA Weekly and a member of Dissent magazine's editorial board, also
scrutinizes the flaws in the Supreme Court's decision and says, "Even before
it commences, the Bush presidency has undermined both the rule of the people
and the rule of law -- democracy's twin pillars."
Meyerson concludes, "To read the opinions of the four dissenting justices in
Bush v. Gore is to see how stunned, how shaken, they are by the duplicity in
which their colleagues have engaged to subvert the workings of democracy."
Ask yourselves, readers, have Chris Matthews or even liberals such as CNN
Crossfire's Bill Press (and I happen to like Press despite his sins of
omission) done an entire month, or even a week, of prime time special reports
on election 2000's subverting democracy? Has the general public been given
the O.J.-Monica-JonBenet-Elian level of saturation coverage of the Supreme
Court's duplicity and the Bush team's complicity in undermining democracy in
the recent election?
Again, a test to determine whether the mainstream media have done a good job
conveying any given news story is to ask: Do most Americans understand the
details of the story? Is it common knowledge?
Somehow top level TV network decision-makers saw fit to make details of
O.J.-Monica-JonBenet-Elian common knowledge, while they determined the public
did not need to be well informed of the details surrounding the subverting of
democracy in election 2000.
In Part Three of this series, we will look again at liberal media critics and
examine more reasons why mainstream news media organizations tend to be
conservative, why those media consistently favor corporations over average
Americans, and why corporate-owned media often fail to cover events that put
corporations and the wealthy in a bad light.
In the meantime, groups planning to go to protests of the Bush inaugural
should do whatever they can to take the news media along with them.
Demonstration organizers said on Thursday's C-Span that police were "acting
as corporate operatives" by restricting protesters' access to the parade
route and other sites the mainstream news media will cover.
In the 1960s a popular song suggested, "If you're going to San Francisco, be
sure to wear some flowers in your hair." For new millennium protests, the
idea is, "be sure to wear a camcorder anywhere; look out for rightwing
infiltrators; and take care."
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