Last night I watched NBC nightly news, as I have begun to do every night since the police tear-gassed the "Occupy" encampment in downtown Oakland
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I'd say to catch Keith Oberman too. I think he sometimes over sensationalizes, but on his last show, he just was going through the different cities where this is happening - the 85 year old woman that got pepper sprayed in the face in Seattle, the Iraq vets wounded in Oakland, but also things going on all around the country that are being only moderately reported. Denver, Portland and Phoenix come to mind.
As much as it's concerning in specific, in aggregate it is disturbing.
Back when I was a hippie, during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as the police tear-gassed the demonstrators, the ones who could still breathe were chanting "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!". Back then, it meant that a few TV cameras were aimed at the scene; today it means that hundreds of thousands of individuals with cheap video cameras built into their phones are taking close-ups of their friends being tear-gassed and shoved to the ground. The mainstream media doesn't have to cover it, because The Whole World Is Watching on Facebook and YouTube. (Of course, you know who pays for those helicopters and satellite-equipped news vans and shit... it ain't you and me, that's for sure.)
Oh, and New York's Pacifica listener-supported radio station WBAI is covering everything that goes down in NYC, so I would expect that KPFA is likewise covering stuff in the Bay Area.
Remember what Gandhi said: "First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you win."
Yeah, if you don't listen to Democracy Now on Pacifica you should start. They have been in the thick of things. What I love about them is they have no pro or anti American bias. They report these actions the same way they'd report actions in Egypt, Syria or Libya - you know, the places where it's okay for the rabble to throw the dictators out.
Here's more video and commentary about that pepper spray incident. And what's really telling is the end of the video, described by a commenter (or I never would have watched the whole thing), where the protesters WIN.
But hey, SF Chronicle, let's just write another article about how the Occupiers are all homeless criminals hurting Oakland businesses. According to business groups that mostly represent 1% companies and not small businesses at all.
I learned straight up and first hand - although luckily for me, in a less violent way - at the very first set of protests I went to how deeply the media can skew what is going on there. Accordingly, I have never gone along with the prevailing view that the Occupy movement is a bunch of "directionless dirty scrub kids who are throwing littler everywhere and just refuse to get jobs and have no agenda". I won't at this point go into detail about what happened at the protests I was at vs. what I saw on the news later that night but I remember being rather gently patted on the head by one of the older women there at this sort of losing of my innocence, so to speak. It's amazing how the media can spin an event with a camera while making it look like "raw uncencored footage
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As much as it's concerning in specific, in aggregate it is disturbing.
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Oh, and New York's Pacifica listener-supported radio station WBAI is covering everything that goes down in NYC, so I would expect that KPFA is likewise covering stuff in the Bay Area.
Remember what Gandhi said: "First they ignore you, then they mock you, then they fight you, then you win."
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But hey, SF Chronicle, let's just write another article about how the Occupiers are all homeless criminals hurting Oakland businesses. According to business groups that mostly represent 1% companies and not small businesses at all.
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