NORTH AMERICAN MEDIA SILENT ON MASSIVE POST-G8 ITALIAN PROTESTS

NORTH AMERICAN MEDIA SILENT ON MASSIVE POST-G8 ITALIAN PROTESTS
by Paul D. Boin 6:57pm Thu Jul 26 \'01
pboin [at] home.com
http://uk.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=8081

If 150,000 protest in the streets, and the media doesn\'t cover it, did it really happen?

REAL NEWS BRIEF: #1 (July 25/01) [Real News Network, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada]
On Tuesday, July 24, massive simultaneous demonstrations occurred in cities throughout Italy in response to what many Italians feel was an unjustified use of force during the Genoa G8 meetings. These spontaneous peaceful protests were also a reaction to the brutal police raid, at the Summit\'s close, of two schools housing participants from the Genoa Social Forum and members of the Independent Media Center, that also went largely unreported or illreported. Accounts from Reuters {Reuters (Rome) 2001}, the Indy Media Centre {Brabinger 2001}, and other European news sources confirm that approximately 150,000 people marched through the city centre\'s of Rome (approx. 50,000), Milan (approx. 45,000), Balogna (approx. 15,000), Florence (approx. 6,000), Genoa (approx. 5,000), Napoli (approx. 5,000), Palermo (approx. 2,000), Trieste (approx. 2,000) and a number of others, bringing the total number of participating cities to about thirty. Remarkably, if you were watching, listening, or reading North America\'s mainstream news media, you\'d think this real world event never happened.

Participants in these Italy-wide marches represented a broad coagulation of pro-democracy (\'anti-globalization\') activists, environmentalists, union members, parliamentarians, families and children. Apparently such a huge and broad-based expression of outrage aimed at the Italian government, and other G8 nations, isn\'t \'newsworthy\' to \'leading\' news outlets like the CBC, the National Post, CNN and others. This real news story consistently remained invisible on CBC radio\'s World Report, CNN\'s Global Minute, and the entire July 25th edition of the National Post. This, while CBC Television\'s newscast managed to find time to air \"N Sync\'s newest CD\", and CNN managed to fit \"McDonald\'s new public stock offering in Japan\" into its \'Global Minute\' slot (itself struggling for news air through the cracks of the CNN-frenzy over the Condit-Levy affair).

The Globe and Mail, while doing it\'s best to ignore the story, managed to include a misleading and skeletal wire copy paragraph piece (in their World Report box on page A9) that read (in its entirety): \"Tens of thousands of people, many shouting \'Killers, killers,\' protested throughout Italy yesterday against the use of police force that left one person dead and more than 230 injured at the recent Group of Eight summit in Genoa. There were no immediate reports of serious violence during marches in Rome, Genoa, Florence, Bologna, Palermo and a host of other smaller cities across Italy.\" {Reuters 2001}. The Toronto Star also included a wire copy article that lead with \"Thousands marched in cities across Italy...\" The piece continued to explain that marchers were \"demanding the resignation of the country\'s Interior Minister over the death of a protester during the Group of Eight summit.\" {Reuters/Canadian Press 2001} Besides scandalously understating the numbers of people in the streets (the Toronto Star actually managed to include the figures for Balogna, Florence and Palermo, while failing to mention the huge turnouts in Rome and Milan. Since the participants for these two cities alone amounted to 95,000 perhaps the crafter of this piece felt the people of Rome and Milan\'s role wouldn\'t go to well with the lead line \"Thousands march...\".), both reports again focused on the already internationally (and unavoidably) known death of Carlo Guilianni, and neglected to mention the terrible beatings that people took while working and sleeping in the two school buildings at the very end of the G8 summit.

