[Media-watch] Anti-War Protesters Attack Mainstream Media

[iainc2003 at tesco.net]

Richard Blow is the former executive editor of George Magazine. He is author of American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr., and is writing a book about Harvard University.  


About 1,000 people and I were standing at an anti-war rally in Harvard Yard a few days ago listening to the speaker, a Harvard professor named Brian Palmer, take the offensive. Palmer was angry -- not just at President Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, but at the American media. 

The press won't tell the truth about this war, Palmer declared. "CNN will show Iraqis dancing in the streets, but it won't show burned and crushed and obliterated bodies." The line brought a huge cheer. 

Hostility to the American media has become an emerging theme of the anti-war movement. Protesters are giving voice to a feeling of betrayal, a sense that the media ought to be sympathetic to liberals but isn't -- and as a result, we're getting more propaganda than truth.  

Thus, a Web site called UnitedForPeace.org lists the networks' phone numbers, urging callers to demand that the stations recite the numbers of civilian casualties. Protesters in Oregon have spat at and used pepper spray on media photographers. 

Even lefty media are under fire for not being liberal enough. At a recent San Francisco rally, a speaker from Pacifica Radio announced that he listened to NPR "to know what the enemy is saying. He added, "They talk a lot about being objective.... Well, we see what the objective of the mainstream media is. Their objective is to cheer the war on." 

And in a letter to the Romenesko's Media News, a hangout for journalists, Nation columnist Katha Pollitt joined the anti-NPR chorus. Usually she loved NPR, she said, but now she found a lack of "serious discussion of how the invasion of Iraq is being discussed around the world." (Really? Sometimes I think that's all there is on NPR.) 

Meanwhile, if I hear one more person tell me that I really need to watch the BBC to hear the truth, I'm going to start watching "Are You Hot?" just to show my patriotism. Some of this lashing out merely reflects the Left's cultural preference for things international -- if it's European, whether it's film, diplomacy or journalism, it must be better than the homegrown stuff. 

Nor is all of the criticism wrong. The media have grown increasingly corporate, and large companies tend to be politically conservative. Partly as a result, the media have probably underplayed the intensity of the anti-war movement. 

It's creepy to hear about Clear Channel, which seems to own just about every radio station in the country except NPR, forcing its station managers to organize pro-war rallies. Fox News, meanwhile, has become like Voice of America with prettier anchors.  
Progressives have become American outsiders, as marginalized as conservatives used to be. 

During a recent New York protest, the electronic sign that runs around Fox's Manhattan office actually mocked the protesters, saying, "How do you keep a war protester in suspense? Ignore them." Fox's grammar is as lacking as its professionalism. 

But when the Left starts to attack NPR, you know there's something more primal at work -- because NPR is simpatico, in an aging, baby-boomerish sort of way. Conservatives have complained for decades about NPR's lefty tint, and they've had a legitimate gripe -- even if it's become more editorially cautious and Washington-centric in recent years. 

No, this hostility isn't really a reaction to the failings of the media. What's really going on is a struggle for cultural power. Progressives have become American outsiders, as marginalized as conservatives used to be. 

They don't influence the Congress; they hardly even influence the Democratic Party. They're a minority on the Supreme Court, as the decision that put George W. into office demonstrated -- a decision that kept liberals out of the White House. Sure, the Left controls Hollywood, but as the reaction to Michael Moore's Academy Awards speech showed, it's pretty tepid about talking truth to the man. The media, however, are always up for grabs. In recent years, conservatives (Fox, The Weekly Standard, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage) have steamrolled liberal opposition. Now liberals are fighting back. Their argument isn't particularly nuanced, and at times they sound as open-minded as a Boston shock jock whom I recently heard refer to Iraqis as "monkeys." 

Macing a photographer isn't the best way to make your case. It is, in fact, repulsive. But despite my qualms about the hyperbole of their arguments and the actions of some, I think the protesters' anger may prove to be a good thing. 

It is time for the media pendulum to swing back to the left. If it does, maybe it'll stop in the center -- which, in the long run, is exactly where the news media ought to be. 

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Published: Mar 31 2003