BY SEAN HEALY
The mainstream media's coverage of the M1 protests outside the Australian Stock Exchange bore little resemblance to what really happened.
Just as at S11 in Melbourne, most who took part would have been left wandering whether there weren't really two sets of protests going on: one, a spirited, noisy, non-violent and effective series of actions against corporate capitalism, and the other, a "rampaging mob of hooligans", the modern-day equivalent of the Vandals' sacking of Rome.
But then no-one involved in M1 would have been particularly surprised at such coverage — it's what everyone was expecting. The corporate media are the corporate media, and they can be trusted to defend the interests of their owners, members of the very capitalist elite M1 was a protest against.
What is instructive is the systematic way in which most media outlets went about their job, with the deliberate and malicious intent to portray M1 in the worst light possible.
Step 1: Ignore
Planning for M1 began in November and ramped up quickly from the beginning of February — but it was almost entirely absent from the mainstream media until April and only really became a strong news story on the weekend before it happened.
This was not because the corporate media outlets didn't know about it. News editors and chiefs of staff certainly knew about it from late February and early March, when actions to launch M1 in different cities took place, and it was very definitely "booked in" as an event from that time.
Nor was it because there was nothing "newsworthy" about M1 coalitions' events in the lead-up to the big day. There were scores of pickets and rallies and teach-ins, all just as "newsworthy" as anything else going on in Australia's cities, which received no, or next to no, coverage.
ABC journalists and producers made it clear to M1 media people why the event wasn't getting a run on the national broadcaster: because the ABC charter prevents "pre-publicity" for any kind of protest, a catch-all which could (and nearly did) black out any coverage of the event before it happened.
Commercial outlets didn't need a formal rule to refuse "pre-publicity". While Sydney's Daily Telegraph may have carried six small pieces over two months on M1, the Sydney Morning Herald didn't mention it at all until the day before.
Step 2: Trivialise
With a virtual blackout on "pre-publicity" news coverage also came a refusal to seriously countenance the issues that the M1 protest was about.
This, again, was not for want of trying. A media conference M1 Sydney organised five days before the protest, for example, precisely to explain the issues, received coverage only from AAP.
Opinion page editors refused to return phone calls, executive producers of current affairs shows sneered "Is there anyone you have who'd even be capable of maintaining an intellectual debate?", and features editors were always "considering [their] options".
There were some exceptions: the Australian printed a feature, "Back to the barricades" by Margot Denney, on April 27 which included a box on the reasons for the protest, Triple J producer Kath Dwyer presented an excellent three-part radio documentary very critical of the stock exchange and "casino capitalism" on April 30, May 1 and May 2, and Stephen Long wrote a detailed analysis of the new global movement in the Australian Financial Review on April 29 (although the Fin readership is hardly the movement's target audience).
But, on the whole, the protest was deliberately trivialised.
The M1 activists' wide-ranging critique of corporate capitalism, in all its forms and with all its injustices, was reduced to a handy label: "anti-globalisation" (a label the movement itself rejects) or, occasionally, "anti-capitalist".
And, denied such an opportunity to explain itself, the movement could then easily be presented as "ill-informed" or "ignorant" or "infantile".
Step 3: Sensationalise
What eventually secured coverage for M1, and blanket coverage at that, was the "threat of violence".
The reason why most media outlets didn't cover any preliminary background on the M1 protests was because they didn't need to: they'd already written their stories (titled "Outrage: violence flares as protesters block ASX" or some such) and all they needed was the pictures.
Of course, the more coverage is given to the "threat of violence", the more pumped up the police are, the more likely it becomes that anything could spark an incident, and, bingo, there's your front page.
As a consequence, it doesn't matter what the incident is — because the details of it, and how it happened, are irrelevant, even counterproductive, to the "violent mob" story. The pictures can even contradict the story's slant, as long as they're dramatic.
In Sydney, 80 protesters were arrested and 30 injured when riot police, and officers on horseback, moved in to confiscate a Kombi van playing dance music. This was clearly a provocation — as everyone who saw it well knows.
It was even obvious to the Channel 9 news crew, whose reporter told me "I'm going to mention this in my newscast tonight, it's been ridiculous for the police to do this". And, yes, he did mention it in the newscast, to my surprise, but it was buried beneath tonnes of overlaid talk of protester violence.
Commercial TV, the tabloids and right-wing talk-back are, predictably, the worst culprits of this: for them, sensationalism is an essential part of convincing people to listen to, or read, the advertisements they carry.
The "quality" media, the ABC, the Australian, Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald, are more restrained and less sensationalised and somewhat more objective in its reporting: the Herald deigned to recognised the Sydney protest was "largely peaceful". But their headlines are still about "violent mobs" and their editorial line is still witheringly hostile to the movement.
Step 4: Slander
The media's hatchet job on the anti-corporate movement didn't end when protest organisers were packing up and heading off to celebrate — they were just getting started.
Having ignored the protest for months, denied the movement any opportunity to properly explain itself and then convicted it on trumped-up charges of "violence" , the corporate media moved in for the kill. Each outlet did this in its own inimitable way.
The "down-market" media simply reprinted, or rebroadcast, whatever vile, black propaganda was coming out of the Police Media Unit.
So, the day after M1, the Daily Telegraph was full of claims that protesters had sought to light fires under the horses, had used marbles against them, had stabbed one officer with his identity badge and had put ropes around their own necks to simulate police assault.
These are the stories the police always trot out when the pictures make them look bad; they came up with similarly ludicrous claims after S11.
There is no video footage of any such incident, no journalist reported on it at the time and there were no witnesses other than police officers. But the Telegraph prints them, and Howard Sattler broadcasts them, without needing any proof whatsoever, and adds, without any questioning, police claims that the incidents at M1 were the "worst ever by Australian protesters" and were the work of a "rampaging mob of hooligans".
The "up-market" media doesn't descend to such levels, (although they do print the police's claims without comment) but instead choose to run columns and editorials in which they claim that, by opposing corporate globalisation, the protesters were harming the people they were seeking to help.
All this would make for angering but depressing reading — but for one little fact. People are not the idiots the corporate media believe them to be. Sooner or later, they release the disjunction between claims of "protester violence" and TV footage of police dragging protesters away by the hair, the contradiction between claims that demonstrators don't know what they're talking about and the brief and articulate snippets they hear from demonstrators themselves.
At that point, which for many has already arrived, they will go looking for an explanation of what this new movement is about, to find out whether it might just espouse values that they themselves believe in — and they will need to find the answers to their questions.
And if that isn't a strong argument for an effective activist media and more concerted grassroots organising efforts, then I don't know what is.
[Sean Healy was M1 Sydney's media spokesperson.]