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SMOKE
GETS IN OUR EYES
THE GLOBALIZATION PROTESTS
AND THE BEFUDDLED PRESS
BY
JOHN GIUFFO
In
Quebec City, a lone protester stands enshrouded in tear gas, facing
down a line of police in riot gear. In Genoa, helmeted, shielded,
and masked police rush into a crowd of helmeted, shielded, and
masked protesters. Blood pours down faces; water flushes gas out
of eyes. These are the images that we have come to expect from
the news coverage of the growing protest movement connected to
issues of globalization. But the dramatic visuals often overshadow
the reasons for those visuals. Almost two years after the 1999
"Battle in Seattle" the mainstream press, with some
exceptions, is still missing the story.
A hard look at more than 200 stories by major news outlets, (ABC,
CBS, CNN, FOX, NBC, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times,
The Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek) shows serious weaknesses
in the coverage of the four largest protests -- the International
Monetary Fund meeting in Prague in September 2000; the hemispheric
free trade talks in Quebec City in April; the European Union summit
in Gothenburg, Sweden this June; and the G-8 meeting in Genoa
in July. The problem is not so much the focus on the small percentage
of protesters who acted violently, but that the coverage lacks
context.
Since Seattle, in fact, most of the U.S. press seems in a state
of befuddlement, failing to explain to news consumers what these
large global protests and the underlying issues that fuel them
are all about.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"WHO
ARE THESE PEOPLE?"
The protests are difficult to cover -- chaotic, partially violent,
and complex in their list of complaints and demands. Still, the
underlying issues that have brought out hundreds of thousands
of people are often glossed over or misrepresented.
This is particularly true of television news outlets. Protesters
are more likely to be found explaining themselves in print than
in the reports from broadcast and cable news networks. TV on the
whole gave little explanation of the issues that brought more
than 100,000 people to Genoa. On CNN, very few protesters were
given broadcast time to explain their views, leaving it to correspondents
to sum up, often with a broad brush, who was demonstrating and
why. On Fox newscasts, Genoa protesters were all but ignored.
"From what I've seen and read, I want to know more,"
says James Naughton, executive director of the Poynter Institute.
"Who are these people? Why are they so intense about it?"
They are, of course, hard to classify in a word or two. Perhaps
the most photographed but little understood group of protesters
is the so-called "Black Bloc" -- demonstrators who don
masks, challenge the police, and view property damage as a political
statement. During these large protests the demonstrators sometimes
designate zones to allow for a "diversity of tactics"
-- a green zone for nonviolent protesters, red for "Black
Bloc"-style action, and yellow for those somewhere in between.
(This zoning strategy has gone all but unreported in the mainstream
press).
But the vast majority of the protesters are less extreme than
the Black Bloc. They include environmentalists, union activists,
church members, anarchists, farmers, college students, and others.
What they say they want is more democratic control (and less corporate
control) over the rules that affect the environment and labor
conditions around the world. This includes more democratic control
over supranational organizations such as the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, whose unelected
leaders, the protesters argue, override democratically arrived-at
laws and regulations in the name of development and free trade.
In Europe, some protesters also want to slow the course of the
march toward a more powerful European Union, which they feel eradicates
cultural identity. Slashing third-world debt is another goal.
In the view of the officials at the World Bank, the IMF, or the
WTO, meanwhile, the protesters are blaming them for things that
are not of their doing. These officials tend to see barriers to
unencumbered global trade as a recipe for balkanization and economic
slowdown, for rich and poor nations alike.
Journalists often try to sum up who the protesters are and what
they want using terms like "anti-globalization" or "anti-capitalist."
Neither seems adequate. "It's not an isolationist movement,"
cautions Jay Sand, a volunteer for the Independent Media Center,
a Web-based clearinghouse for information about the various protest
groups. "These people want a different type of globalization
-- one that doesn't emanate from what's best for corporate leaders."
It is no surprise that most editorial opinion in the U.S. press
has leaned heavily toward the corporate side of these debates,
although the degree of the tilt can be startling. In a database
search for the month of April, around the time of the Quebec City
protests, the liberal media watch group Fairness & Accuracy
in Reporting counted thirty-five editorials in major newspapers
in favor of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the issue that
brought Western leaders and tens of thousands of protesters to
Quebec City. The number of editorials against the agreement: zero.
FAIR found op-ed pages also skewed -- twenty-five opinion pieces
in favor of the agreement, nine against.
