Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
When Coverage Matters: Tea Party vs. US Social Forum
Mass movements that matter for media—Round 2
When it comes to covering activist gatherings, corporate media have established clear standards: Numbers don't count nearly as much as politics do.
Last fall, when tens of thousands of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists and their allies marched on Washington in a grassroots rally for equality, media gave it far less coverage than the similarly sized, largely corporate-funded Tea Party protest in Washington just a month earlier (Extra!, 12/09).
So it came as little surprise that the Tea Party Convention this
February would get more coverage than the June U.S. Social Forum, five
days of strategizing, organizing and activism inspired by the World
Social Forum launched in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001. What was a
little shocking, though, was just how stark the difference was. 
The Social Forum, in Detroit, drew an estimated 15,000-20,000
progressive activists from around the country, while the Tea Party
Convention in Nashville hosted a meager 600 attendees. Two activist
gatherings striving for political and social change, one at least 25
times larger than the other-but the smaller one got all the media
coverage. Across 10 major national outlets in the two weeks surrounding
each event, the Tea Party got 177 mentions to the Social Forum's three.
(Per participant, the Tea Party got 1,500 times as many mentions.)
It was almost a total blackout for the USSF. Aside from local coverage, the only corporate media mentions found in the Nexis database came from Glenn Beck (Fox News, 6/29/10, 6/30/10)-warning viewers about "socialists and communists coming out of the woodwork to co-opt the youth and spread a dangerous disease"-and Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, a guest on John King's CNN show (6/30/10).
Not one major newspaper outside of Michigan covered the story. Time and Newsweek ignored it. The Associated Press didn't run a single story on its newswire.
Of course, many alternative journalists did cover the huge event, including prominent reporting from Inter Press Service (e.g., 6/25/10).
By contrast, in the two weeks surrounding the February Tea Party Convention, the right-wing gathering got 12 mentions in the Washington Post, eight in the New York Times, seven in the L.A. Times and four in USA Today. CNN mentioned the convention 71 times, Fox News 27, MSNBC 19, ABC 21, and CBS and NBC four. Politico (2/12/10) reported that CNN sent a crew of 11 to cover it; soon after the convention, the Washington Post assigned a reporter to "make sure the movement's covered fully in its pages" (Politico, 3/12/10).
In Detroit, the USSF was too big to ignore; the local alt-weekly, the Metro Times (6/23/10), even dedicated a front cover to it. The two daily papers, the Detroit Free Press (e.g., 6/20/10) and Detroit News (e.g., 6/23/10), for the most part offered respectful coverage of an event that brought a boost to the decimated Detroit economy. But Nolan Finley, editorial page editor of the News, mocked the gathering (6/20/10): "This ain't no tea party. The forum is a hootenanny of pinkos, environuts, peaceniks, Luddites, old hippies, Robin Hoods and urban hunters and gatherers. In other words, a microcosm of the Obama administration."
Finley seemed only to be giving colorful voice to the unspoken thoughts of most corporate journalists. The Social Forum certainly wasn't the Tea Party; it was a gathering of people whose voices are routinely discounted by the media gatekeepers, no matter how big a hootenanny they can muster. When one side has 600 people (and one Sarah Palin) pushing the fiscal conservatism beloved by corporate media bigwigs, and the other has 20,000 challenging the neoliberal status quo and highlighting the struggles of the working class and people of color, journalists don't need to be told how to do the math.
Sidebar: The Spurning of Atlanta The non-coverage was essentially a repeat of the first U.S. Social Forum in 2007, which drew some 12,000 activists and not a single major newspaper or television reporter outside its host city of Atlanta. (Two local AP reporters did file stories on the wire that year-7/27/07.)
The Boston Banner, Boston's African-American weekly paper, published two in-depth pieces (6/28/07, 7/5/07), and other smaller papers like the Albuquerque Journal (6/21/07) and the Miami Times (7/4/07) also ran articles. The local Augusta Chronicle (7/2/07) declared that the "Forum Shows Far Left's Faults," concluding: "Until those on the far left begin to sacrifice their priorities for the sake of gaining power as a group, the republic seems safe. The revolution barely sputters."
45 Comments so far
Show Allgnken
Why are people surprised at this? Obama said he did not want to re-instate the "Fairness Docterine" back into law. When the Tea Party gatherings are sponsored by Fox News and Fox scares other News Services that don't emulate the news they spread are going to cover the Tea Party events over other Grass Roots events even if there sponsored events only have 5 people turning out and thousands at other events. Welcome to the USA Bought and Paid for by Fox News. Wake up America!!
So much for the tea party being a grass roots effort. The tea party was contrived by the corporate establishment to accelerate the rightward shift of US politics.
