Revolution isnt being televised media ignores global protest

[seemslikeadream]

The revolution isn't being televised: Beyond Hong Kong, media ignores global protests
Mainstream media has covered Hong Kong's protests extensively, but ignored Haiti, Ecuador, Chile and elsewhere

Alan MacLeod
People demonstrate at Plaza Italia on the fifth straight day of street violence which erupted over a now suspended hike in metro ticket prices, in Santiago on October 22, 2019. - President Sebastian Pinera convened a meeting with leaders of Chile's political parties on Tuesday in the hope of finding a way to end street violence that has claimed 15 lives, as anti-government campaigners threatened new protests. (PEDRO UGARTE/AFP via Getty Images)
It’s all kicking off everywhere in 2019. Haitians are revolting against a corrupt political system and their President Jovenel Moïse, who many see as a kleptocratic U.S. puppet. In Ecuador, huge public manifestations managed to force President Lenín Moreno to backtrack on his IMF-backed neoliberal package that would have sharply cut government spending and increased transport prices (FAIR.org, 10/23/19).

Meanwhile, popular Chilean frustration at the conservative Piñera administration boiled over into massive protests that were immediately met with force. “We are at war,” announced President Sebastián Piñera, echoing the infamous catchphrase of former fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. Piñera claimed that those responsible for violently resisting him were “going to pay for their deeds” as he ordered tanks through Santiago. (See FAIR.org, 10/23/19.)

Huge, ongoing anti-government demonstrations are also engulfing Lebanon, Catalonia and the United Kingdom.

NewsHour: Pro-democracy demonstrators and Beijing fight for the future of Hong Kong
PBS NewsHour (10/5/19)
Yet the actions that have by far received the most attention in corporate media are those in Hong Kong, where demonstrations erupted in response to a proposed extradition agreement with the Chinese central government that opponents felt would undermine civil liberties and Hong Kong’s semi-autonomous status. A search for “Hong Kong protests” on Oct. 25 elicits 282 responses in the last month in the New York Times, for example, compared to 20 for “Chile protests,” 43 for Ecuador and 16 for Haiti. The unequal coverage is even more pronounced on Fox News, where there were 70 results for Hong Kong over the same period and four, two and three for Chile, Ecuador and Haiti, respectively.

This disparity cannot be explained due to the protests’ size or significance, the number of casualties or the response from the authorities. Eighteen people have died during the ongoing protests in Haiti, 19 (and rising) in Chile, while in Ecuador, protesters themselves captured over 50 soldiers who had been sent in as Moreno effectively declared martial law. In contrast, no one has been killed in Hong Kong, nor has the army been called in, with Beijing expressing full confidence in local authorities to handle proceedings. The Chilean government announced it had arrested over 5,400 people in only a week of protests, a figure more than double the number arrested in months of Hong Kong demonstrations (Bloomberg, 10/4/19). Furthermore, social media have been awash with images and videos of the suppression of the protests worldwide.


One way of understanding why the media is fixated on Hong Kong and less interested in the others is to look at who is protesting, and why.

Worthy and unworthy victims

NYT: Hong Kong’s Challenge to Xi Jinping’s Iron Rule
New York Times (8/14/19)
Over 30 years ago, in their book "Manufacturing Consent," Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky developed their theory of worthy vs. unworthy victims to explain why corporate media cover certain stories and why others are dropped. They compared the media coverage of a single murdered priest in an enemy state (Communist Poland) to that of over 100 religious martyrs, including some U.S. citizens, murdered in Central American client states over a period of two decades. They found that not only did the New York Times, Time, Newsweek and CBS News dedicate more coverage to the single priest’s assassination, the tone of coverage was markedly different: In covering the killing of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, media expressed indignation, demanding justice and condemning the barbarism of Communism. The killings of religious figures in Central America by pro-U.S. government groups, on the other hand, were reported in a matter-of-fact manner, with little rhetorical outrage.

In other words, when official enemies can be presented as evil and allies as sympathetic victims, corporate media will be very interested in a story. In contrast, they will show far less enthusiasm for a story when the “wrong” people are the villains or the victims.

On Hong Kong, the New York Times has published three editorials (6/10/19, 8/14/19, 10/1/19), each lauding the “democracy-minded people” fighting to limit “the repressive rule of the Chinese Communists,” condemning the Communist response as evidence of the backward, “brutal paternalism of that system,” in which China “equates greatness with power and dissent with treachery.” Hong Kong, on the other hand, thanks to the blessing of being a former British colony, had acquired “a Western political culture of democracy, human rights, free speech and independent thought.” (The Times has not elected to publish any editorials on the other protests.)

The Times also ridiculed the idea that “foreign forces” (i.e., the U.S. government) could be influencing the protests, calling it a “shopworn canard” used by the Communist government. Yet the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has officially poured over $22 million into “identifying new avenues for democracy and political reform in Hong Kong” or China since 2014. The Times editorials did not mention this funding as possibly complicating their dismissal of foreign involvement in the Hong Kong protests as a “canard.”

