If You Were Wondering Why Protest Coverage Seems Fairly Muted, NPR's Public Editor Confirms This is Intentional
If You Were Wondering Why Protest Coverage Seems Fairly Muted, NPR's Public Editor Confirms This is Intentional
https://www.threads.net/@nprpubliceditor/post/DIhOEQQOyqP
EDIT: Also worth noting that the next nationwide protest date for 50501 is May 1st
I sent a note to the public editor a couple days ago suggesting that while it was nice that they went to a single protest in NYC, they are missing the trend, that attendance and rallies and protests have been growing, even in deeply red parts of the country. That upward trend should be newsworthy. No response so far...
The message is that peaceful protests that don't involve property damage, and major disruption to business don't warrant respect or attention in America.
Within a capitalist system no one is going to pay any attention until you distrust the flow of capital in one form or another: stop traffic so people can’t go to work, shut down businesses, strike, slow down at work, target a CEO home, call in sick en masse.
Why would anyone pay attention if you’re just standing in a park holding signs?
Boycott boycott boycott. The most effective methods are strikes. But we need a higher level of organization for that, something I'm not seeing
Give it time. Women's Suffrage started pretty tame before the firebombs.
News does not need to be sensational to be important.
News programs need to report what is important, not what they think will catch eyeballs
There is a balance to be struck. News has a few vital cogs in the machine that it cannot continue without. It needs reporters, editors, news to report, readers who are interested, and an income stream to keep it all running. It doesn't need to be profitable, but it does need to be sustainable. If you only ever report stories that nobody cares about, you will not make enough money to be sustainable. If you only report sensation, you will become corrupt. If you over-report on the same subject, readers will become numb to what you have to say. So while you are correct, news needs to report what is important, they also need to consider how their stories will impact their readers.
"Aren't news worthy enough"
News can and does keep dragging the same worthless news articles whenever they want so this is a lie
That's like the entire purpose of a protests. How incredibly unethical of a journalist to even say something like this.
I love NPR but this stinks real bad. They should resign.
I love NPR but have been watching them slide right continually for most of my adult life. Then NPR outlets (not npr itself but still) took major donations from the Koch brothers.
:|
still probably the most factual news outlet but I temper my expectations.
Trump wanting to end PBS, NPR etc., calling them fake news does keep me supporting my local station tho.
I stopped donating when they aided the DNC in ignoring Bernie in 2016.
valid.
I say this in good faith, and I have a friend at NPR and I don't hate them...
Should we protest at the news stations to make it easy for them to get pictures?
Seriously, would it work?
I have been saying this and I’m really glad to see others coming up with the same idea. News won’t come to us? Then we need to go to the news.
We need to march around their buildings, shout up at their windows, block access to their parking lots with our sheer numbers - make us impossible to ignore.
Isn't fox news in new york? Make their little spectacles outside a nightmare!
It's with doing anyway. They are the worst enablers of this madness.
My 2 cents. There isn't a cohesive reason for the protests so reporting on it will be muddy. Devil's advocate but it's the same reason occupy Wall Street failed. The message got watered down. If the media can't report on a clear, concise and unwavering requirement from the crowd then reporting on it is exceedingly hard to sell to the public.
If the media can report on Trump's incoherent rantings and make that sound like anything more than hot garbage, then they can absolutely do the same for protesters with varying causes, who are nowhere near as incoherent.
They do need to be covered, though. The world needs to see that many here will never bend the knee and accept anything less than a real democracy.
This is why strikes are more newsworthy: they disrupt things.
With a protest news will cover:
- That it happened
- What the protest was about / why it happened
- How many people were involved
After that, you're basically done, other than maybe taking some pictures of interesting signs or costumes.
With a strike you get all the above plus:
- What services are disrupted
- What is being done to end the strikes
- What's being done to mitigate the disruption
- What people who are disrupted feel about the strikes
The disruption part is key, because disruptions lead to other disruptions and that leads to a new story.
Look at the coverage of the trash collectors' strike in Birmingham
- First paragraph: the disruption being caused
- Second paragraph: more about the disruption
- Third paragraph: what's being done to end the strike
- Fourth paragraph: what the strikers want
- Fifth paragraph: what the strike is about
- Sixth paragraph: what the authorities are doing about the disruption
- Seventh paragraph: more about the disruption
- Eighth paragraph: more about what's being done to end the strike
- ...
Or look at the coverage of the transport strikes in Greece. Again, because a lot of things are being disrupted, there's more to talk about.
Part of the reason that disruption is key is that there's a long chain of side effects. For example, with the garbage strike there's uncollected garbage. That has a side effect of attracting rats and other vermin. People worry that that might have a side effect of causing disease outbreaks. That might have an effect on the already strained public health system.
In addition, the more disruption, the more pressure there is to fix it. That results in various people passing the buck / blame to other people, which results in more news-worthy things to write about. You get conflicts between different levels of government. Conflict is interesting, so it's something that makes the news.
A protest on the weekend that doesn't really disrupt anything just isn't going to get the same level of coverage.
11 days until May Day which would be the perfect opportunity for a really disruptive general strike. But, I guess Americans aren't concerned enough about the state of their country to really disrupt anything yet.
