Honest question: What incentives do Corporate media have to ignore these current set of protests?
I mean... How much Chomsky have you read? He'll give you a much better overview than I could. This shit isn't new. I'll have a crack at the question though:
Major networks are owned by just five or six corporations. Their boardrooms and major shareholders interlock with defense contractors, private prison giants, and border security firms that make billions from deportation policies. Have you any idea how much of our money these fucks are pulling in? ... Every protest covered legitimately threatens their shareholders' portfolios. This also goes for big tech/social media.
Networks also fear losing access to both parties, which are pushing harsh immigration policies. Kamala swore to be tougher on immigrants than Trump, and Democrats have lately been crowing that Trump is deporting fewer people than Biden did.
Any "objectivity" is a thin facade. They don't want to challenge the immigration narrative that drives ratings among their core demographic, which is such a helpful distraction from inequality, and which is driving their shareholders portfolios up.
When forced to cover protests, media employs tactical reporting: dramatically under-counting crowds, obsessively focusing on any hint of disorder, and platforming the most extreme voices while ignoring reasonable demands. The well worn playbook is designed to delegitimize, and a horrifying proportion of Americans eat that shit up and ask for seconds.
The corporate media isn't neutral, or just biased. It's complicit. These issues matter hugely to the status quo they defend, and people recognizing their own power, and what our taxes are being spent on, is a massive threat to an unfathomably evil status quo.
"The media serve the interests of state and corporate power, which are closely interlinked, framing their reporting and analysis in a manner supportive of established privilege and limiting debate and discussion accordingly." - Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, 1988 (and look how media has consolidated since then)
Bezos, in his own words:
"I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:
I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. [...]"
"The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know" - maybe even more true now than it was in 1993.
Codeword for "Jeff Bezos's continued monopolistic domination of online retail and logistics at the expense of everyone else". In other words, he's doing to right-libertarians what rich billionaires always do to right-libertarians. Play them like a fiddle.
It is a bit like a barrister not asking questions they don't know the answer to. They have a vision of the world they want to promote and typically aren't going to report on anything that they aren't confident to be neutral or non-threatening to that vision.
The corporate media's main tactic is to just put their worldview to people over and over again until any dissenters either run out of energy to push back or become marginalised. These groups exist because a someone or someones with money has a vision of the world they want to promote. Otherwise there isn't enough income to make the thing tick.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...: "The British Stop the War Coalition (Stop) claimed the protest in London was the largest political demonstration in the city's history. Police estimated attendance as well in excess of 750,000 people and the BBC estimated that around a million attended."
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/feb/11/slugs-iraq-w...: "In February 2003, 1.5 million people protested in London against the looming Iraq war. They didn’t stop the conflict… but their legacy still looms large"
add in David Kelly - RIP - ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kelly_(weapons_expert) ) and it's not a surprise that people are unconvinced that peaceful protest will achieve anything :/
Many people are unconvinced, yes... The thing is, look how hard corporate media and the yacht class work to shut it down. I think they're terrified of peaceful protest.
1. Protests are effective - no they're not, this is a myth because people believed they ended the Vietnam War. If you have power and a belief in doing something, why should you care if a random stranger doesn't like it?
2. Corporate media - this comes from the idea that everything bad is because of "corporations", common with Gen X people. The only successful media right now have strong personal opinions, although frequently those are evil personal opinions, and aren't solely motivated by profits.
3. Defense contractors - this comes from the idea that since war is bad, and corporations are bad, we must be doing wars because it makes money for defense companies. This is in fact totally false - they make less money during wars because they have to make boring products that work, whereas in peace time they get contracted to make fake superweapons we think sound cool. Wars are basically unprofitable for everyone.
4. And finally, if you think everything gets worse all the time this is actually depression and you should get it checked out.
MLK's civil rights movement was one of the most effective protests in history. If you said that they're not always effective I would agree, but to say that they're not ever effective? It doesn't hold up. Even in modern times they can continue to be effective — the BLM protests were a huge personal focus¹ of Trump's at the end of his second presidency; he hated that people were protesting and blaming him, and his advisers immediately recognized the protests as politically threatening to his reelection. BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states.
¹ Source: Peril by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
> BLM eventually lead to wide policing reforms in many cities and states
Did it? I mostly remember it leading to police doing work stoppages and no one noticing or being able to control them.
Like, the NYPD kidnapped de Blasio's daughter. SFPD just stopped issuing traffic tickets and hasn't restarted, and Oakland police just stopped enforcing everything, so the airport In n Out closed because literally all of their customers got their cars broken into.
Like I said, I do agree with you that there are protests which aren't effective, and there are some that are even counterproductive. BLM was successful though, it did lead to reforms: Minneapolis banned chokeholds and revised their use of force policies, New York reallocated some of its NYPD funding, Colorado and New Mexico passed police accountability laws, etc.
Anyway, I know your main point wasn't about BLM, I'm not trying to drag you into a mire over whether it was successful or not.
(It's too late to edit now, but just for posterity's sake, I meant they were a huge personal focus of Trump's at the end of his first presidency.)
For the record, there have been (and will be more) significant protests about this [0]. Corporate media does a fantastic job of ignoring and minimizing protests they're not in favor of (because they are actually effective...).
If you're old enough to remember, think back to how the world held some of the largest anti-war protests in history back in the early 00's. Turns out, corporate media with strong financial links to defense contractors aren't much interested in covering that. At the same time reporters who took too much of an anti-war stance were literally fired... And things have gotten progressively worse with every administration since.