Fear, greed and racsism drive the tea party agenda.
Unfortunately the Democrats have played into the tea party's hand ever since the tea party emerged.
We have lost knowledge here: no number means anything without a denominator. 900 people (out of how many?)
Obviously, there should be a tiny graph in each report: number of media hits per person involved:
30000 people /3 media stories = 10,000 people per story, undervalued by x percent
30000 hits /25 people= 1200 hits/per person = lie by x per cent
or the inverse, to be more hopeful, something like 25 people/30, 000 media hits is : should have a value of 0.00083333333
--a reforming math illiterate here, learning
A gay rights rally!???!!!?? INCREDIBLE! Stop the presses!
Of course. A moron rights rally is much more interesting.
q
Well, the corporate media's selective coverage of news, events and movements is at the heart of our organizing problems, isn't it? Back in the 60s-80 or so, if leftists, unionists, etc. demonstrated or raised hell, it was often covered. The fact that it was negative coverage doesn't matter too much: the FACT of the coverage creates reality, spreads the word, encourages others to join, validates a leftist POV.
In a small factory town on the MA-RI border I was turned on to draft resistance through folk music, coffeehouses and a steady barrage of national TV news and papers reporting on civil rights battles, counter-culture developments, anti-war protests and body bags coming back. Some of them were my friends; most were not.
The Internet might still be free (for a while, anyway), but it is so atomized that it doesn't have much reach. I think we need to discuss ways of creating new mass media, taking over corporate outlets, or consciously and wisely using old-fashioned door-to-door organizing and leafleting.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make noise? If a social forum, demonstration, or act of resistance takes place and the corporate media doesn't report it, it still happened -- but did it meet its intended objective?
See Juan Coles related piece regarding "news" which never happened.
Americans - you live within a vacuumized bubble-world of your own (corporate) creation. And your wish is to export this Zombiefied existence to all other nations so we will all live in a planetary void.
Fortunately for the rest of the world you will collapse before this happens. No country can possibly be so powerful militarily and yet, at the same time, so stupid culturally - and think that this insanity will actually prevail.
FAIR has the unique ability to repeatedly state the obvious. But then again, organizations like that need funding.
FAIR was important in the 80s right after Manufacturing Consent came out, and there really was a need for an analytical analysis of coverage. But at this point, it's stating the obvious, bordering on ridiculousness.
And why do people still use the word 'activist'? Isn't it better to be an 'organizer', a pro-active participant? The word 'activist' needs to go the way of the dodo. And the word 'progressive' too, what's up with that? As though all the radical anarchists at the USSF would identify with that safe word.
I dunno, it's time to stop playing nice with safe phrasing. Let's just say it, the capitalist press is our enemy, there is no need to appease them with neutral language, or get surprised when they ignore us.
The article puts some meat on the bones of suspicions about the cynical mainstream press. It's one thing to claim that we know that the press is biased; it's quite another to document the scope of that bias.
q
No, it's 20 year old meat, and it's getting rancid. The should be spending their time countering the problem, not documenting it. Hey, I have a great idea I learned from FAIR. How about all of us send an email of complaint to the ombudsman at our regional dailies? That should take care of it. And let's keep doing that every time we get an email alert about media bias.
Not.
One counters inaccurate reporting with accurate reporting. FAIR is doing exactly what it should be doing.
q
They are countering nothing. Nothing, because they of all people should know that if the problem is the one they're complaining about, nobody except the people who already know that are going to read the complaint. It's totally devoid of logic, which they know but hope we miss, as it is designed solely to keep their name in circulation among their donor pools. What they are doing is make-work, not productive. All FAIR is today is a non-profit trying to stay in business, like so many others. Why not spend that time, effort, and bandwith actually doing things that make what this article is covering unimportant? There are two ways, and neither are complicated or hard.
1. Figure out what gets things into the mainstream media, and then do those things. There are many more considerations used by the MSM other than number in attendance, and most of them are not conspiratorial. The Tea Party event and the Social Forum event are absolutely not comparable. In other words, the article's entire premise is wrong.
2. Substitute alternative media and cease caring at all about whether or not Brian Williams shows up. We already know our first efforts at exploiting the internet don't work, largely because the free services offered by Google and other gigantic multinational corporations tend to make all of us want to be authors instead of distributors. Did you know that it's still legal to photocopy something and put it up on the bulletin board of your local supermarket, or stand in front of the post office handing out leaflets? Most small to medium-sized towns feature letters sections, the most-read page after the front page, that only censor for language and libel, not political content. All three of these options also have no spam filters, and the face-to-face option also allows you to answer questions. It's awesome.
