By Seth Ackerman
As tens of thousands of protesters rallied in Seattle to shut down the opening conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting last December, mainstream media treated protesters' concerns with indifference and often contempt. That hostility translated into slanted coverage of both the demonstrations and the police reaction.
A US News and World Report headline, "Hell No, We Won't Trade" summarised a recurring motif: "anti-trade" became a common — though wildly inaccurate — label for the demonstrators in mainstream coverage. "A guerrilla army of anti-trade activists took control of downtown Seattle today", a Washington Post article (1/12/99) began. Newsweek (13/12/99) reported that activists "posted web pages to educate their followers on the evils of foreign trade."
It should go without saying that virtually none of those who oppose the WTO are against world trade — any more than those who boycotted General Electric were against electricity. Yet ABC anchor Jack Ford (1/12/99) assumed that everyone whose job involves trade supports the WTO, as he pitted the demonstrators against the city hosting them: "No American city exports as much, President Clinton was happy to point out today, which helps explain why a good many people in Seattle are angry — at the protesters and their very anti-trade message."
NBC financial correspondent Mike Jensen (29/11/99) was enlisted on the eve of the WTO meeting to extol the benefits of free trade. Jensen concluded that "most experts say getting rid of trade barriers on both sides is a good thing for American workers and consumers. But no matter what comes out of this four-day meeting — and a lot of analysts don't think it will be much — world trade has such momentum, almost nothing can get in its way."
"A stew of grievances"
Even coverage that did attempt to describe the protesters' goals dealt with them in only the vaguest terms — and often at a level of generalisation that rendered the descriptions inaccurate or meaningless.
An ABC News story by correspondent Deborah Wang in Seattle failed to address the activists' concerns with anything more than platitudes:
"They are fighting for essentially the same issues they campaigned against in the '60s. Corporations, which they say are still exploiting workers in the Third World. Agribusiness is still putting small farmers out of work. Mining companies, still displacing peasants from the land. But what is different is that, for these protesters, this single organisation, the WTO, has come to symbolise about all that is wrong in the modern world."
More helpful than such generalities would have been a summary of some of the protesters' specific complaints: that the WTO has issued rulings forcing member countries to repeal specific laws that protect public health and the environment; that it proposes new rules limiting countries' freedom to regulate foreign corporate investors; and that its decisions are made in secret by an unaccountable tribunal.
Instead, ABC's Peter Jennings commented that "it seems as though every group with every complaint from every corner of the world is represented in Seattle this week".
US News (13/12/99) dismissed the protesters as "causists and all-purpose agitators." The Philadelphia Inquirer's William R. Macklin (5/12/99) referred to them as "the terminally aggrieved" with "a stew of grievances so confusing that they drowned any hope of broad public support".
CBS Evening News explained some of the background on its November 29 broadcast, but obscured the core criticisms of the WTO. Dan Rather reported that the WTO had ruled on many environmental issues, but failed to explain that the WTO has ruled against environmental restrictions in every case that has come before it.
Indeed, Rather's reference to the WTO's ruling on "fishing restrictions aimed at saving endangered species" might have misled viewers into thinking that the WTO was intervening on behalf of threatened animals, instead of ruling that such restrictions are an unacceptable restraint on trade.
'Duped' by Buchanan
The lack of understanding of the demonstrators' concerns was unsurprising, given how seldom the media spoke with them. When the police first started using tear gas against street blockades, CNN reporter Katherine Barrett (30/11/99) turned for comment to Jerry Jasinowski, president of the National Association of Manufacturers. Jasinowski confessed that he was "struck by how loopy some of the protesters were" and observed that they were "shouting a lot of crazy different messages".
Perhaps the single WTO opponent who received the largest amount of time on CNN to expound his views was ultraconservative Pat Buchanan, who was interviewed, one-on-one and at length, by Inside Politics anchor Judy Woodruff (30/11/99). Though right-wing nationalists did not appear to be an appreciable fraction of the actual protesters in Seattle's streets, the media seemed to anoint Buchanan as a major leader of the anti-WTO movement.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote (1/12/99) that "knaves like Pat Buchanan" had "duped" the demonstrators — "a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960s fix" — into protesting the WTO.
