Imagine a protest in a nation’s capital that results in the arrests of hundreds of peaceful demonstrators, attempting to draw attention to an active political controversy. If we’re to believe anti-government activists in Venezuela, the fact that the television did not cover an event is proof that the government is stifling the press.
But this demonstration happened in Washington, DC, not Caracas. The hundreds of protesters were arrested in front of the White House, where they were urging the Obama administration to reject the climate-wrecking Keystone XL pipeline. And according to a search of the Nexis news database, the protests hardly made a sound in the corporate media.
There was a brief mention on CNN (3/3/14) : “Hundreds of protesters were arrested outside of the White House Sunday in a massive demonstration against the Keystone oil pipeline.” The same was true on ABC‘s Good Morning America (3/3/14), where viewers were told that there was
a chaotic scene at the White House Sunday as hundreds of demonstrators chained themselves to the fence and spread across Pennsylvania Avenue, refusing to move. They were protesting the proposed Keystone oil pipeline extension, claiming that it would damage the environment.
The hometown Washington Post appears to have skipped the protest for the print edition, running a short piece (3/2/14) on the Post Local blog; the New York Times also ran a Web-only piece (3/2/14).
One of the more thorough reports on the protest came from the independent media; Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman (3/3/14) explained that the protest “could be the largest youth sit-in on the environment in a generation,” and interviewed a climate activist.
As we’ve pointed out many times before, some protests are evidently much more important than others.
I am a lefty, but every time I read that there has been a “Media blackout” of a demonstration, or event, I always look into it to see if that’s true. Most of the time, it isn’t, and I find links to all kinds of major media stories. This time, I found there was not much coverage and I wondered why. I did a search to find out how many attended,and learned from Think Progress that 1000 people were expected to attend. Jezuz H. Louise. Quit with the drama. I lived in DC for 6 years and attended many protests that were far bigger than that, and didn’t get much coverage. Want to know why? Because protests are not news in DC. They happen all the time. 1000 people is tiny by DC standards. Everybody thinks their protest should make the news and then calls it a media blackout when they don’t. The arrests were planned in advance. The protesters were warned they would be arrested if they blocked the street or strapped them selves to the fences. The police had vans and buses there to transport those arrested. It’s not as though there was a police riot. This sort of thing simply isn’t news unless somebody famous is there and gets arrested, or you have hundreds of thousands of people. Comparing this to Venezuala is absurd. This type of protest is becoming obsolete in the US and really doesn’t pack much punch. It’s the 21st century and new methods must be found to be effective.
Just a heads up you spelled Capitol wrong.
Dear Rebecca Gavin,
In the blog above, Peter Hart is not just comparing elite media (e.g WaPo, NYT)coverage of the protest in question to that of protests in Venezuela; he’s also making a comparison to elite media coverage of protests in the past that had less protesters participating, as supported with a link in the last sentence of the above blog that I shall also provide: https://fair.org/blog/2011/04/05/not-tea-party-not-news/
Despite the fact that the Tea Party protests mentioned in the above link are in the past, the reason Peter Hart provided a link discussing them is to illustrate the principles that elite media use in determining what deserves coverage, and these principles are thus far not constrained by time.
Furthermore, one should keep in mind what the aforementioned protests are about. While there are lots of important problems in the world, the protest against the Keystone pipeline and the proposed construction of the latter has great consequences for human species survival. Therefore, it is a morally irresponsible for elite media to ignore this protest. While elite media institutions are certainly not moral agencies, we media activists need to put pressure, through collective and organized action, on these media institutions to provide proper coverage on problems like the Keystone pipeline.
To Rebecca: Any demonstration in which hundreds of people are arrested is newsworthy, IMO, even if they aren’t violent (as in Venezuela). And a demo of 10,000 people has got to be news in a Beltway paper. The privileged ought not have complete control of the media agenda.
FYI, Jonathan: Washington is the capital of the U.S.
“A capitol is a building in which a legislature meets.” (Wikipedia)
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A demonstration in Washington, D.C., during which hundreds are arrested for their opposition to the Keystone XL Pipeline certainly demands coverage my the major media. Failure to put it on the front page indicates the extent to which the Washington Post has degenerated in recent years, with its op-ed array of neo-con artists George Will, Marc Thiessen, Robert Kagan, Robert Samuelson, Michael Gerson and Charles Krauthammer. Here’s hoping Jeffrey Bezos, who acquired it last October, can restore WaPo to its former glory.
The NY Times piece was actually buried in a blog.Regrettably, this is not new.
During the Reagan nuclear build up, there were regular demonstrations at the Nevada Test Site. I attended one of those. There were 5-6,000
people & over 1,200 arrests. This was covered by the Las Vegas TV
stations but there was a blackout on either coast.
In the US, even the “left,” with VERY rare exception, have skimmed over or completely ignored protests against the US war on the poor. On spite of strong participation by the poor (jobless and employed), liberal media redefined Occupy itself as a movement of middle class workers.
By the end of the 1960s, a popular theme on the right was that protests exist because they got a lot of media attention. The way to end protests, then, was to ignore them. By ignoring them, media strongly implies that the public is generally satisfied with our hyper-corporate system.
Tens of thousands marched against GOP wingnuttery in Raleigh, NC the first week of February. Did you hear about it?
Vrede: There has been coverage of the Moral Mondays in Raleigh, albeit not adequate at all. There were out-of-state phone banks to get North Carolinians to that big rally. MSM simply flipped the state from blue-to-red with no discussion in the same manner it made a big joke of the 2nd congressional redistricting that followed the 2010 census.
I meant to say 2010 census in Texas.
There was more coverage last year when the Leg. was in session, little to none of the 2/2014 protest.
Yeah, the GOP did the same thing to NC10 and my NC11.
I wonder if we crossed paths at the NTS. I went there regularly from about 1991 into the 2000s.
THERE YA GO…..