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"THE
CIRCUS "
Some reporters, meanwhile, hold dismissive views of the protest
movement. Tom Fenton, a CBS News correspondent who says he has
covered the protests in "Davos and other places where these
people demonstrate," wrote a July 20 Web commentary titled,
"When the Circus Comes to Town." The Genoa protests,
he wrote, are "a circus, complete with clowns...[who] are
there because for a few days, Genoa is the best stage in the world
to show off your anti-globalization credentials, a neat place
to hang out with like-minded kids who have nothing better to do
in summer, and a great way to impress your stick-in-the-mud friends
when you get back home." Such views sometimes make it into
the reporting. In a July 20 story on the Web, CNN's Rome bureau
chief, Alessio Vinci, went to pains to distinguish between nonviolent
protesters and those involved in clashes with police. Nevertheless,
Vinci dismissed those in the clashes as "a group of people
not really here to protest the G8 summit. They probably don't
even know what the G8 summit is all about."
There seems to be a widespread view in the press, meanwhile, promulgated
by the columnist Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, among
others, that the protest movement is a Western, middle-class affair.
But that is not quite on target. "Since the Seattle protests
. . . there have been at least fifty separate episodes of civil
unrest in thirteen poor countries, all directed at the IMF,"
says a report by the World Development Movement, a British non-governmental
organization that studies global poverty.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"RUNNING
BATTLES"
THREAT OF VIOLENCE LOOMS AT G8 SUMMIT; SUMMIT PROTESTERS, POLICE
CLASH; RIOTS DISTRACT PRAGUE IMF SUMMIT; GOTHENBURG UNDER SEIGE
— by an overwhelming margin, the coverage of the protests
surrounding the trade and global-issues meetings since Seattle
has been dominated by the violent parts of the protests.
Of course, massive street violence is a story. "I don't know
a newsman in the world who, when there are running battles between
protesters and the police going on, is going to turn away from
that and say that we really need to be covering the nonviolent
protesters," says Mark Knoller, a CBS News White House correspondent
who covered the president's visit to Genoa.
But how much should violence overshadow context? "I think
that protests often get covered simply as sports events,"
says Sue Horton, the Sunday opinion editor for the Los Angeles
Times. "This many people turned out; these were some of the
highlights of the events; the police won or the protesters won."
While some journalists report on the protests as sports events,
others tend to see the police as the hometown team. News outlets
often use verbs that neatly place blame: "Protesters . .
. take to the streets throwing rocks . . . police respond with
tear gas and water cannons," (NBC Nightly News, July 20 Genoa);
"Bloody outbursts by anti-globalization demonstrators . .
. forced a veritable security invasion" (Carol Williams,
Los Angeles Times, June 17, Gothenburg); "A state of civil
emergency is declared in Seattle as violent protesters and police
clash . . ." (Fox News, November 30, 1999).
Many protest organizers, at least, argue that the blame for initiation
of violence has sometimes been misplaced. "The one thing
that the media have consistently gotten wrong, particularly with
Seattle, is who initiated the violence," says Mike Dolan,
the Western director of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, and
one of the organizers of the Seattle protests. "The police
initiated the violence in Seattle." A July 2000 report by
the American Civil Liberties Union, which examined the police
response to the protests in Seattle, concluded that the police
overreacted toward demonstrators, that there was a lack of preparation
on the part of police, that the creation of a "No Protest
Zone" violated the First Amendment rights of the protesters,
that the police abused and brutalized protesters, and that improper
arrests were common.
In Genoa, the July 22 early morning raid at the Armando Diaz school
complex, where protest organizers had made a headquarters, may
offer an example of misplaced blame. Some seventy members of an
Italian SWAT team smashed through the doors; sixty-one demonstrators
subsequently required hospitalization. Early on, some U.S. outlets
did mention claims of excessive police force. But most reports
emphasized protester violence, and some just stuck with police
accounts of the raid. CBS News featured a Web report on July 22,
for example, that made it sound as if some of the sixty-one protesters
carried out from the raided building had sustained their injuries
during the previous day's clashes, as the police contended. Contrary
views were scattered in the bottom third of the story. ABC News
noted the raid briefly, but did not mention the violence.
Almost immediately after the raid, however, European news outlets
and alternative news organizations like Alternet.org featured
reports of brutal violence on the part of the police. On August
6 The Wall Street Journal nailed the story by interviewing beating
victims in five countries as well as doctors, local officials,
and neighborhood witnesses. The findings: most of the demonstrators
had been peaceful; most of their arrests were tossed out; their
injuries had been inflicted by police. They include a twenty-one-year-old
cello student from Berlin whose injuries required brain surgery
and a twenty-four-year-old student of Indian culture who had been
thrown down two flights of stairs and dragged by her hair. Other
U.S. media then followed up.