So why wasn\'t this massive news story \'newsworthy\', or worthy of proper and accurate coverage, to our agenda-setting news media? Thankfully, there are media scholars and authors that can help guide us through the media fog towards an answer. James Winter, from the University of Windsor, point\'s out that \"the news media in Canadian [Western] society predominantly may be seen as promoting a narrow ideological \'consensus\' on the world around us.\" Winter labels this \'consensus\', and the process that forms it, \'Media Think.\' \"By this I mean a form of group think on a vast scale which permeates the lives of elites, news workers, and much of society at large...It is a process by which the mainstream, corporate media largely function, wittingly and unwittingly, as the delivery system for neoconservative (and neoliberal) dogma...It\'s the means by which the media create particular pictures of the world in our heads, all the while omitting and thereby preventing the formation of alternative, competing pictures.\" {Winter 1997 :114}. Robert Hackett, with other researchers based at Simon Fraser Univiversity, point out that \"...the most important and debilitating blind spots in the Canadian [Western] media: [are] the lack of coverage afforded to Canada\'s [North America\'s] deepening social inequalities, growing corporate power, and alternatives to neo-liberal economic perspectives.\" {Hackett, et al. 2000: 166}. And, of course, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman\'s media analysis revealed that \"views that challenge fundamental premises or suggest that the observed modes of exercise of state power are based on systemic factors will be excluded from the mass media even when elite controversy over tactics rages fiercely.\" {Herman & Chomsky 1988: xii}.

Sure, mainstream publishers, editors, and even many journalists (in perpetual denial), will speak volumes on how this tradition of media analysis is baseless. But actions or, more accurately in this recent G8 case, inactions speak far louder than words. Obviously our mainstream media, and the elite clients and advertisers they serve and represent, feel threatened by reality - a reality that demonstrates the failures of corporate-led globalization and the ever blossoming resistance to it. As our predominantly corporate media\'s content becomes ever more abstracted from, and irrelevant to, today\'s real world, thankfully inspiring media alternatives and actions are emerging to help citizens get a more accurate picture of our world - the Independent Media Centre (http://www.indymedia.org), Democracy Now\'s daily radio/web-audio programs (http://www.pacifica.org/programs/democracy_now), the Straight Goods (http://www.straightgoods.com), Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (http://www.fair.org), the Media Channel (http://www.mediachannel.org), NewsWatch Canada/Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom (http://www.presscampaign.org/newswatchlist.html), and the up-coming Media Democracy Day on October 19th (Actions are being planned in cities throughout North America and beyond. Contact pjbaines [at] yahoo.ca for information).

These organizations and initiatives are providing both alternatives to, and lessons for, the mainstream news media\'s performance. A performance which is increasingly becoming more dreadful and embarrassing.

[Paul D. Boin is an investigative journalist and educator based in Ontario, Canada, the founder of the Real News Network (to be officially launched in October), and is presently completing his doctoral degree in Education (in the program focus of Critical Global and Community Issues, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto). Paul is also a co-founder of Media Democracy Day (Web site, http://www.MediaDemocracyDay.org, to be up and running soon). Paul is presently working on a book entitled \"Reclaiming Our Minds: Towards a Democratic News Media and Society\", to be published in 2002. He can be reached at pboin [at] home.com]

REFERENCES

1. Reuters (Rome), \"G8, Manifestations in 30 Cities. In 50,000 They Parade to Rome,\" Yahoo-Italy News July 24 2001, < http://it.news.yahoo.com/010724/58/14wqq.html (Translated from Italian to English via http://babelfish.altavista.com/translate.dyn )>.
2. Airven Brabinger, \"Protests Against Police Violence,Throughout Italy,\" Independent Media Centre July 24 2001, <http://www.indymedia.org>.
3. Reuters, \"Marchers Protest Against Summit Police,\" Globe and Mail, July 25 2001, A9.
4. Reuters/Canadian Press, \"Fire Italian Minister, Protesters Demand,\" Toronto Star July 24 2001, <http://www.thestar.com>.
5. James Winter, Democracy\'s Oxygen: How Corporations Control the News (Montreal: Black Rose, 1997), 114.
6. Robert Hackett, Richard Gruneau, et al., The Missing News: Filters and Blind Spots in Canada\'s Press (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives/Garamond Press, 2000), 166.
7. Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988), xii.