Or, you can continue to fawn over white-collar liberal non-profits who preach exclusively to their donation-friendly choir and generate no actual change whatsoever. Your choice.
OMG I just got the joke. Julie Hollar is being ironic as she IS the media bias. She is an author of CD that biases negatively on Tea Party constantly but it bored to report on the USSF (which it is SFCC own fault they are boring).
Now what she has done here is blame OTHER media as if she is innocent for sake of irony. I am the only smart one to catch it.
yup...I guess you're the only smart one. Nice going.
uh, smart one...your syntax is a little scrambled. might want to tighten it up a bit. wouldn't want the CDers to think you're an idiot now wudja?
You don't have to be jealous of me..although it is understandable.
Hey, everyone, we've discussed this before. Freepers and Tea Partiers (the names keep changing, but nothing else does) salt our boards. So what? Poodleguy is a recent addition (edition?). We know this -- it happens over and over -- yet we keep responding to them, instead of using that time to either disrupt their boards, or better yet, knock on our next door neighbor's door and ask if he or she wants to come to a community organizing forum next Wednesday night (and not to see the latest revision of Loose Change).
One of the greatest things we should learn from the so-called "right wing loonies" is that not everyone has to be the boss/deepest thinker. In fact, that's for hardly anyone if what's important is getting a movement going. What is needed, and what progressives always eschew, is foot soldiers like Poodleguy. They're the ones who do the work, not the tacticians. We spend all our time trying to figure out the perfect policies to sell, and no time doing the selling -- mostly because most of us insist that it's impossible to work on tactics with anyone who doesn't agree with us 100% on the policy questions. 99% isn't good enough. Hyperbolic? Just wait -- at least a dozen people are about to excoriate me for mocking Loose Change, and a dozen others, who aren't even hardcore "truthers," will take that richly deserved mockery and reflexively twist it into "you accept the government's story -- you can't be trusted" even though what I wrote contains no hint that I accept the government's story. We're the neanderthals, not the right-wingers.
Leave this Poodle goofball alone (why on earth would you waste time commenting on his grammar? Is your sense of intellectual superiority going to get you through the aftermath of this coming Election Day?) and do something useful. If you're wondering what's useful, ponder this: The Tip O'Neill era is over. All politics is no longer local. We are in the full flower of the age of "identity politics." All the beneficial policy analysis in the world means nothing now. The useful work is gathering together people who identify with each other, even if the reasons why they do make no sense, or even if there appears to be no reason at all. Identify, don't convince. That's what wins.
Yet another example of irony. He responds to me (calling me some names too for some reason like I don't belong on this site and he does) then tells others not to respond to me (which 99.999% of the population did not). What a nut case!! I did not know they had internet access at the looney bin :)
Re:" instead of using that time to either disrupt their boards"
Most of their boards censor before your comments can show.
Re:" knock on our next door neighbor's door and ask if he or she wants to come to a community organizing forum next Wednesday night"
good idea but on CD, most of them dont do that. Its not in their interests.
Re: "One of the greatest things we should learn from the so-called "right wing loonies" is that not everyone has to be the boss/deepest thinker"
Amen bro !
Re: "We spend all our time trying to figure out the perfect policies to sell, and no time doing the selling -- mostly because most of us insist that it's impossible to work on tactics with anyone who doesn't agree with us 100% on the policy questions. 99% isn't good enough. Hyperbolic? Just wait -- at least a dozen people are about to excoriate me for mocking Loose Change, and a dozen others, who aren't even hardcore "truthers," will take that richly deserved mockery and reflexively twist it into "you accept the government's story -- you can't be trusted" even though what I wrote contains no hint that I accept the government's story. "
I'm with you bro. It's hard to convince the purists on this board. They're politically arrested infantiles fine with Repugs.
Re: "One of the greatest things we should learn from the so-called "right wing loonies" is that not everyone has to be the boss/deepest thinker"
I'm glad you assumed I can't think as deep as you and that I 'm a looney. It really helps summarize your abilities to debate as most left wing loonies. (Wow, that was easy to name call...I should do that all the time to argue)
PS.. Your neighbor must hate you by now always knocking on his door to preach how smart you are with no message.
Actually, my neighbors are mostly on board to do necessary work, and a lot of it gets done. And while I've made enemies on both sides of the traditional aisle (anyone fighting the status quo will), two years ago they elected me to the School Board by a pretty wide margin, and after that elected a couple of my fellow organizers by pretty wide margins. Going back to 2003, only two years after I moved to this town, we elected the first Green Party officials in the history of New York State. That immediately became the subject of a lengthy New York Times magazine feature. Some of what happened next became substantial national and international news. You can google information about New Paltz, NY to learn more.
