2w ago

Corporate Media Minimize Massive Hands Off! Protests.

Corporate Media Minimize Massive Hands Off! Protests

After the biggest anti-Trump protests since the 2017 Women’s March, many major media outlets seemed intent on downplaying the size and significance of the massive demonstration of opposition.
The Hands Off! protests took place on April 5 in 1,400 locations across the country, with solidarity rallies in Europe and Canada. Volunteer organizers said the events were aimed at opposing billionaire government and corruption; cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and other vital programs; and attacks on immigrants, trans people and other vulnerable groups. At a conservative minimum, hundreds of thousands of people turned out to resist the Trump administration’s many assaults on democracy; organizers estimate the total reached into the millions.

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4d ago

Corporate Media Minimize Massive Hands Off! Protests

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9 comments

The revolution will not be televised.
It won't be on social media, either, and it sure as shit won't be on Tik Tok.
If they don't see it coming, so much the better. This isn't a popularity contest, it's an existential struggle.
- If they don't see it coming, so much the better.
  No, we kinda NEED the media and the world to know and pay attention
  This isn't a popularity contest, it's an existential struggle.
  That's just it, though, it's both: in terms of raw violent power, we have 0 chance of beating the government that controls the most powerful military in the world and who most cops are not just professionally, but also ideologically on the side of.
  The only way to topple a government apparatus that powerful is to make it so hated as to be untenable.
  That doesn't happen until the atrocities they commit are undeniable in both cruelty and scope, and if a lack of media coverage minimizes the scope, that breaking point may never come.
  The complicit billionaire-owned media KNOWS this, which is WHY they're systematically doing so.
  
  While it would be nice for the media to share, we can't force them. We don't own them. That's why we need to share it. That's why we need to take pictures of the crowds, show evidence that millions show e up.
  I think you misunderstand one small part of that powerful military - we're so blended in this country, you can't just bomb rebel strongholds because your own supporters are there too. That may be acceptable in a small part, but then his supporters get pissed off.
  We also massively outnumber the military. The Navy can't do much on the inner united states.
  If there is one thing any powerful organized military will always struggle to fight against, it's guerilla warfare. Improvised weapons are particularly devastating because they're unpredictable. We've seen how effective the "force multiplier" aspect is in theaters like Iraq and Afghanistan. It's essentially not.
  
  No, we kinda NEED the media and the world to know and pay attention
  They can only hold the lid down on the pressure cooker for so long. And their power only comes from our believing in it.

When regular working people eventually win, we're going to have to reinstitute all the controls that we had for decades preventing single corporations from owning too much of the media. Break it up into little pieces. One of the first things corporations did when they got their first man, Reagan, in power was consolidate the airwaves; they know that's the tool necessary for them to repeat and spread lies, and without this tool, they're going to lose.
It's not an accident that Sinclair owns most of the local tv stations broadcasting to rural markets and that all the AM radio stations are run by a small handful of Conservative propagandists.
We've gotta get that shit shut down--a limit on the number of stations any company can own, massive fines for violating standards of truthfulness, etc.

There were two telling things for me in the coverage.
First, it was always "thousands" of people at the event. Not tens of thousands like in Boston. Not something on the order of 100,000 or more in NYC (it stretched for 20 BLOCKS). All over the media "thousands" of protesters. Not "millions attend Anti-Trump rallies across US cities" like the National Post wrote.
The coverage tried to make it sound like this was 1,200 mostly insignificant protests across the country.
Second, most of the news websites weren't covering it live. And when it finally made the front page later that day or the next morning, it was 2/3/4 stories down.
Now ... compare that to what happened in South Korea. Yes, a very different ballgame, but it was halfway across the world and ALL of the news media were treating it as breaking news and halting all other coverage.
That protest had about 1 million people.
Our protests had about 5,000,000 people across the country.
It should have been covered as a much bigger deal.

If the main way rich people get their news is through network TV, doesn't that give protesters an advantage? If the movement is larger than rich people expect it to be, they'll dismiss it until it's too big to ignore.
- 🤫

9 comments