The Need to Cause Damage: the 2008 GOP Convention

Riots at the GOP Convention during the first week of September went almost unnoticed. In the news, it was widely reported (or worse, insinuated) that the protesters didn’t even know what they were protesting about. The news coverage had been gradual, like grains of sand slowly falling through an hourglass. Now is the time to reconsider what in fact is the news. What values does the news protect? What interests does it have? And why (in this example) isn’t there more outrage about the unseemly police state tactics used in St. Paul, Minnnesota during the 2008 GOP Convention?

Were the protesters even mentioned amongst the chummy jabs by the crony partneership of Rudy Giuliani, Joseph Lieberman, Sarah Palin and John McCain? What we (as outsiders) truly know is filtered through many sources—sources which seem to exclude reasons for protest, sources which attempt to maintain journalistic “detachment” yet don’t acknowledge their alliances with big media companies and a compliance with a war machine, Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex”. It is no surprise that protests were under-reported at the DNC, as well.


Protesters at the Republican convention were oft-reported in the Minnesota media as a troublesome band of youths who were looking to interfere, attack, and pose a threat. The very framing of protest (through laws, restriction on freedom of speech, and , yes, through media) is to neuter the protesters so that they are caught in these screen shots of protesters being dragged away by police, being peppersprayed and teargassed. Somehow in the mainstream media, the police become unquestionable, unassailable, and irreprehensible protectors of the public good. If public opinion is outraged, how opportune for the media—who can twist the original jarring shots of police dragging protesters away, hitting protesters with batons, setting off fake bombs—as an instance of police brutality.


Apparently, news bulletings were posted saying that 300 people had been arrested in St. Paul before arrests occurred. Apparently, the cops were waiting to arrest and teargas the students, activist and leaders as they marched over a St. Paul bridge, their permit expiring at 5pm, allowing police to make a swift onslaught of arrests by 530 pm. The oft-repeated image in the media is a clash between police and protesters, further corroborating the notion amongst Americans of unruly and “anti-American”, liberal youths who were “posing a threat” that the police had to quell.

The Problem With Reporting.
All film is a lie, because we can edit—because we can exclude information. Because stories in the heads of producers influence how they cut, why they cut and who they cut and what they cut to. There is no more simple law of film than that. And yet images and reports sway a public towards particular opinions, towards a particular outrage or oath of political support.


And yet the serious consequences behind news reporting that claims to be “honest” is it’s glaring dishonesty. It is a dishonesty that soon becomes reflected on the public stage to reach a wider audience, a dishonesty reflected again and again in constituents who rely on the news as a legitimate source for information. Why aren’t there people on a news program who counter the information being reported? Who present a different story? Even amongst ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX the story angle is in the same ballpark, despite FOX’s conservative slant of deceptive “fair and balanced reporting”. What is needed now is a praxis implemented into the media to question the notion of media itself—a drastic reconstruction of the role of media on inidvidual programs. As is the case with the thousands of disgruntled protesters at the GOP convention, American public protest and news reporting needs to be allowed to be less neutered, less controlled and more volatile in terms of the rights of free speech than it is today.