-Caveat Lector-
The news media and political protests
By Carla Binion
Protests were effective in the 1960s because the news media covered them.
Today media organizations often ignore protest demonstrations. When TV news
networks do not cover a protest, the demonstration can not move public
opinion. The various news media organizations serve as the public's eyes and
ears. When the media fail to report any given event, the public remains
blind and deaf regarding the story.
Most Americans get their news from television. Day after day during the
1960s, TV news networks showed close-ups of such atrocities as innocent black
children marching into police fire hoses. Television news people ran Martin
Luther King's speeches and discussed and dissected them. The American
people's eyes were opened, through the media's lens.
By contrast, during recent post-election protests in Florida, TV networks
kept a distance from Jesse Jackson and other like-minded demonstrators. Few
networks aired Jackson's speeches in their entirety. Television news
commentators did not explain and clarify the protesters' grievances or give
them sympathetic coverage. Fox Network's Bill O'Reilly and many other
commentators frequently maligned Jackson as a troublemaker.
During last year's Seattle protests of the World Trade Organization, TV
networks also kept a distance from the demonstrators. Commentators on MSNBC
and other cable news talk shows said repeatedly that they did not understand
why people were demonstrating. They often said that the protests seemed to
be a hodgepodge of vague and cranky quibbles and implied it would be
impossible to grasp the details of the complaints.
No wonder the commentators did not understand. They simply never asked. Few
TV networks conducted any in-depth interviews with spokesmen for the
protesters. The networks did not often show close-ups of peaceful protesters
being tear gassed or shot with rubber bullets -- incidents widely reported on
the Internet and in alternative news publications.
In the same way, TV networks gave little coverage to Jesse Jackson's recent
complaint that a mob of hired Republicans used violent tactics to try to
break up a peaceful post-election demonstration in Florida. If the networks
had spent adequate time examining that information, the public would better
understand the reasons for Jackson's protests.
During the 1960s, public opinion shifted when the media showed the people the
truth about antiwar and civil rights demonstrations -- especially when the
media explained the reasons behind the marches and sit ins. Once public
opinion changed, the people urged legislators to take action.
Because the following example from history is a useful illustration of (1)
the media's impact on public opinion, and (2) the importance of having a
fully informed public, it will help to digress and explore it at some length:
Deborah Lipstadt researched the behavior of the American press during the
coming of the Holocaust in BEYOND BELIEF (The Free Press, Macmillan, Inc.,
1986.) Lipstadt says, "During the 1930s and 1940s America could have saved
thousands and maybe even hundreds of thousands of Jews but did not do so."
Lipstadt points out that the U. S. was slow to recognize the Nazi threat to
the Jewish people and asks what might have been done to initiate rescue
operations sooner. She quotes Adlai Stevenson: "I believe that in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the American people will make the right
decision -- if and when they are in possession of the essential facts about
any given issue."
The problem was, during the early Holocaust years, the American news media
did not present "the essential facts" to the public in a timely way.
Washington might have acted sooner to assist the Jews, says Lipstadt, if the
American public had known -- via the media -- what was going on and then
urged politicians to act.
The U. S. press treated Hitler's early antisemitism and persecution of the
Jewish people as "sidebar" news stories. Although Hitler's Final Solution
was known to the media by 1942, the press did not fully convey the fact to
the American public.
Deborah Lipstadt points out that in The Washington Post, March, 1943, William
Shirer criticized the public for thinking that reports of Hitler's atrocities
were only propaganda. Lipstadt also mentions that in January, 1944, Arthur
Koestler cited U. S. public opinion polls showing that nine out of ten
Americans believed that reports of a Nazi threat were propaganda lies.
(Arthur Koestler, New York Times Magazine, January 9, 1944.)
Lipstadt notes that the Christian Century (February 16, 1944) said in
response to Koestler that there was no use "screaming" about atrocities
against the Jews, claiming it would only "emotionally exhaust" those who
wanted to use their energies to build peace after the war.
Could the media have been quicker to report the truth about Hitler in a way
that the American public understood? What did the media do wrong?
In general, the media reported stories about the Nazi threat in piecemeal
fashion, instead of showing the public a complete picture all at once.
Lipstadt says newspapers did not allocate enough space for stories of
Hitler's increasing threats. Relevant news stories were buried in back pages
of the newspaper rather than given front page coverage.