Sorry you internalized the "right-wing loonies" comment. I won't even guess at the psychology behind why you did that. I was actually making fun of many of the posters here, who always brush people like you off with that phrase. That your level of reading comprehension didn't make that apparent to you illustrates my central point well. I take you seriously because you are doing work on behalf of your beliefs. Most people here think you're a random crank. I don't. You are a dedicated foot soldier. I was trying to show "our side" the value in that. But you don't have to work at it so hard, because they won't learn. You can watch Jersey Shore, go to church, clean your gun, eat chicken wings, drive SUV's, have your job exported to China while your favorite fishing stream gets filled with coal slurry, take Lipitor, and raise dimwitted offspring in low-tax school districts who will quietly go off to the next Iraq to your heart's delight. You and the anti-American, internationalist corporatocracy you serve have nothing to worry about from us.
In essence, too smart for our own good. I agree with you. Progressives tend to equate public/media relations with deceitfulness. Yes, it can be in the wrong hands; but it can be effective, as you aptly described, if well intentioned. It's time to put strategies in action. We've got 30+ years on us, certainly Gov. Dean's group has a good start and results. It's a hard sell on the left, but compromising is essential among the left (and, sorry the right has demonstrated that it is not an option for their inclusion, so forget about them, they prefer lockstepping to the lowdown.) We can fine tune once we are on a roll. Let's get busy.
Public/media relations is deceitfulness. The tools of sales and marketing are not politically neutral. The right wing will always win that game. Sales and marketing are part of the foundation of the social conditions that are the root cause of the political problems.
The right doesn't compromise. They consistently do whatever it takes to advance the interests of the ruling class.
Answering the question "which side are you on?" is not fine-tuning, and that is the question that needs to be asked. Liberals and progressives and Democrats use sales and marketing to try and sell people on the idea that they are on the side of the working class, while actually working for the ruling class. That is the purpose of sales and marketing - to facilitate the flow of money from the working class to the ruling class, to fool the working class people into thinking that our interests as working class people are the same, or are compatible with the interests of the ruling class. The fact that many cannot imagine a world without sales and marketing, think that those have always been around, and think they are neutral tools demonstrate how thoroughly co-opted they are, how much in the service of the ruling class they are.
I get so bored with this. When will progressives become adults?
It stopped being "progressive news" no later than the onset of the first Gulf War that the media coverage of progressive events runs the gamut from zero to disproportionately low and inaccurate when run at all. The weird things about this article, and all the comments that follow it, are these: 1) We're still acting like we're surprised, which means we're either incorrigible whiners, really stupid, or both; and 2) We spend no time whatsoever trying to figure out how to either become "newsworthy" by MSM standards (I've pulled this off a few times, inadvertently going nationwide twice, if anyone cares to know how), or bypass the need (or desire) for MSM attention.
It doesn't matter if only ten people show up to an event if two or more are bonafide national celebrities, even if all they're famous for is having marketed a sex tape. That's because the MSM generates its revenue by attracting public attention to their broadcast. By now you must have noticed that most of it is gossip and twitter feeds from the audience itself. But has anyone at the US Social Forum (or here on the CD boards) ever tried to bombard a particular program's twitter feed, or develop a celebrity spokesperson or two? Why not, if watching any MSM outlet for two hours clearly demonstrates these are ways to get access?
The Tea Party movement got started top-down. Its founders/sponsors had celebrity spokespeople lined up before Day 1. They had plans to instantly co-opt public response directly into Republican candidacies, first by having celebrity Republicans and elected officials show up at events (which also helps generate attendance) and then by forming a "Tea Party Caucus" in the House. They gave expensive public relations to a host of "average joes" to provide plausible balance against accusations of elitism and to make sure there were enough celebrities to cover as many locations as necessary. Setting aside how much money they have for implementation, the people at the helm are incredible organizers. It's been about high-profile branding since day one. "You, Joe the Plumber, Jesus, his MILFy prophetess, the NHL Fan Club, and Patrick Henry! Together, we're The Tea Party!" Good god. Also, compare the short list of Tea Party demands (and correlate it to the Contract with America) to the Port Huron Statement. We never learn. Complaining is easier. Let me clue you in: the MSM is operating on its own business model. They don't owe you a thing if you're not bringing their advertisers an audience, and that was as true when the "Fairness Doctrine" was in place. Let's not pretend that the curiously named "Fairness" Doctrine is rigidly exclusionary, guaranteeing nothing more than the less bigoted half of the corporate lobby machine called "government" gets to speak with equal time. It doesn't mean anything to the Social Forum.
