Vietnam War Protest, Washington, 1965
Keith Olbermann clearly isn’t happy about the recent spate of protests flaring up around health care in town hall meetings across the country. MSNBC’s infamous left-leaning talking head made his disdain known to the world on the program Countdown last week with an excoriating comparison:
“Not merely spreading lies, but convincing a dissatisfied portion of the population to believe their propaganda and to act out in anger…When Hamas does it or Hezbollah does it it’s called terrorism. Why should Republican lawmakers and the astroturf groups organizing on behalf of the health care industry be viewed any differently?”
The Countdown segment, which featured scenes from some of the various meetings, attempted to highlight the connections between some of the protesters and right-wing interest groups. In one shot, an anonymous protester at a CT meeting wearing an Athem: Blue Cross Blue Shield shirt was singled out as a “likely” member of the insurance industry. Another scene showed a meeting led by Democratic Congressman Steve Kagen in Kewaunee, WI. A protester named Heather Blish was quoted as saying she was “just a mom” and that she had no affiliation with the Republican Party. Olbermann pointed out that her LinkedIn profile stated she had previously been vice chair of the Republican Party for Kewaunee County until the year before.
As Olbermann made his diatribe, the caption that floated on the screen threatened the viewer with “Political Terrorism.” His central message was not simply that some folk had misrepresented themselves: it was that the political Right’s involvement in orchestrating some of the opposition that's occurred surrounding healthcare is equitable to bombing or killing people.
Olbermann’s overblown statements, however ludicrous and seething with hatred they might have been, raise some significant questions about the nature of political organization, as well as the role that the news media plays in covering and “framing” societal issues.
The Right is the New Left
If Olbermann really wanted to prove that the Republicans were choreographing the protests, he need only have listened to NPR's On The Media. In last week’s episode, co-host Bob Garfield recounted an interview he had back in April with Adam Brandon, spokesman for the Right-leaning Freedom Works Foundation, to discuss his association’s leadership in organizing the now-famous “Tea Party Protests.”
Not only did Brandon openly admit Freedom Works’ responsibility for the protests; he also went on to explain how his group acquired the effective tactics it employed:
“When we get our jobs in our organization,” said Brandon, “the first thing you do is you sit down with some of Saul Alinsky’s books, Rules for Radicals. And we read that book and we study that book, and everything that we've been trying to do here comes straight out of those pages.”
That’s right. The Right got its playbook from the Left, who pioneered the very same methods that it now denounces as they come at it from the other side.
Of course, Olbermann doesn’t call it the same thing. He uses the word “astroturfing” (a media term for a public relations stunt performed to look as if it arose spontaneously) to describe the approach behind the tea-partiers and health-doubters. When people like Alinsky and Abbie Hoffman did it, it was called “grassroots activism.”
Aside from connotation, there is nothing that sets the essential technique of these two concepts apart.
To wit: in the 60's, Liberals used their media resources to call people to action, too. Television didn't play much of a role, but alternative radio, newspapers, books, flyers, and so on, were all utilized to get people together.
Granted, most of these were underground resources with little funding, and most didn't have a national distribution. But they were all led by some figure with ties to a political organization, an agenda, and access to a media outlet.
Certainly, though, there must be a difference between two brothers churning out an alternative rag from their basement, and well-coffered political wonks schmoozing with federal officials from their headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue? If not from tools or techniques, what could account for the apparent incompatibility of these wildly divergent images?
It could be argued that the sheer scale of their media operation makes the new protest organizers fundamentally different. But scale has never been part of the definition of grassroots activism. Flash mobs are called together by a single leader using the Internet, which is an international media resource (can’t get much bigger on the scale than that), and we generally place these events under the "grassroots" category, too.
Likewise, no grassroots organization ever restricted people from donating as much money as they wanted to a campaign. And regardless of their closeness to Washington, the people who organize and participate in any protest or rally are American citizens who do really believe in what they're saying and deserve to have a voice as much as anyone else. Their interests and ideas don’t become less relevant just because they have money and connections.
In fact, the most successful such campaign to date came straight from none other than our current president. When running for office, Obama’s operation was referred to as “grassroots” by media and politicians alike, despite having a massive organizational structure backed by millions of dollars and strategists who issued in-depth directives to the volunteers. Millions of Americans legitimized that juggernaut with their votes.
The End of the Radical?
If Right-wing organizers are having such a successful time using the Left’s methods, whatever happened to Leftist rabble-rousing?
A multitude of reasons could be trotted out to explain why the climate for Liberal protest has grown tepid over time. Part of it’s generational. The Democratic Party became a popular haven for ex-activists after the 60’s, and as people settled into their lives they also quieted down a bit.
Another factor that may have caused protesting to drop among Liberals was the end of the Vietnam Draft. Young people coming of age during that war faced the stark possibility of becoming cannon fodder. Scott Lackey, Co-Founder and Strategic Director of the New York-based ad agency Jugular Advertising, summed the indignation it caused him and other young men best on his blog, The New Advertising: “We were personally motivated to convince the government not to send us off to die. And we were loud and noisy about it. Lots of us. And our girlfriends too.”