The police killing of a twenty-three-year-old protester, Carlo
Giuliani, in Genoa rightfully received heavy coverage. But in
one sense it, too, was off target. Time and again, mainstream
news reports said Giuliani's death was the first at a globalization-related
protest, that the movement "had, perhaps, found its first
martyr" (ABC News.com, July 20); "It was the anti-globalization
movement's first blood, and the radicals' first martyr."
(Newsweek, July 30).
But as was pointed out by The Nation, The Village Voice, and CommonDreams.org,
among others, protesters have been killed at other recent globalization-related
protests. Members of the Landless Movement -- a Brazilian land-reform
group that opposes market-led land reform and corporate-controlled
patents on seeds -- were killed in September 2000, reportedly
by members of a private security firm employed by local farmers.
Three students were killed in late June in Papua New Guinea while
protesting against World Bank mandates for privatization. Activism
against rules imposed by the IMF and the World Bank has resulted
in injury and death in countries such as Nigeria, Bolivia, and
India. Giuliani's death was simply the first to occur before Western
cameras.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
DOING
IT BETTER
All of this is not to say that the press hasn't been improving.
Some news outlets have begun featuring a wider range of voices
and perspectives on globalization-related protests, and are attempting
to report and explain the underlying causes. Some examples:
* John Tagliabue, in a story
for The New York Times on July 22, used the experiences of two
Norwegian protesters to explain some of the issues that brought
them, and thousands like them, to the troubled G-8 meeting in
Genoa.
* CNN's Stephen Frazier
hosted a lengthy discussion on April 20 of the issues that brought
protesters to Quebec City. Reports from the field were interwoven
with discussions from several perspectives on free trade, NAFTA,
and other globalization-related issues. The result was a textured
report that put the anger on display into context.
* The Los Angeles Times's
Sue Horton commissioned an April 29 Q&A with Naomi Klein,
a Canadian journalist whose book, No Logo, has become a rallying
cry for the protesters. Interviewed by Marc Cooper, Klein dissected
the movement and articulated its goals and challenges.
* On the reporting front,
in Newsweek on July 30, Christopher Dickey and Rod Nordland demonstrated
that, before Genoa, the Italian authorities had turned back at
the border thousands of people who were on blacklists or "who
had long hair, tattoos, or body piercings."
* David Ruppe wrote two
solid pieces for ABCNews.com on July 10 and 20 -- documenting
aspects of the protests that were underreported elsewhere in the
mainstream press, including the arrests of journalists and the
extent of the security clampdowns. And a "Fact File"
on MSNBC made a serious attempt at sorting out the various interests
and memberships of the protest groups.
But these were exceptions. Many factors can prevent journalists
from getting as much texture and context into these stories as
they would like. Among them: shrinking news holes and airtime,
less interest in international news, the tendency toward sensation
and away from issues-based journalism, the complex and shifting
makeup of the protest groups, and the tense environment of a protest
zone.
But excuses aside, poor coverage of the globalization-related
events is feeding something of a media backlash. "I think
that a lot of people who had not been interested in media criticism
before are very concerned about the coverage," says Rachel
Coen, a media analyst at FAIR, "and they are drawing some
connections between globalization and corporate-owned media."
One
result is the construction of new Web sites with news and information
about trade and globalization issues, such as Indymedia.org, the
site of the Independent Media Center. Indymedia describes itself
as a collective of some fifty "independent media organizations
and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, noncorporate
coverage." During Genoa, organizers say the site was receiving
a million hits a day. It grew, in part, as a result of reaction
to mainstream coverage of the Seattle protests. "The dissatisfaction
with people who work in corporate media is part of it," Sand
says. "Some activists have gone to these events and then
they've seen with their own eyes and they compare that to the
ways it's been portrayed." They may do that again in late
September, when the World Bank/IMF holds its annual joint meeting
in Washington, D.C.
Indymedia.org is not about to replace NBC. But then NBC -- and
its mainstream competitors in print and broadcast -- don't need
to give viewers and readers, particularly young ones who tend
to follow this movement, another reason to mistrust them.
It takes time, reporting, and homework to get a handle on the
issues surrounding trade and globalization that have been targeted
by the protesters, but it's worth the effort. The protests are
organized, they're global, and they're not going away.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Giuffo is an assistant editor at CJR.
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