Both getting into the MSM and end-running around it are not brain surgery. Leftists always make fun of how stupid these voting-against-their-own-interests working-class right-wingers are. But really. Think about it. Who's stupid?
I will close with one fer-instance. In late 2005 I decided to register in the Democratic Party to run against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party (I left and re-enrolled no-party shortly thereafter). I was a nobody -- still am -- but nobody else was doing it, which was an intolerable condition. Shortly thereafter, through a set of media conditions I did not previously understand (but would be happy to explain now that I've learned about it), an AP photographer dropped by my house, took a picture of me in a blue t-shirt in my driveway, and I ended up front page news on roughly 1200 print edition papers throughout America, and for a couple of days was in the "Top News" and "Political News" sections of Yahoo News. But I couldn't get covered in Common Dreams. Stories in the New York Times couldn't get reproduced here. A few days later I learned (unsolicited) from Jeff Cohen that his whole crowd (he founded FAIR, which penned this article) had been secretly convening to unveil a candidate in what they hoped would be a huge media surprise, and I had accidentally messed that up. So they blocked me -- from the small "progressive media" institutions so they could at least implement that wing of their media plan, and their candidate got no play in the MSM at all. Why? Not because the MSM wouldn't cover an anti-Hillary candidate -- my brief success with the front pages had pulled the veil off that complaint -- it was because they chose someone who, while as little known to the public as me, was well-known to the MSM as the plaintiff against Time Warner and the New York Times in a case that cost the MSM a ton of money. And then these progressive media geniuses acted surprised that neither Time Magazine nor the New York Times gave any ink to their magnificent announcement.
Progressives, including and perhaps especially the small cadre of "professional" progressives, set records every year for being incredibly bad media relations people, and also work overtime to make sure everything they promote is long-winded, multi-syllabic, and totally incomprehensible to anyone who might theoretically be interested in actually voting in his or her own interests. Too many wonks spoil the broth. Go back and read your Alinsky. Solid, never-fail, wonk-free organizing tactics -- the bare-knuckled truth. The Tea Party people boast endlessly that they have, and it's obvious that they're not lying about that.
You ask, "when will Progressives become adults?"
Progressivism by definition requires a Pollyanna naivete. The very idea that man can progress, when history teaches us that we really don't. Sure, we have social programs and entitlements, but so did the Romans. And if being trapped in a job that you feel you can't leave isn't slavery.... Torture? Still got it. Misogyny? Alive and well. Uncounted corpses? Shock and Awe, Baby. What sane, rational adult would find hope in this world for a better tomorrow?
RE: Progressivism by definition requires a Pollyanna naïveté.
You raise an important point, though I think a more sophisticated explanation is warranted. Implicit within progressivism is the idea that our political economy can "progress", or as the notion is usually framed, can be reformed. This leads to what Rosa Luxemburg called "reformism” (see her pamphlet “Reform or Revolution”).
This idea is based on the notion that capitalism’s (innate and systemic) destructiveness: wars, coercion, vast inequality, environmental and economic injustice etc. can be reformed by “nudging it in the right direction”. However, if we look closer at the periods of reform, (e.g. the 30’s and 60’s) we find that those reforms were achieved not due to great visionary leaders, but rather to mass movements that had a very large revolutionary component to them*. The reforms were achieved through the struggle of mass movements to which the ruling class was FORCED to make the concessions that they later took credit for. What we have seen for the last 30 to 40 years has not only been a lack of “progress” but a constant chipping away of the reforms made in past generations. Why? Because we haven’t had mass movements on the scale of those earlier periods. Reformism (read progressivism) avoids mass movements and confrontation with entrenched power; progressives ask politely. Note, for example, how “the Nation” or “the Progressive” magazines avoid advocating activism. Meaningful reforms – not reformism- require mass movements that are militant. Elites often appropriate reformist rhetoric in their public statements (like Obama made while campaigning) but ultimately will deliver nothing.
*(For a great source of info see Sharon Smith’s "Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States”. Also see Lance Selfa’s “The Democrats: A Critical History”.)
The idea that society can progress is closely tied to the myth that progress and Capitalism are one and the same.
"Progressive" then means "progressive Capitalism," which means "Capitalism that works."
Just as liberals try to disguise the fact that liberalism means and always has meant "free markets" and individualism, so too progressives try to disguise the fact that progressive politics mean support for Capitalism. When things get bad, liberals start calling themselves progressives. They both differ from conservatives in that conservatives don't pretend that Capitalism means anything other than dog-eat-dog, while liberals and progressives harbor the illusion that it could be made nicer and kinder.
