By Robin Andersen
Television, with its broad audiences and visual modes, did bring the World Bank and International Monetary Fund demonstrators in the streets of Washington D.C. into the homes of those watching. The immediacy and drama of live footage taken of such compelling events offered a profound sense of knowing what went on. However, a closer look reveals how little information was actually contained in the TV accounts of the opposition to global finance in its present form.
Converging on the streets of the capital in such numbers demanded the country's attention. Even as the public witnessed a profound rejection of the economics of global capital, it was left to news reporting to explain why it was happening. But TV news and indeed the larger press were unable to articulate those reasons. Protesters entered the media frame as defiant disrupters, but they were allowed to speak only in the abbreviated language of soundbites instead of actually articulating their positions on global economic issues. Most of the time media announcers spoke for them, repeating what became simplified phrases that stood as the total explanation for the protests. As one CNN reporter said, they are protesting "what they call global capitalism," which is "not treating the poor of the world well enough." Coverage was littered with a few vague statements about World Bank policies harming the environment, but was never followed by any detailed information. No actual WB or IMF projects that had impoverished the populations of developing countries were cited, yet there are many examples in the literature of Mobilization for Global Justice, 50 Years is Enough, Global Exchange and other organizations carrying out the protests.
It is not surprising that reporters could not debate economic issues and the finer points of the criticism of global capital. The media have been mystifying the U.S. economy for years, presenting the stock market as the apex of prosperity and financial security, when actually it has benefited very few. As economist Steve Brouwer points out in "Sharing the Pie," the top one percent of the richest Americans owns almost half of the financial assets in this country. The next nine percent of the wealthy own another one third of the wealth. That leaves about one sixth of the country's financial assets to be divided among the rest of us, the other 90 percent. Average Americans have not benefited from the widely reported bull market of the last decade. The profits of giant corporations jumped 58 percent from 1992 to 1997, but this increase was not accompanied by gains in wages and salaries for ordinary workers.
Ironically, the Sunday morning news was filled with chatter about the stock market, and how low dot-com stocks might go on Monday morning. We were told that Bill Gates lost $11 billion in the latest "correction." No piece of information better exemplified the dramatic nature of the unequal distribution of wealth in America and the world, but the story was never linked to the protests.
Even though TV images captured glimpses of printed union signs demanding "Jobs with Justice," reporters never tried to explain why working people in this country would feel compelled to engage in economic protest, or how that protest might be linked to the exploitation of workers in the sweatshops of the cheap labor markets around the globe. One of the striking characteristics of the protests against the WTO, IMF and WB is the unity forged between students, environmentalists, the sweatshop movement and labor unions, among others, but media coverage ignored the diversity and connections of the groups involved.
TV anchors and reporters were profoundly unprepared, incapable or unwilling to debate the global economic issues raised by the protesters. They seemed intent on giving only the IMF and WB side of the story. It was obvious that reporters had been thoroughly prepped by the public relations folks at those organizations. TV provided airtime for lobbyists and repeated their arguments forcefully. Chief World Bank spokesperson Caroline Ansty, interviewed at length by CNN, portrayed the protesters as misguided and misinformed. Protesters were presented as naïve and "confused" about the real, positive role of these financial institutions. At this point, many others who articulate positions critical of such policies could have been brought into the debate. Eric Toussant, for example, who wrote the book, "Your Money or Your Life," might have been interviewed about Jubilee 2000 and other international organizations in favor of Third World debt relief.
It was Sunday morning, and I flipped though the channels furiously looking for some meaningful debate. Instead, I found ABC covering the window displays at Macy's, which featured Disney's "Winnie the Pooh characters." The shameless promotion on ABC of their parent company Disney spoke volumes about the inability of corporate media to be critical of business and the economy, tied as they are to corporate interests.
Press reports of the demonstrations were strikingly similar to coverage of political races, where the focus is on campaign tactics and strategies instead of the issues themselves. How the campaigns in the streets were being carried out occupied most of TV news reporting, which detailed the planning and organizing strategies of both cops and protesters.
The law enforcement strategies of the police took center stage, with police activities often reported using the language of military strategy. One story spoke of an "army" of cops using "news age equipment." Add TV's propensity for entertainment values, with a little injection of anticipation and sensationalism, and some of the coverage sounded like a high-security action-adventure narrative, as violence threatened the nation's capital "only six blocks away from the White House."
