Generously written for the CC by Gail from Wit's End, our neighbour blog. Gail is also a regular writer for the CC Magazine, whose massively enlightening first piece will appear in our May 2012 issue. Subscribe today to read her words of wisdom!
Perhaps it shouldn't have come as such a powerful shock, but untold numbers of people who rallied on May Day with Occupy Wall Street to protest growing income disparity and corporate domination woke up the next morning, incredulous, to discover there had been a bloodless media massacre of their huge demonstration. The silence was deafening about actions from other cities around the country and indeed, mass turnouts around the world.
Tens of thousands of protesters in New York, who had taken over Broadway from the early beginnings of the day at Bryant Park in Midtown, marching all the way through the night to the furthest reaches of the Financial District in lower Manhattan, were jubilant and celebratory at the overwhelming turnout. Hundreds of banners, balloons, musicians, street artists and flags had contributed to a festive, peaceful demand for the end of a capitalist system that values profit over people and the environment. No one anticipated such a gigantic resurgence would receive a near total blackout of news coverage, or that of the few truncated articles that did appear, a grotesquely disproportionate focus would feature arrests.
Since then the organizers have been bitterly reminded once again that, just as occurred at the beginnings of Occupy last fall, corporations and banks control not just government - the legislature, along with the Federal Reserve and other agencies, plus most notoriously, the judiciary - but have an iron grip on that last bastion of freedom, the Fourth Estate - the press.
Even though representatives from the media amply recorded the participation of dozens of disparate labor and justice groups that had organized in support, most of the pictures, videos, interviews and articles were ignored by their editors and never made it into the public eye.
Nobody needs to be fooled more than twice, and it's hard to imagine that Occupiers will rely on the veracity of mainstream media in future. Expect them to implement plans for drastically improved, coordinated, self-produced information going forward. Reports of their demise have been greatly exaggerated by the propaganda that passes for news in America.
Event photos:
For more photos of protestors (and the police brutality used against them), check out this article here (the very top photo of the goading donuts is also from this article):
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/05/may-day-around-the-world/100289/