They even go so far as to think that if all of us became nice and kind within Capitalism, that Capitalism - and society - would then become nice and kind, and that the way to bring this into being is to personally set the example by being nice and kind (or green or vote third party or whatever.) "Be the change you wish to see."
This naive and foolish notion that Capitalism can be regulated or reformed so that it is good for everyone would be akin to changing the TV show Survivor so that everyone gets to stay on the island. But then that would not be the same game, would it? But they refuse to consider discarding the game.
"We want individualism that isn't so...you know - individualistic. We want free markets that aren't so, oh I dunno... not so free."
What absolute hooey. "Progressive" is conflated with "capitalist" precisely why -- because you say so?
As usual, a substantial amount of the commentary here is the exact problem I outlined -- intellectual masturbation by people trying to show their erudition and rhetorical flair, and nobody pulling off the gloves and stepping forward to get bloody -- thereby fulfilling their own rhetoric and selling defeatism to the potential organizing pool better than the right ever could, because the messaging is emanating from the inside, not the outside we readily ignore. Go to Dick Armey's office -- he has a paycheck for you.
This article is a tragic whine-fest that actually gets to the heart of the problem in its last paragraph. All that crying over no media coverage, and then concluding with a piece of actual mainstream media coverage that, like it or not, hit the nail right on the head:
The local Augusta Chronicle (7/2/07) declared that the "Forum Shows Far Left's Faults," concluding: "Until those on the far left begin to sacrifice their priorities for the sake of gaining power as a group, the republic seems safe. The revolution barely sputters."
Read it and weep, people. They can openly publish about what a ridiculous, atomized, in-fighting, self-aggrandizing and useless bunch we are -- and we revel in it. Great.
Where are the progressives who are not proposing ideas to get Capitalism to work better?
You have no way of knowing who here has and who has not been "pulling off the gloves and stepping forward to get bloody." I know for a fact that in many cases you are dead wrong.
I always find it ironic when people post here to tell the rest of us that posting here is a waste of time, or who express their opinions and then say that expressing opinions here is "intellectual masturbation by people trying to show their erudition and rhetorical flair." Wouldn't that then also apply to you?
The Left is divided because of the massive infiltration of people who while posing as being on the side of working class people are actually siding with the ruling class, and because of decades of brutal suppression and relentless propaganda.
I know quite a few who have not let centrist Democrats co-opt the term. You're right -- I don't know specifically who is stepping forward to get bloody. But I know who isn't. I ask here all the time, very simply and quietly: Who is organizing? Post back if you're organizing. Nobody ever does. But I get a lot of replies telling me how impossible it is, and all the reasons, and how little it would do if attempted. And that's what gets me going. A million bloggers and no organizers. Tens of millions a year spent by so-called activists on cable TV subscriptions and "stupid phone" data plans, and scores of millions of man-hours spent using them, but cries of poverty and time constraints when asked about how their organizing efforts are (not) going. Millions of hours spent trying to win a guest column on Huffington Post, not one spent actually getting people together. Needless to say, it drives me nuts.
But not because I'm part of this problem. Sure, I drop in here from time to time to seed the board with wake-up calls. But in my home town I'm an elected official co-managing an entirely socialist enterprise that is very successful and a model for our region -- the school board. Little place, but we consistently get nationally ranked. The people who helped get me elected have subsequently gotten others elected and gotten themselves elected. Prior to that many of us were part of left-wing political history in this country when we elected the first Green Party public officials in New York State. In the aftermath, we ended up being conspicuous national news at the forefront of a critical progressive issue that is still playing out to national headlines nationwide every day. So no, my accusation don't apply to me or the people in my town with whom I work. I could help people see very clearly what the possibilities are when you substitute TV time for getting a local progressive act together, and don't fuss too much about vocabulary, party affiliation, or purity -- and even how to protect yourself from infiltrators. I also have some insights into the false issues raised by this FAIR article.
Great points. Thanks.
STEVE: If you lived in the Bible belt you would not be so confident about organizing efforts for liberal/left/progressive causes. I have every confidence I'd be burned as a witch or shot as a radical if I tried that where I live.
You heard about the imbecile/pastor who wanted to burn the Koran? That's 35 miles from me in a UNIVERSITY town. Imagine the mentality in a back-water zone.
I spent time in New Paltz, and went to college in Albany. Heck, do you know John Esposito, an old buddy (jazz musician) of mine? That location is like Night and Day to the South.
It's great that you have some bona fides your under belt, and it's a good thing that you can provide guidelines for those interested; but please stop presuming that the only way to change the world is through local politics, or taking a political initiative.