Protests too can be disruptive. They don't have to be just people along the side of the road, building, etc. For instance, here's thousands of people blocking a freeway in downtown LA as part of anti-ICE protests in February
(Did get more media coverage indeed due to being more disruptive)
Organizing a general strike is also more difficult in the US with union membership being so comparatively low. Greece and the UK both have around double the unionization rate (~20% vs ~10%). Not impossible, and would be great to see, but protests themselves are a tool that can help get there. Help people see that people within your community are just a pissed as you are and you'll have a lot more people willing to join in. Unions are some of the people organizing various protests too. They are able to drive membership up because of it
Protests that block key roadways are generally not received well. People are often mad that they're inconvenienced and will use moral arguments regarding potential disruption of emergency services.
At least with strikes, most of who you're fucking over is your boss and not the people you're trying to have side with you.
This is my hope, too, but it's happening slower than I'd like. Enthusiasm for https://generalstrikeus.com/was strong at first, but has slowed significantly. It's always on my protest sign "Signs a strike card!" My hope is that the protests will grow and develop into momentum for a strike... I'm not sure what else to do...
So what they're saying is... there's another way to get their attention. Challenge accepted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_protests
We might need something more, because the Bush anti war protests didn't do very much.
I'm not saying that she is intentionally being shitty, but there is a good chance her board is. This is a deep dive in who is on the board of NPR from last year. Scroll down to see NPR specifically and notice the bolded or linked people and who they're tied to.
In a way, it's good that the protests aren't getting a whole lot of coverage. That means that they are peaceful enough that they're boring. That's what we want: PEACEFUL disruption.
Pretty sure the protests will start getting more attention when the administration starts firing tear gas and rubber bullets into the crowds when their bad-actor plants start causing issues.
I disagree. They should have more coverage because they are peaceful and people will feel safe enough to come join. What they can show:
- The dates for the future and how many have happened in the past
- Talk about what the signs are saying and get responses from the Republicans. You know, like when Bide was "too old."
- Give the general mood.
- Send reporters to ask why people are there.
This is journalism 101 and she is super, duper wrong.
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Past and future protests can be covered in press releases. Not worth sending a reporter for.
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The cameras show the signs. That’s the point of the signs. Opposing politicians don’t want to comment.
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General mood can be covered in seconds by images.
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Why people are there again is covered by the signs and the aim of the protest. Unless people got lost on their way to the anti-hedgehog protest in the next street.
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The issue is they aren't disruption.
They are peaceful, which is good. But they are not disruptive.
They aren't disruptive yet. I assume the plan is to start without disruption as a way to amass numbers, gain support, and show how widespread the opposition is. As time goes on, the protests will move away from the weekends, which will automatically make them more disruptive.
I think when the actual disruption starts is when the likelihood of push back, and them no longer being peaceful, increases. And, as you said above, peaceful is good.
Yes, keep it peaceful
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world
Maybe you could actually go see it so you don't have to report "hundreds of" or "several" protestors when many thousands showed up.
The Wall Street Journal reported it as "thousands" and called them "massive protests": https://www.wsj.com/video/thousands-of-anti-trump-protesters-gathered-around-the-world/ED93CD21-F4F3-4B1F-9DDC-1FB2F710228D?mod=automatedsubsection_trending_now_video_pos3
It's the same excuse they use for not posting rape stories and knife attacks in germany, unless it is an immigrant of course.
I generally agree with the Argument of significance when there's about 100 rapes daily that you cant report everything, but the argument falls flat once they decide to still post them when it fuels division.
If you’re still under the illusion that NPR is “left” or “liberal”, please absolve yourselves of this.
Since Gee Dubz and for some time previous they have been center-right and often undermine progressive efforts with muted or deliberately misleading wording.
Juan Williams of Fox News was a senior reporter there for a long time, if that helps.
Are there non-American news that are covering it?
I'm in Portugal and the anti-Trump protests in the US have been covered in prime time TV news here.
Not fully free from similar issues here. For instance, the BBC is massively downplaying turnout
The BBC is saying "thousands" were protesting on April 19th when others estimate in the range of 4 million. Counting people in photos on social media in just a handful of cities gives a figure higher than thousands. There were hundreds of protest locations
The BBC also claims there were "tens of thousands" on April 5th when it was estimated at 3-5 million. There were over 100 000 in DC and 100 000 in NYC alone on April 5th!
This kind of shows that maybe protests aren't working. If 100,000 people coming out isn't noteworthy that's because it's easily dismissed as a small vocal minority. If less than 1% of the population come out to the streets on a sunny weekend that's just a party. Obviously it's not, but that's a very easy dismissal of a protest that didn't even disrupt a work day to try and make a point.
This reaction by this reporter is manufactured obviously but there's truth in it. If there's a protest every month that doesn't rock the boat and doesn't agitate for anything then it will just fade into the background.
Protests take time to work. If you think that one day of protest is going to change it all, look to other movements. You can succeeded; it just takes much longer than people think they take. They want you thinking it's hopeless so when you don't get immediate results, they're happy to call them failures
Estimates are far higher than 100,000 people. Not just a small number. It was ~4 million on April 19th and ~3-5 million on April 5th depending on the estimates you look at
They are claiming it's "thousands" across the limited US media coverage, but you can find photos online of those kinds of numbers in various smaller cities alone
Just remind people that there were months of peaceful protests that went unheard when they start complaining about public disruptions
we've circled the city of Jericho seven hundred times now and we're no closer to shouting the walls down
Third or fourth largest protest in the history of the country... "Not newsworthy."
This seems like lazy, irresponsible journalism to me. If the protests aren't interesting from a distance, get out there and interview people. Ask them for their stories and tell them! Otherwise they're just telling the protesters they need to be violent to get attention.
This thread glows so much my insides hurt.
A photo essay may not be the best choice when your organization is called National Public Radio.