Re the so-called liberal media, Rather, et al.
Except from interview with Naomi Klein:
BUZZFLASH: Your comments just raised one other point. There were huge demonstrations in the United States on October 26, and yet most of the press played them down, to the extent that The New York Times inexplicably got it wrong. Protests in D.C. had estimates between 100,000 and 200,000 people. There was a two-mile group of people that walked around the perimeter of the White House. And The New York Times, in its Sunday edition, ran a story saying that, in essence, hardly anyone came.
KLEIN: Yes, I saw that. And I think that the follow-up story was a really good example of media activism in practice. I'm always a little bit skeptical about the power of writing letters to the editor, but actually I think that this was a great example of the potential for media activism. In some ways, I do think that the media has to be more accountable than our own elected politicians, as ironic as that is. I think The New York Times was forced to change those numbers, even though they didn't apologize. It's clear that the letters that they got and the phone calls that they got forced them to reexamine that major cynicism and the quiet "invisibilizing" of left-wing dissent, which we see over and over again.
This is something that's happening around the world, but there are some examples of success. I was in Argentina, and there was a similar issue; people felt that their protests -- this is after the economic collapse -- weren't being covered, that their numbers were being diminished in the mainstream, corporate press. And so they just took their protests outside television stations. It was peaceful, but it was quite militant. And the television stations were forced to pay a lot more attention to the accuracy of the reports.
We're starting to see this more and more globally -- media is becoming a target of activism. And there are a lot of journalists who are very, very uncomfortable with this, because they're used to seeing themselves as the witness, and even the accomplice, to liberation struggles around the world. You know, the great pride that CNN took at being at Tianamen Square -- "the whole world is watching." And now it happens, when these guys go to cover protests, they get eggs thrown at their cameras. People go to protest outside their (media) offices because the reporters, editors are not seen as witnesses; they're seen as active suppressors and distorters of information.
BUZZFLASH: I just found it so astonishing that here's The New York Times, which conservatives, the right wing, the Bush administration -- which is probably a hyphenated expression -- calls the liberal media. But here was an event with 100,000 to 200,000 people, and the paper that calls itself the paper of record of the United States basically said it was a fiasco, and hardly anyone came because the weather was bad, when in fact, the story was exactly the opposite.
It's almost as though they missed 150,000 people. They couldn't find them in D.C. It seems to be journalistic malfeasance -- not just an oversight, but an intentional distortion of the facts.
KLEIN: I get questions like this all the time, before an event even happens. I was interviewed by USA Today, before the protests in Washington about the IMF and the World Bank, where every interview began with: Aren't you disappointed? Before the protest even happened, there was this glee and this absolute joy in preemptively burying dissent. I've been part of this growing movement against corporate globalization, and a few years before Seattle, and every time there is a protest, the mainstream media declares the movement dead.
BUZZFLASH: Even if it's growing in number.
KLEIN: Before Genoa, where there were 200,000 people, it was dead. They declared it dead immediately after Seattle. And then, of course, after September 11, it was dead. And the fact that the facts got in the way, and there were -- I think there were something like 250,000 people in Barcelona protesting in March. Then, when 70,000 people go to a conference to talk about alternatives to globalization, it's barely even reported. So I believe that there's active suppression.
And my favorite example of this is during Bush's inauguration. I knew that a lot of people were in Washington protesting because a lot of my friends were there. And so I just assumed that I would be able to turn on the news and be able to watch the protests on television. So I do this, and I'm flipping from network to network to network, and there's absolutely nothing. But there's more than nothing: There are actually moments in the coverage of the inauguration that are sort of like coverage of a sports event. The network anchors were narrating Bush walking down the street and there was constant filler and voiceover. And I can't see the protestors anywhere.
And Peter Jennings goes -- no, I think it was Dan Rather, he says: It's his day. Some people think it's their day, but it's not. It's his day, apparently.
I mean, there wasn't even acknowledgment that not only weren't they covering the protests; they were actively deciding not to depart from the script that they had in their mind of what this inauguration was going to look like. And it was this strange sort of window of acknowledgment that the cameras would not budge and show us what was actually happening.
BUZZFLASH: It's his day. It's his administration. It's his two years. But I'm still astounded. Why didn't the world object -- The New York Times, which, as you said, due to activism, actually printed an article that was fairly accurate the following week. But what do you think is going through the mind of an editor? I mean, they had to have the reporter there who saw 150,000 people. They get this report. There's this huge march -- the largest since the Vietnam War, which is as newsworthy as you get. What is the editor saying? Forget that? Just play it down and say there were a few thousand people there?
Someone at The New York Times played with the facts. It's just astonishing to me that they made an editorial decision to ignore the facts on the ground and write an interpretation that was inconsistent with what happened. |