As a teacher, I think great changes can and do happen in the classroom. And as a writer, I believe that ideas also change lives. Giving short shrift to the unique efforts others make, just because they don't conform to what you do, is unfair and in my view, suggests an insistent form of tunnel vision.
steve....would you give me a shout? ray@gmail.com
rudyspeaks and bletspleg have made tentative forays into "activism" by suggesting that cders could, to good benefit, meet locally. it is as a lead balloon.
i've puzzled at the zero response. i'm sure many of the posters here are well passed their "sell by date"...i know i am.
but not meet even for a beer? (that's old) thoughts?...peace
I've been recommending physical get-togethers for two years now, and giving out my contact info and organizing tips, and obviously using my real name, all to no avail (and in many cases having people here type -- we type a lot, you know -- about how pointless actual organizing would be).
I will get in touch via email. Thanks. The tips are at commonplans.blogspot.com.
Are you threatened by the gayness of people that you do not know? I'm going to practice microsurgery so that I can excise your small and simple minds. Don't forget to flag all that threatens you by unknown posters. Only Darwin can cure intolerance and small mindedness. A totally queer thought!
Amazing article. Distribute it widely to help USans to get their necks out from under the propaganda boot.
Distribute to whom? The people who already know it? How is that productive? Why not spend that time, effort, and bandwith actually doing things that make what this article is covering unimportant? There are two ways, and neither are complicated or hard.
1. Figure out what gets things into the mainstream media, and then do those things. There are many more considerations used by the MSM other than number in attendance, and most of them are not conspiratorial. The Tea Party event and the Social Forum event are absolutely not comparable. In other words, the article's entire premise is wrong.
2. Substitute alternative media and cease caring at all about whether or not Brian Williams shows up. We already know our first efforts at exploiting the internet don't work, largely because the free services offered by Google and other gigantic multinational corporations tend to make all of us want to be authors instead of distributors. Did you know that it's still legal to photocopy something and put it up on the bulletin board of your local supermarket, or stand in front of the post office handing out leaflets? Most small to medium-sized towns feature letters sections, the most-read page after the front page, that only censor for language and libel, not political content. All three of these options also have no spam filters, and the face-to-face option also allows you to answer questions. It's awesome.
Or, you can continue to fawn over white-collar liberal non-profits who preach exclusively to their donation-friendly choir and generate no actual change whatsoever. Your choice.
This article is totally irrelevant. Complete waste of time discussing it, big mistake for CD to have posted it, and for those inclined to agree with it, please go out and organize your neighborhood/town/county as if it and the situation to which it refers so whiningly were happening on Pluto -- which it may as well be for all the value it has for the work that needs to be done here on Earth.
See my longer post down below for a more detailed explanation. I'm bored and I'm going to bed.
People forget that in the thirties populace rage manifested itself in the union movement and organizers made sure that people knew what they were angry about. Employers co operated by hiring goon squads to beat up organizers.
During the sixties populace rage manifested itself in opposition to the war, and more particularly the draft, and also paired up with the civil rights movement which had been chugging along for quite a while before that but decided to show some non pacific rage. Draft card burning, Watts, bombing ROTC offices got news. And again authorities cooperated by shooting demonstrators.
The tea partiers have co opted that populace rage, (or at least the appearance of it) for the benefit of corporations and wealthy people. I wonder if anyone is going to start shooting them?
Meanwhile the progressives, all sweet reason and peaceful coexsistance and win-win strategies are being ignored. Maybe it's time to stop being quite so sweet and reasonable, doesn't seem to work all that well. Certainly hasn't helped Obama.
Absolutely.
And the alternative to being "organizers" who "make sure that people know what they were angry about," to write and speak for that anger, is to become a reasonable progressive or liberal - for the purpose of ensuring that the power structure and existing social conditions are not seriously threatened or questioned.
Bull. The main fall-back option is to type on the internet on your Dell computers and Apple portables like good consumers. There are no left-wing organizers. And if anyone wanted to attempt it, just like the civil rights, peace and labor organizers of earlier times, you may actually have to risk getting locked up and shot at, which is what people with police and weapons do when something actually threatens them. We have weekends, overtime, health plans, and pensions because of people who were willing to hold the line when the goons showed up, even though --nay, especially though -- it was clear that sustaining casualties was inevitable. It's not something of a bygone time that nobody does any more -- it's just the left that won't do it. Having guts is no longer a part of who we are. When neoliberals or neoconservatives order soldiers to go step on a land mine in Iraq, there are millions of people ready to go do that. But we type on our corporate consumerist products -- and mostly rationalizations for our own inactivity, at that. When people have cause to look to the left, all they see, by our own doing, is that there's no "there" there. And it's our own fault. Articles like this, always looking outside to place blame, the victim mentality, and the comments that follow it make me wanna puke.