"What's driving [the protests]?" CNN political analyst Bill Schneider asked on Inside Politics (30/11/99). "Resentment of big business for its irresponsible behaviour, a resentment shared by the left" — followed by a sound bite of AFL-CIO leader John Sweeney — "and the right" — followed by a sound bite of Pat Buchanan. This type of right/left "even-handedness" concerning the protests did not appear to be justified by the actual composition of the anti-WTO movement.
Anarchists smash, police respond
Perhaps mainstream news outlets' confusion concerning the protesters' composition and goals contributed to their often skewed coverage of the behaviour of the Seattle police and National Guard. A continuing theme in news reports was that the use of tear gas and concussion grenades was an appropriate response to "violent" activists.
CBS News anchor Dan Rather reported (1/12/99) that "the meeting of the World Trade Organisation was thrown into turmoil by violent demonstrations that went on into last night. That brought on today's crackdown." A CNN report from Seattle (1/12/99) claimed that "as tens of thousands marched through downtown Seattle, [a] small group of self-described anarchists smashed windows and vandalised stores. Police responded with rubber bullets and pepper gas."
But the sequence of events described in these reports was wrong. As Detective Randy Huserik, a spokesperson for the Seattle police, confirmed, pepper spray had first been used against protesters engaged in peaceful civil disobedience. CNN anchor Lou Waters asked Huserik (30/11/99) why the chemical irritant was used:
"Waters: How would you characterise the nature of the threat today? Were police assaulted? Is that what precipitated this?
Huserik: Well, a rather large group of protesters were determined to continue blocking public entrance and exit in access of some of the various venue sites. They were given a lawful order to disperse, which was ignored. Officers then announced that the Seattle police officers would deploy pepper spray if the crowd did not disperse. For those that remained, the pepper spray was deployed in order to disperse that crowd."
One eyewitness, non-violence trainer Matt Guynn, distributed the following account of police brutality over the internet:
"In one scene I witnessed this morning (at 8th Avenue and Seneca), police who had been standing behind a blockade line began marching in lock-step toward the line, swinging their batons forward, and when they reached the line they began striking the (non-violent, seated) protesters repeatedly in the back. Then they ripped off the protesters' gas masks, and sprayed pepper spray at point-blank range into their eyes repeatedly.
"After spraying, they rubbed the protesters' eyes and pushed their fingers around on their lips to aggravate the effect of the spray. And after all THIS, they began striking them again with batons ... The police then were able to break up the line, and the protesters retreated to the steps of a nearby church for medical assistance."
The lack of condemnation of police tactics — especially their tear-gassing and pepper-spraying of peaceful protesters — was a striking feature of the coverage. "Thanks for joining us and good luck to you out there", CNN anchor Lou Waters told a Seattle police spokesperson (1/12/99) as police continued their crackdown on demonstrators.
A front-page Los Angeles Times article on the protests (2/12/99) featured a subhead that read "Police Commended for Restraint." Yet the only source cited by the Times was Seattle police chief Norm Stamper, who praised the "professionalism, restraint and competence" of his forces.
A disturbing indication of mainstream media attitudes toward coverage of the WTO meeting came before the conference, when Disney/ABC's Seattle affiliate announced that it would "not devote coverage to irresponsible or illegal activities of disruptive groups", adding that "KOMO 4 News is taking a stand on not giving some protest groups the publicity they want ... So if you see us doing a story on a disruption, but we don't name the group or the cause, you'll know why."
This decision by a corporate-owned news outlet to explicitly ignore the messages of groups practising civil disobedience underscores the importance of independent journalism. Organisers in Seattle made a priority of setting up an Independent Media Center (<www.indymedia.org>), which offered alternative news on the demonstrations and their issues in every format from internet chat-rooms to satellite TV feeds.
ABC News offered a backhanded compliment to the Independent Media Center in its December 5 broadcast, noting that "the meeting of the World Trade Organisation was a turning point for the so-called independent media — small, partisan news organisations and individual reporters with political opinions they could never express in the mainstream media."
The media activists, correspondent Brian Rooney said, "got out a worldwide message about the working poor, endangered species and the power of the World Trade Organisation." Perhaps alternative media wouldn't be needed to get such messages out if there weren't so many political opinions that you can never express in mainstream media.
[Abridged from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR's) magazine, EXTRA! Visit their web site at <www.fair.org>.]