TV's flare for the dramatic was only one aspect of the way reporting was skewed toward the police perspective. From the start, the media quickly framed the protests, dubbed "A16" by participants, as "the battle after Seattle," promising that police would not allow a repeat of the "violence in Seattle." These stories assumed that the demonstrators were to blame for that violence, even though it is now well documented (by the Seattle police themselves) that the police instigated the violence. Pepper spray was used first by Seattle police against peaceful demonstrators, even though it was reported as retaliation for property damage, according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) in the Jan/Feb 2000 issue of Extra! Self-described anarchists engaged in vandalism, but those actions are distinct from state repression of peaceful demonstrations and should be reported differently, not branded as simply "violence."
The Washington police were depicted as calm, reasonable and very efficient, but the chief "admitted that he was nervous." The story was presented from the perspective of the police; reporting was done, essentially, in their "voice." When the police used alleged fire violations to shut down the "convergence center," the demonstrators' planning and work center, it was called a "pre-emptive strike," not the violation of civil liberties that it in fact was. Cameras focused on a small number of the most menacing-looking protesters wearing black masks and engaging the police in confrontations, even as reporters admitted that these were not characteristic of the vast majority of protesters.
In fact, the only way get an accurate picture of what the demonstrations were really like was to watch C-SPAN. The footage of rallies, performances, speakers, marching and street theater went on for hours. The unrepresentative, sensational TV news coverage, heavily biased in favor of police and global financial structures was utterly incapable of providing even a semblance of what it was like, or what was at stake.
It is not surprising that TV coverage focused on the confrontations between police and demonstrators. After all, demonstrators went to Washington to close down the IMF and WB meetings — they went to be confrontational. But the actions planned by organizers were acts of civil disobedience, not violence or property damage. Civil disobedience has a long history as a particular form of expression, of speaking truth to power. In America, taking to the streets to express political discontent is guaranteed by the Constitution and First Amendment, as well as by a long history of grassroots activism and politics. Historians might say it is one of the cornerstones of the American democratic process.
But the corporate media now seem incapable of speaking about or reporting on such grassroots practices. The have become so steeped in the language of law and order that they no longer have the words, angles or story lines to talk about people's demands for economic and environmental justice and human rights. In a number of ways, news reporting was actually directed by the protesters, who demonstrated an unprecedented degree of media literacy and sophistication. To start, the IMF and World Bank meetings would have gone on in quiet obscurity had protesters not been present. The puppetry, art, camaraderie and street theater of the demonstrations could not be ignored, making it impossible for the media to singularly depict the demonstrators as stereotypes of violent thugs, though that interpretation was present, especially at the beginning and end of TV's protest narratives.
On Sunday morning we were told that more than 600 people were arrested the night before for "parading without a permit." According to community media producers from Paper Tiger Television who were at the demo, that action was well-planned with the police. Activists from the International Action Center negotiated with D.C. police to plan the event, and everything was OK-ed. Then the cops changed their tactics without notice, cordoned off the area and arrested everyone who did not have a mainstream press credential. The headline "parading without a permit" was repeated, yet no further details were offered until, at one point, an image of a naked man covered only in palm leaves flashed across the screen. Only then were we told, ever so briefly, that he had been protesting the sweatshop conditions under which clothing is made. Indeed, that tidbit of information would likely never have been reported on TV without the theatrical flare of the demonstrator. In this sense, activists have learned their media lessons well and use visual icons with a high degree of literacy.
But these tidbits certainly should not constitute the sum total of news in a democracy. And indeed they do not. Anyone interested in engaging in the democratic process by understanding the economic realities under which we live, or in becoming an historical actor by attempting to shape global structures that affect our lives, can begin by logging onto the Internet. Radio and video interviews, news dispatches, web-page links and reporting of all kinds can be found at Independent Media Center, which was developed as an alternative to corporate news reporting.
I was surprised to find the links to Mobilization for Global Justice and 50 Years Is Enough on the CBS Web site. Those links not only provided information, they underscored the redundancy of the corporate media. News exists to explain, in brief yet clear capsules, what has gone on in the world; A16 coverage proved that formula no longer works. It showed that corporate media is unwilling or unable to summarize, with any degree of accuracy, the ideas, criticisms, art, culture or emotions of voices critical of corporate wealth and police power. Why do we need news reporting if the only way to tell the "other side of the story" is to let the other side tell it? The Internet and the newly emerging independent-media centers now provide the means by which people and organizations can speak in their own words and through their own Web sites. And it's none too soon, because CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN, or Newsweek and Time for that matter, cannot provide a democratic forum to discuss issues of common concern. In this new world of mega-corporate ownership, the role of bottom-line journalism is becoming increasingly obvious; it exists to provide a singular interpretation of the real. It exists to interpret the world's events in favor of corporate, global capital.
- Robin Andersen teaches Media Studies at Fordham University and is the author of "Consumer Culture and TV Programming", and coeditor of "Critical Studies in Media Commercialism." She is also a Project Censored judge.
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