Guardian: Ecuador moves government out of capital as violent protests rage
Guardian (10/8/19)
However, media (e.g., Voice of America, 10/11/19; Miami Herald, 10/9/19; Reuters, 10/9/19) are taking seriously the accusation that the Ecuadorian protests are, in fact, masterminded abroad, by President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, with the Guardian (10/8/19) going so far as to describe the Ecuadorian protesters not as “democracy-minded people,” but “rioters” — a label not appearing in connection with Hong Kong, except as an accusation by Chinese officials (e.g., Time, 10/2/19; CNN, 10/22/19), who are almost universally condemned in coverage as part of a “repressive” (e.g., Vox, 8/29/19; Guardian, 10/19/19) “dictatorship” (New York Times, 8/29/19).

In the cases of the less-covered protests, the “wrong” people are protesting and the “wrong” governments are doing the repressing. As the Washington Post (10/14/19) noted on Haiti,

One factor keeping Moïse in power is support from the United States. US officials have been limited in their public comments about the protests.

On Ecuador, the State Department has been more forthcoming, issuing a full endorsement of Moreno’s neoliberal austerity package:

The United States supports President Moreno and the Government of Ecuador’s efforts to institutionalize democratic practices and implement needed economic reforms…. We will continue to work in partnership with President Moreno in support of democracy, prosperity, and security.

In other words, don’t expect any angry editorials denouncing U.S. client states like Haiti or Ecuador, or arguing that the Chilean government’s repression of its protest movement shows the moral bankruptcy of capitalism. Indeed, corporate media (e.g., Guardian, 10/8/19; CNN, 10/8/19; USA Today, 10/10/19) emphasized the violence of the Ecuadorian protesters while downplaying Hong Kong’s — the New York Times (6/30/19) even inventing the phrase “aggressive nonviolence” to describe the Hong Kong protesters’ actions, so eager was it to frame the demonstrations against China as unquestionably laudable.

Which protest movements interest corporate media has little to do with their righteousness or popularity, and much more to do with whom they are protesting against. If you’re fighting against corporate power or corruption in a U.S. client state, don’t expect many TV cameras to show up; that revolution is rarely televised.
https://www.salon.com/2019/10/31/the-re ... -protests/

[RocketMan]

Redundant thread.

[seemslikeadream]

Slate

What the Protests Breaking Out All Over the World Have in Common
Millions of people are taking to the streets. It might just be the beginning.

Joshua KeatingOct 22, 20192:59 PM

Lebanese protesters gather in Sidon on Monday. They are holding flags and chanting.
Lebanese protesters gather in Sidon on Monday.
Mahmoud Zayyat/AFP via Getty Images
All around the world, governments are telling people to cut back and raising prices on basic needs. The result has been rage and chaos.

Fifteen people have died in violent protests in Chile over the past week. The unrest was originally sparked by a 4 percent increase in subway fares in the capital city, Santiago, but has since spread to other cities, triggered by more widespread anger over inequality and rising costs. “It’s not about 30 pesos, it’s about 30 years,” went one slogan, referring to the three decades since Chile transitioned from dictatorship to democracy, a period during which many Chileans have felt left behind by the country’s much-lauded economic growth. The chaos in Chile has been shocking in large part because of the country’s relative prosperity and political stability. But it followed a very familiar recent pattern.

In Ecuador, recent protests led by indigenous groups were sparked by a decrease in fuel subsidies instituted under a deal with the International Monetary Fund.* After being forced by the protests to remove his government from the capital, President Lenín Moreno caved and restored the subsidies.

Should we have seen this chaos coming? Latin America’s economies began slowing around four years ago after about a decade of commodity-driven growth that led to increased social spending by governments and a growing middle class. As the downturn continues, governments are cutting back, and citizens feel vulnerable. And the newly empowered middle class is starting to feel its gains slipping away.

The Carnegie Endowment’s Moisés Naím wrote in a prescient 2015 article, “members of the middle class often feel more politically empowered and connected; their expectations of government rise in tandem with their economic status, and they are in a better position to organize and demand that those expectations be met.” Meanwhile, others don’t feel the growth has helped them at all. As Chilean political scientist Patricio Navia writes, describing his country’s current crisis, “the real reasons behind the rage lie in the frustration of a population that was promised access to the promised land of middle-class status, but that has been denied such access at the gate due to an unlevel playing field characterized by an abusive elite, an unresponsive government and an unkept promise of meritocracy and equal opportunity.”

Austerity-driven protest is spreading. Lebanon has been wracked by days of mass demonstrations by hundreds of thousands of people that were first sparked by a government proposal to raise the value-added tax, and introduce a tax on internet messaging services like WhatsApp, in order to address the country’s massive national debt. Inflation-plagued Zimbabwe saw mass protests sparked by fuel price hikes earlier this year. Austerity measures and cuts to fuel and bread subsidies were a major factor behind the protests in Sudan late last year that led to the overthrow of longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir. The lifting of food and fuel subsidies sent tens of thousands of angry people into the streets of Jordan last year. Austerity measures were also one driver of the unexpected protests in Egypt last month, which probably dwindled only because of the repressive policies of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s government.

