Friday, May 19, 2000

World Bank / IMF protests in Washington DC

There were protests in Washington DC over the weekend. I was there. You were there as well, unless you have been avoiding the media coverage. I have net yet watched any of the local news, and cannot really comment on how it was presented, but I will state that the broadcasts in Washington itself were not accurate. I have to qualify this by saying that they were not accurate from my vantage point. They did reflect one particular reality however. Just as the police were at times beating protesters in a rather desperate attempt to maintain the (corporate) ideology which the World Bank / IMF represents, so were the various official news media in Washington trying to bombard the average news-watcher with a specific agenda. I believe they were ultimately more successful.
The news media proved itself quite able to disarm the power of the protest.
No issues were raised. There was little talk of why the protesters were angry, except for a few anti-capitalist soundbites. These brief rants would succeed in raising warning flags among most of the newscast’s audience, who to a great extent have been socialized to fear all forms of social conscience as communistic. There were of course many adamant anti-capitalists among the crowds, but most protesters were merely calling for limits to the excesses of rampant and unregulated capitalistic enterprise. It was these voices of moderation which were silenced by the media authorities. Instead the protest was presented as being a group of extremists who desire civil disobedience largely for its own sake. Perhaps this process was most aptly symbolized by the focus upon the anarchists, who to my eyes numbered only a few dozen among the estimated ten thousand protesters. It was they who were given the most airtime during the early “set-up” days of the protest. I can only assume that their extreme beliefs would have immediately signalled to the television audience the dangers of the protest movement. Certainly this was felt by the staff at the hotel in which we were staying, who were otherwise unaware of the goals of either the protesters or the World Bank / IMF.