Bull? I agree with you. Maybe you didn't mean to respond to me.
Somehow we may have misunderstood each other. I don't believe either of the two alternatives that you appear to have articulated.
Organizers are not writers or speakers, although at times they may do some of that. Organizers are organizers. They recruit workers, they create going concerns that operate doing functions towards a goal, they strategize, develop, test, and revise tactics, and take physical actions. If they happen to be gifted speakers or writers, they should do that, too, but good organizers should be recruiting spokespersons so the organizers can spend their time organizing. The spokespersons can concentrate on developing a public profile so as to be a source of popular and perhaps media attention. If a listener likes what a write or speaker said, they need two things: 1) a place to hang out with like-minded people; and 2) a job to do. The organizer makes sure there's no lapse between listener response and work assignment.
I also believe that the principal alternative to these activities is not becoming a reasonable liberal, but to blog, which is an even deeper black hole than reasonable liberalism. I cursory review shows that there are 10 times more progressively inclined people writing thousands of comments on The Huffington Post with the hope of getting a big enough "fan" response to garner a precious "guest column" than there are doing the organizing work I described in my previous paragraph. There are 44,244 people currently subscribed to the Common Dreams Facebook page, and all they're doing is reading articles and blogs, and "liking" them, and typing comments. Do you realize that if just those people canceled their cable TV (do any of us really like the programming that comes with basic cable?) and phone data plans (using phones just for phone and text), there would be $5 million dollars in their collective pockets, and 200,000 man-hours available to do organizing? And that's just the people on the Common Dreams Facebook page.
We are nowhere near as locked away from avenues to success as we convince ourselves. It's not mostly because of the unlimited money controlled by our opponents. It's not because of the ease and false comfort of electoral and institutional liberalism. Those things have essentially been constant in whatever forms were current since the dawn of civilization. It's because the theoretically "enlightened" few are enlightened in information only, not in what it takes to translate that into action. In fact, for such high-IQ people, we have as little critical thinking capacity as followers of the Tea Party, have egos with fragility many times their dramatic size, have unlimited capacity to rationalize inactivity compared to our desire to act, and in general make no sense at all.
There have actually been cases here on Common Dreams when I've been accused of being a right-wing infiltrator because my emphasis on taking personal responsibility for our personal contribution to work for change sounds like "conservative talking points." That's always been my favorite. Good luck to us.
Understood. I meant that given that some are going to write, we should ask on whose behalf are they writing?
You make many valuable points here.
Among the many elements omitted from FAIR's complaint, but critical to the differences in MSM coverage:
Conventioneers were entertained by the legendary singer/songwriter Ray Stevens, and we heard a good speech from former Congressman Tom Tancredo as well. One of last night's speakers at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tennessee was Joseph Farah of World Net Daily. Also Angela McClowan of FOX News. Celebrity liberal-slayer Andrew Breitbart. Other media figures, preachers, etc. (by no means a comprehensive list):
Rep. Michele Bachman will be the Breakfast Speaker Friday morning and Rep. Marsha Blackburn will be introducing Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska (2006 - 2009) and 2008 Republican Vice Presidential Nominee, Saturday evening at the Convention's closing night banquet. Other participants include: Phil Valentine (Nationally Syndicated Conservative Talk Radio Host), Bruce Donnelly (President, SurgeUSA), Judge Roy Moore, WWTN, Ana Puig, Dr. B. Leland Baker (author of Tea Party Revival), Mark Skoda (The Memphis Tea Party), Keli Carender (aka Liberty Belle), Dr. Rick Scarborough (author of "Enough is Enough"
------------------
Besides the absence of celebrities big enough to give an audience to MSM advertisers, here's another really huge reason the MSM couldn't cover the forum even if it wanted to: no focus. This from friendly source:
Labor Notes had a presence at the U.S. Social Forum last week, the gathering in Detroit of 15,000 activists from every different social justice movement you can think of. There was a workshop for every cause and strategy, from stopping “fracking” to using puppetry to move your campaign.
We thought we’d be posting daily blogs about the goings-on, but there turned out to be far too much to do—marches and demonstrations every day, 1,000 workshops to choose from, old contacts to renew and new ones to make. Here’s a small sample of news from the June 22-26 gathering. Look for more in the next issue of Labor Notes magazine.
Funny, I saw a response to my reply to a comment made earlier earlier this morning. I was going to respond to that response but something came up. When I returned, I couldn't find my comment or the one who I responded to. Weird ! Is everything all right or is there a glitch that needs reporting?