Leverage your activism, make it hard for the media to get it wrong

national | miscellaneous | news report Thursday February 27, 2003 22:39 by Phuq Hedd

Two articles that suggest we should not let the weeping dogs lie!

The two linked articles taken together suggest that rather than completely giving up on mainstream media we should make it hard for them to tell half-truths. One is written by the organizer of MediaLens about a success story in this regard and the other is about the "Press the Press" campaign which aims to force mainstream media to address anti-establishment views

Lydia Sargeants piece "Press the Press" http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=3117 notes that:

`many of the people interviewed at the NY demonstration expressed the feeling, “now, the government has to listen and stop this war.” (Oddly, in a kind of illogical dysfunction, most people speaking and being interviewed indicated that they thought the war on Iraq was inevitable.)'

And that exactly this response happened during the Vietnam protests. Those expressing this viewpoint were sadly disabused as the US government continued and intensified its onslaught. Sargeant argues that we have to move away from this and build deeper campaigns that keep the "leaders" on the run permanently no matter what the outcome from this current assault on Iraq.

The article by Dave Edwards
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/021217_Adjusted_Curiosity.htm
of MediaLens recounts a heart-warming tale of how a student from Stirling managed to put enough pressure on John Snow that when Straw attempted to retail old lies about Iraq forcing the weapons inspectors out Straw felt obliged to correct him. This, it is interpreted, shows that media "professionals" are not deliberately lying: instead they are displaying the results of their careful conditioning by the system and they can be jerked out of this if they are called to account in a polite but forceful manner.