Corporate Media TALKING ABBOUT THE ISSUES!

Protestors apparently suceeded in disabling a number of corporate media cameras by spray painting their lenses and pulling wires. During the live broadcast still ongoing at a major corporate cable TV station (with WEB simulcast), the off-screen reporter could be heard exclaiming 'Fuck, they got all of [the cameras] except [one]'. Additionally, tear gas fired by riot police appears to have incapacitated at least one of their own. Live video coverage showed the policeman being assisted from the front lines by three others. Up the revolution!

What is the logic in breaking news equipment? It implies you are afraid of people seeing what you are doing. It makes you look like a criminal.

The only reasons I can think of for you to do such an small-minded thing are:

1. You are only interested in breaking the law and are using these protests as a cover.

2. You are a thug and just hate everybody.

3. You are a corporate or police provocateur and are trying to discredit the protesters.

We need more information not less.

Keep in mind that most of that in depth CNN coverage was broadcast during the middle of he day when most viewers were still at work, and not watching CNN.

I have noticed that often on CNN, the early reports of an event are fairly balanced and contain some pretty astounding information. But soon the central office gets its hands on the editting and the coverage completey morphs into the standard corporate faire.

(In 1990 for example, in one of its earliest reports on the Gulf Massacre, CNN actually revealed that a high Iraqi government official had previously asked a White House laison to Iraq whether the U.S. would respond with force if Iraq attacked Kuwait. The laison's response was something to the effect of 'No. Go ahead.'

That report aired a couple of times very early in the day, and then was never seen again.)

Today, once I got home from our solidarity protests here in San Francisco, I tuned in to CNN to catch all of this great coverage that people were telling me about, and discovered that it was no longer there.

The headline news said of the protesters only that we are 'opposing free trade' and 'opposing globalisation' and noted a relatively obscure comment from Green Peace that I don't even remember. The report like wise only showed Bush making some brief and equally obscure references to effect that free trade equates to us all being good neighbors, and that the FTAA would improve the lot of workers.

The rest of the report focused on rocks and eggs being thrown at the police while a video was shown of property destroying anarchists beating the hell out of a Volvo station wagon with hammers and sticks.

Continuing to focus on protester 'violence' the report just ten seconds or so later showed the exact same Volvo bashing footage over again.

Apparently there was so little of this type of activity that CNN had to run the footage twice to pull off the sense of mayhem that the spot was being used to fool viewers into believing Quebec was experiencing from protesters.

The entire day therefore, had been boiled down to a couple of minutes of vague and confusing milquetoast which centered on images of property damage.

The only 'in depth' report that I noted was on CNN's non-headline channel which ran a show called 'Spin Room'.

The show is hosted by a couple of young testosterone headed slightly libertarianesque smart asses, who generally spend the entire program setting up ways to make clever, sarcastic comments about the news story at hand.

On this evening's episode they did indeed interview a protest leader for quite some time, but they made sure the focus of the exchange remained firmly in the camp of - 'Wow, throwing rocks and eggs doesn't sound like an intelligent political agenda to us. It looks more like a lot of the protesters are just looking for an excuse to break things.'...

There is a science fiction novel called Dune (Frank Herbert), that is an excellent political commentary and allegory. A key phrase and theme that continuously runs through its narrative is "wheels, within wheels, within wheels..."

Meaning that when we are being propagandised and manipulated by great powers, there is always more than one layer of deception in their process. The uppermost layers are meant to subtlely shift our attention by getting us to focus on a particular matrix of lies and/or truths, underwhich deeper and more important ones remain permanently hidden.

We should approach viewing CNN reporting with this theme firmly in the center of our minds, and dig to find those deeper truths.

In this case, this deeper truth is that when the average overtime working Jane or Joe gets home exhausted from work late in the day, and clicks on CNN to see what's going on in the world, they see exactly what the stockholders and parent companies of CNN want them to see.

Dexter

You're right, later in the day I checkup up on the news again and it had all gone to mush.