Early coverage of the upcoming protests at the Republican and Democratic national conventions has followed a familiar pattern: Mainstream media are stoking fears about the potential for violence in Philadelphia and Los Angeles by rewriting the actual history of police brutality at last year’s anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle. In its place, media are developing a mythology of dangerous protesters who, for unspecified reasons, violently overpowered police.
“It is widely agreed that the Seattle police got out-foxed by better organized protesters trying to shut down the World Trade Organization meeting last year,” reported NBC‘s Fred Francis in a story about the conventions (Nightly News, 7/14/00). 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.”
Widely agreed? Francis must have either missed or discounted the American Civil Liberties Union’s recent report on the Seattle protests. “Demonstrators [in Seattle] were overwhelmingly peaceful,” wrote the ACLU. “Not so the police.”
According to the ACLU’s 87-page report, “Out of Control: Seattle’s Flawed Response to Protests Against the World Trade Organization,” the City of Seattle’s response to the WTO protests was characterized by “unwarranted restrictions and outright assaults on citizens and on their basic American rights.” The “draconian” violations of civil liberties committed by Seattle police and officials included widespread use of “chemical weapons, rubber bullets and clubs against peaceful protesters and bystanders alike”; numerous “individual acts of [police] brutality”; the suppression of free speech rights; hundreds of improper arrests; and intimidation and “brutal” abuse of arrestees.
NBC, ABC and CBS all ignored the release of the ACLU report, as did CNN. The Seattle Times is the only major American newspaper to have covered the ACLU’s findings (7/5/00).
Yet the media haven’t forgotten Seattle– mainstream reports on the upcoming convention protests consistently refer to them as follow-ups to Seattle, and frequently ask whether authorities in Philadelphia and Los Angeles will be able to avoid a similar scenario. But which scenario?
One ABC World News Tonight report (7/23/00) asked what lessons Philadelphia police have learned from Seattle, and how they will be applied to the convention. According to reporter Jim Sciutto, Philadelphia police observers in Seattle saw protesters “at times playing to the television cameras” by feigning injury. Sciutto’s report features, without rebuttal, a Philadelphia police lieutenant claiming that at the sight of a camera, activists are trained to “fall down and start screaming and yelling whether you hit them or not.” ABC‘s report made no mention of any substantive allegations of police brutality in Seattle.
When riots erupted in Los Angeles on June 19 after the Lakers won the NBA Finals, several news outlets discussed the random acts of vandalism as though they were comparable to the protests planned for the Democratic convention. “Los Angeles officials hope that the convention crowd will exercise more self-restraint than the Lakers crowd,” reported the NBC Nightly News (6/20/00). The CBS Evening News (6/20/00) made the same comparison, reporting that officials promised “much less access for potential troublemakers” at the convention than there had been at the Lakers game. CBS voiced skepticism however, adding, “but that’s what they said in Seattle…. And some of those [protest] groups have already announced they’re coming here.”
What emerges from this coverage is an image of activists as a paramilitary mob preparing to take to the streets to frustrate and discredit the police.This distorted view has been helped along by the three major networks’ failure to discuss in any depth protesters’ critiques of the conventions. CBS mentioned that Los Angeles anarchists would protest in order to “shine the spotlight on economic injustice” (7/10/00); NBC (7/20/00) noted that the protesters’ message is “simply that the political parties have been taken over by big money interests.” Neither network featured any further examination of the activists’ political positions.
Demonizing activists and ignoring police brutality may imbue police departments with a sense that they can operate with impunity– or at least without fear of serious scrutiny from the press. This media whitewashing may heighten the risk that citizens assembling to speak out at the conventions will face police violence.
ACTION: Please contact the media and urge them to provide more balanced coverage of the protests at the Republican and Democratic conventions than they did of last year’s protests in Seattle. Acknowledging the ACLU’s findings about the growing problem of anti-protest police brutality would be one way to improve coverage. Taking activists’ politics seriously would be another.
For more information on the protests planned for the Republican Convention (7/31/00-8/4/00), visit http://r2kphilly.org/ . For info on actions at the Democratic Convention (8/14-17/00), visit www.d2kla.org .
CONTACT:
NBC Nightly News
Phone: 212-664-4971 or 202-885-4259
Fax: 202-362-2009
Nightly@nbc.com
ABC World News Tonight
Phone: (212) 456-4040
Fax: (212) 456-4297
netaudr@abc.com
CBS Evening News
Phone: (212) 975-3691, (202) 457-4385
Fax: (212) 975-1893
audsvcs@cbs.com
