In only about nine months, the media have succeeded in building a mythology around the anti-globalization movement in this country that’s striking in its inaccuracies.
Of course, Big Media’s corporate slant on things is nothing new here in the United States. Activist groups, especially radical ones, have been maligned in the pages of the press throughout history. (One wonders if the front page of Revolutionary War era papers ever read “Violence in Boston: Vandals Destroy Tea.”) This slandering has often occurred hand-in-hand with government operations to discredit groups opposing the status quo.
The media seem to have a hard time making up their mind whether anti-globalization protestors are an organized paramilitary group or a bunch of kids who don’t know anything about the issues they’re protesting. Alternately portraying the majority of those in the movement as violent thugs or body-pierced twentysomethings looking for kicks, the coverage has the effect of simultaneously demonizing and discrediting the movement as a whole.
In one recent report, Rachel Coen of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) points out that on the front page of The Washington Post on April 16 “was the article ‘Demonstrators Are United by Zeal for Global Justice,’ which purported to examine the politics of the mobilization (against the IMF and World Bank) but instead inaccurately concluded that the protest was ‘a demonstration without demands.’ It noted activists’ ‘body odor’ and reminded readers that ‘the fad factor cannot be denied. To have been in Seattle is to have reached a higher state of cool.’ ”
In a different report, FAIR notes that some coverage went in the opposite direction as well: ” ‘It is widely agreed that the Seattle police got out-foxed by better organized protestors trying to shut down the World Trade Organization meeting last year,’ reported NBC’s Fred Francis in a story about the conventions (Nightly News, July 14).
Francis went on to describe activists who attended the ‘violent’ Seattle demonstrations as a ‘battle-tested’ force ‘better trained than the LAPD for street violence.’ ”
A particularly maligned group during this coverage has been anarchists. Across the board, reporters have referred to them as “so-called” anarchists, as if no one could really believe in anarchy. Depicted as black-mask wearing, police-cussing, property-destroying rage junkies, the media’s treatment of anarchists is nothing but a contemporary spin on the same old propaganda that portrayed anarchists as black cape-clad, bomb-carrying terrorists.
Anarchism has repeatedly been identified with a set of tactics rather than as a philosophy. While it’s true that anarchism has a long history of direct action — strikes, workplace sabotage, etc. — in order to hold corporations accountable to workers, throwing a brick through a window is not an “anarchist” act.
Various tactics are debated among anarchists. None define anarchism. Anarchism is not a set of tactics.
Anarchism is a political belief system and a worldview with many different schools of thought and a long history. Anarchists believe that people can accomplish through cooperation and voluntary association what governments now accomplish through violence. They believe that capitalism is an inherently violent, demeaning and destructive economic system. They believe in a non-hierarchical, egalitarian society. They believe in the worth of every form of life and that humans are part of an intricate web, not the top of a pyramid. They believe that every human being has the right to be physically nourished, emotionally cared for, mentally stimulated and creatively fulfilled.
These media distortions aren’t isolated examples of an errant misquote or a botched fact. There’s been a serious lack of critical reporting on the issues activists are trying to bring into the spotlight. People’s concerns often are summed up in one paragraph or, worse yet, one line instead of being given the in-depth reporting they deserve. Issues at hand include global inequality, environmental racism, environmental destruction, genetic engineering, Third World debt, AIDS in Africa and more.
The media also is directly contributing to the rapid rate in which America is becoming a police state — just as they’ve long ignored the fact that for many minority groups within our population it’s always been a police state. The media simultaneously demonize and discredit the protestors, turning them from citizens with legitimate concerns not being heard into an unruly mob looking for any excuse to trash buildings and beat up cops. The public then is willing to look the other way as police invade civil rights.
As the large protests at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia (and this week’s Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles) show, activists are building stronger independent media channels. (See www.indymedia.org for one example.) Judging by the blatant but unsurprising misrepresentation and demonization of our movement by the corporate media, the strengthening of these channels is long overdue.
I invite you to bypass your normal methods of news consumption and join us as we show what’s actually happening within our movement. Solidarity forever.
ERIC STIENS is a Cincinnati-based activist and an anarchist. He’s in Los Angeles for the Democratic National Convention.
This article appears in Aug 16-22, 2000.