Other nations emulated the grassroots protest ethic. This protest occurred in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1969.
The following generation didn’t feel the need to protest as much in the same manner as the last. David Kennedy, Stanford historian and author of the book “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945,” pointed out in a New York Times article in April that “This generation found more effective ways to change the world. It’s signed up for political campaigns, and it’s not waiting for things to get so desperate that they feel forced to take to the streets.”
Possibly the biggest blow to the modern protest movements, though, was 9/11. Immediately after the attacks, dissent of any sort would be used to question a person’s patriotism. In an update to an article that first appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2002 about the globalization protest movement, journalist John Giuffo said, “In terms of the…movement, 9/11 changed a lot…The drama of the globalization-related protests was play-acted anarchy compared to our glimpse of the real thing that fall morning, and it seems like we’ve lost our collective stomach for such measures.”
By the time the U.S. had recovered from its post-9/11 fever, pent-up Liberal activists channeled their energy into the 2008 presidential campaign – which, of course, resulted in the victory of one of the greatest political organizers of all time. The Activist became the Establishment.
Framing Public Ignorance
Protesters in New York campaign against bonuses to AIG executives after the global collapse of the financial system. AIG was contractually obligated to pay the bonuses.
To be sure, activism on the Left hasn’t completely disappeared. Over the past few years, demonstrations have been congealed around such causes as the Iraq War and the Global Credit Crisis. They’ve largely been ignored, but they’ve been around. Is it likely that Olbermann would refer to any of these as political terrorism? Or Obama’s campaign?
Probably not.
If Olbermann’s invective isn’t enough evidence of well-poisoning aimed at the Right, take a look at the angle FOX News chose: on August 12, the news agency released a report by Bill Sammon titled “Press Largely Ignored Incendiary Rhetoric at Bush Protest.” The article referred to a 2002 incident in which then-president Bush was accosted by left-wing activists during a fundraiser in Portlad, OR.
FOX made a conscious effort to contrast coverage of the 2002 protest with the current hubbub over healthcare – particularly the more violent fringes of the movement. The implied message of this article was that the “liberal media” was going easy on its political buddies.
Portland, OR, 2002
Although the article sounded more like agitated whining than impartial analysis, the story did raise a salient point. The facts that a news source chooses to include – as well as the ones it leaves out – make a huge difference in the way the public comes to understand an issue. The way the story is “framed” matters as much as the story itself.
Ever since partisan media outlets like FOX and MSNBC have risen to national prominence, framing has intensely worried media scholars. The representations that news media build for their audiences, if not carefully watched over, can cause all sorts of distortions in public perception. At their worst, systematically biased portrayals (whether intentional or not) can result in a complete failure of the public to understand what’s going on.
This is exactly what happened at the beginning of Hurricane Katrina, when a popular misconception about the evacuation resources at the disposal of poor residents in New Orleans contributed to the deaths of hundreds of people. During a 2005 panel lecture at Stanford University, Hazel Markus, co-director of the Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, explained how news sources got it wrong:
“Most media and individual accounts reflected a middle class view of the world. This view assumes that the sensible response to the impending hurricane was to evacuate. And by implication, those who stayed made poor choices, didn’t take control of their circumstances, and bore responsibility for their plight. This focus on problem individuals and victim blaming was very prevalent in the mainstream media in the first week of the coverage. There was almost no effort to try to think about why evacuation strategies might be stratified by income, or to represent Katrina from the point of view of those who could not evacuate.”
In that case, assumptions that factored into the way the story was presented led to the loss of lives - and the blaming of victims for their own fates. Presumptive journalism doesn't usually lead to such dangerous conclusions. But if it's cost lives before, it can do so again. Self-scrutiny is essential in preventing that.
The kinds of concerns that Markus and other academics are voicing haven't trickled down into the mainstream conversation yet. But they have influenced the ways that media venues portray themselves. Specifically, the news agencies have become much more adept at abusing framing techniques for their own purposes. That bodes poorly for those of us who need the media's contextualizing apparatus to penetrate the hype and rhetoric.
The service that makes journalists and news corporations vital to our political and cultural institutions is their ability to investigate and contextualize events so that the audience can place them in a proper perspective and come to its own conclusions. On the whole, America’s mainstream media today flunk that test. The sources that uncritically buy into staged events are being gullible (or advancing an agenda), and the sources that hyperbolize are being myopic and reactionary. Both are equally misrepresentative. Both hinder the conversation rather than setting a tone for discussion. And that makes everyone less informed.
What, then, is the short-form context of the health care nay-saying campaigns? You might as well call them grassroots, since they fit the bill synonymously. They matter, but they're full of bad information and consist of fewer supporters than they'd like the world to believe. We should listen to them. Correct them where they’re factually wrong, and negotiate the points on which all can agree. After that, muddle through the remainder – because we’re all still going to be in this together tomorrow.
That's truth. Not political terrorism.