The January 1943 LA Times ran a review of the "Black Decade," meaning the
preceding ten years. However, the newspaper failed to mention Kristallnacht,
and did not mention the extermination program that had been included in the
paper's 1942 listing.
Kristallnacht was the night of November 9, 1938, when Nazi mobs shattered the
glass in Jewish homes, temples and places of business. Many U. S. newspapers
initially took the event lightly. Some papers said the Kristallnacht mobs
were merely spontaneous rogue fanatics, and that Hitler knew nothing about
them.
The New York Daily News thought that Kristallnacht was merely random
expression of popular anger by Germans under financial stress, and wrote that
Hitler "can no longer control his people." (New York Daily News, November
15, 1938.) Many newspapers claimed Kristallnacht had nothing to do with
racial hatred.
The St. Louis Post Dispatch said Kristallnacht was simply about greed, or the
"looting of a people." (St. Louis Post Dispatch, November 25, 1938.) The
Baltimore Evening Sun described it merely as a "money collecting enterprise."
(The Baltimore Evening Sun, November 14, 1938.)
What does the media's handling of the early years of the Holocaust have to do
with today's media coverage of political protest? Here are some connections:
The theats posed by the World Trade Organization's policies, and by the
voting irregularities in Florida, are not the exact equivalent of the threats
posed during the years leading to the Holocaust. However, whether they are
the precise same threats is not the point.
The point is, the demonstrators in Seattle and in post-election Florida were
voicing their concern about what they see as current threats to democracy and
civil liberties. If TV news commentators had done in-depth research, they
would have understood the reasons for the protests and conveyed those reasons
to the public.
Armed with all the facts, the public could then develop an informed opinion
and respond accordingly. Absent the facts, public opinion on issues raised
in Seattle and in Florida will not be well informed, and the public response
will not be purposeful.
Media critic Michael Parenti says in Inventing Reality: The Politics of News
Media (St. Martins Press, 1993) that the media do more than omit important
news regarding political protests. For example, they also often undercount
the size of political demonstrations. As one example, Parenti mentions that
in 1991, shortly before George H. W. Bush began his air attack against Iraq,
ABC reported on opposition to the war.
Anchor Ted Koppel said there were "small groups" of protesters -- one group
in Iowa and one in Berkeley, California, holding candlelight vigils. Says
Parenti, "ABC ignored the large and dramatic demonstrations occurring that
same day in the San Francisco Bay area in which 10,000 people shut down the
federal building and 2,000 shut down the Bay Bridge, the latter resulting in
hundreds of arrests."
The media also often trivialize and marginalize protesters. Michael Parenti
notes that media pundits frequently mislead the public by attributing
irrational or trivial motives to demonstrators, characterizing protesters as
an unrepresentative sampling of the American people. News pundits sometimes
marginalize groups by falsely claiming they are violent, or pundits try to
discredit protesters as people merely trying to foment chaos.
For example, when a few anarchists in Seattle broke store windows, some TV
news commentators suggested the peaceful demonstrators were also contributing
to violence and chaos. As another example, lately when Jesse Jackson speaks
out about Florida voting irregularities, commentators often say he is trying
to stir up conflict for no purpose.
Thousands of people plan to attend marches in Washington to protest the
upcoming Bush inaugural. The general public will not learn anything about
the reasons behind those protests if TV news networks and other media
organizations fail to report the reasons. Remember that even after
Kristallnacht, nine out of ten Americans believed the Nazis were no threat,
because the media did not report the complete story.
It is important that people phone and write news organizations and encourage
them to give ample air time to protests of the inaugural, with an emphasis on
explaining the reasons for the demonstrations. Those of us who would like to
see the protests covered in depth should urge various TV news organizations
to air speeches by Jesse Jackson and other attendees, and ask the networks to
include as guests on news talk shows people who represent Jackson and other
protesters.
Deborah Lipstadt said that Alexis de Toqueville believed that "the press
fulfills its highest purpose when it is a beacon to bring together people who
otherwise might ineffectively seek each other in darkness." Television
networks, newspapers, news magazines and other media organizations could
light the beacon during the protests of the Bush inaugural. They are more
likely to do that if large numbers of people write and phone them in advance
to let them know what we expect.
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