This new wave of backlash to austerity appears to be on the scale of the 2011 protests that broke out in European countries like Greece, Spain, Ireland, and the United Kingdom in the immediate wake of the Great Recession. But this time, the backlash is primarily happening in developing countries in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. The countries involved range from some of the world’s poorest to middle-income and from the most repressive dictatorships to established democracies. The movements are generally loosely organized and sometimes entirely leaderless, with organization taking place on social media and often encompassing a variety of grievances.

The political and economic environments vary, but austerity measures are the common thread: Under these conditions, the public has very little tolerance for cuts to services or subsidies. Governments jack up the prices for food, fuel, or even WhatsApp at their own peril.

While price increases are often the spark, the fuel is worsening economic inequality and rage over official corruption (or outright criminality in some cases). In some countries, like Haiti and Iraq for instance, economic conditions and corruptions have sparked protests in recent days without specific precipitating events. Last year’s Corruption Perceptions Index from Transparency International showed an overall worsening of public perceptions of official corruption across the globe, with the group’s managing director warning, “Corruption chips away at democracy to produce a vicious cycle, where corruption undermines democratic institutions and, in turn, weak institutions are less able to control corruption.”

When government officials and well-connected elites are seen as enriching themselves, public tolerance for belt-tightening austerity measures is understandably even lower.

Hopefully, public backlash will force much needed reforms in some of these countries. The bad news is that we may only be in the early stages of another global economic slowdown. If fears of a recession are born out, calls for more austerity are likely to outpace political reform. And the resulting public anger could be channeled into populism, xenophobia, or authoritarian political movements as easily as reform. The public unrest seen in these countries in the past few months could be just the beginning.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... banon.html

DemocracyNow

Anti-Government Protests in Haiti Enter their Seventh Week
OCT 30, 2019
H5 haiti anti government protests enter seventh week port au prince killings
In Haiti, anti-government protests have entered their seventh week, as thousands of people again took to the streets of Port-au-Prince Monday to demand the ouster of President Jovenel Moïse. At least 20 people have been killed amid the ongoing protests, which have also shuttered schools for two million children across Haiti.
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/10/30 ... venth_week

ALJAZEERA

Two dead as hundreds of police, supporters march in Haiti
Anger has been growing in the country since August due to a national fuel shortage, as protests turn violent.

27 Oct 2019
A man throws a plastic bag to a fire where a dead body is burning during violent protests in Port-au-Prince on Sunday [Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters]
A man throws a plastic bag to a fire where a dead body is burning during violent protests in Port-au-Prince on Sunday [Andres Martinez Casares/Reuters]
Two people were killed as several hundred police and their supporters demonstrated in Haiti's capital for better law enforcement salaries on Sunday, police said, while anti-government marchers also took to the streets.

The first victim was shot during a protest demanding that President Jovenel Moise step down.

More:

Is boom, then slump, behind fiery Latin American protests?

As the UN leaves Haiti, its victims still wait for justice

What is really behind the crisis in Haiti?

The man who opened fire on the crowd of marchers was beaten to death and then burned by demonstrators.

"An unidentified individual was shot dead," the Haitian police said in a statement. "The angry crowd set fire to his attacker."

With their faces hidden, several plainclothes police fired in the air near the anti-government protesters.

Several large bursts of gunfire from unidentified individuals were then heard right next to the area where protesters were marching.

Prior to the protests, police officers had presented their grievances at the headquarters of the Haitian National Police.

"Our wages are miserable. We don't have insurance. We have an insurance card but at every hospital we go to, we have to pay," a masked police officer told AFP, asking to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

As they have for two months, presidential detractors demanded that Moise resign. They were joined by some churchgoers on their way out of services.

Since coming to power in February 2017, Moise has had to face the anger of an opposition movement that refuses to recognise his victory in an election widely seen as dubious.

Anger mounted in late August due to a national fuel shortage, and protests turned violent.

But even before this crisis erupted, Moise was accused of corruption.

An auditors' court probing two billion dollars in aid from a Venezuelan oil fund found that companies run by Moise before he became president were "at the heart of an embezzling scheme".
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/ ... 04631.html

[Joe Hillshoist]

Redundant thread.

Cos of all the other threads discussing this on the board?

All none of them. This is the first time I've seen any reference to it in a GD thread title.

Its like people here are too cynical to believe humans can have had enough of neo liberal bullshit and as a result turn on their governments.


How long till you guys build a super computer, call it Hactar and program it to build a supernova bomb?

[Joe Hillshoist]

In Chile a 4% increase on travel fares - which were very cheap to begin with - has been the impetus for this. Its not just about the fare increase, which is essentially the straw that broke the camel's back.

That's how fucked up it is. People are so squeezed by this bullshit that a tiny increase on a tiny travel fare (by my standards) is enough to push them over the edge into "fuck you - we can't afford to live" territory.

The end result of 45 years of neo liberal bullshit. Its coming to the rest of the western world too.

[Sounder]

It is noteworthy how little MSM covers the Yellow Vests, and it seems they can ignore the large protests even when it's happening in at least ten countries at last count.

So, good topic I say.