Protests and the press

This article on the present-day antiwar movement seems to me to be a set-piece of cynical and superficial journalism. It is basically saying that because there aren't a lot of large street demonstrations against the Iraq War like the ones you see on 10-second news clips about the 1960s, that the antiwar movement is more-or-less useless: Antiwar activists fail to press their cause: Discontent on Iraq lacks white-hot heat of the Vietnam era by Pascal Zachary San Francisco Chronicle 01/23/05

This sense that only the president can end the war is partly a problem of the antiwar movement's own making. Activists bet the farm on defeating him in November, on the premise that the quickest way out of Iraq was to get Bush out of the White House.

But John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, threw a monkey wrench into these plans by not calling for immediate withdrawal or even opposing the war outright -- even though, in the spring of last year, polls showed that nearly half of the Democratic voters not only opposed the war but favored immediate withdrawal.

Kerry argued that he could prosecute the war more effectively than Bush, which opponents of the war took to mean a quicker exit.

But Kerry's approach essentially removed the antiwar agenda from the election campaign, robbing war opponents of a great deal of valuable buzz.

I'm confident that if the antiwar movement did have a lot of big demonstrations going on, that Zachary - or similar writers - would be just as smugly sniffing that, oh, this is so-ooo 1960s, and the antiwar movement is discrediting itself by being so rowdy, yadda, yadda. In fact, this time two years ago prior to the Iraq invasion, there were large street demonstrations and there were lots of timid souls saying, oh, golly-gee, not every single demonstrator has a pure heart and, oh gosh, actually having people draw public attention to their opposition to the war might make some people uncomfortable. And so on and so on.

Also, the public opposition to the Iraq War has already reached levels not seen in the Vietnam War until after the Tet Offensive in early 1968. So, whatever "buzz" Zachary thinksthey've lost, public opposition to the war continues to grow.

This comment about the media from "larre " at the Left Coaster provides a good answer to the Zachary article. Larre gave his post the misleading title of Bring the War Home 01/22/05

Four decades ago, anti-war protest moved public opinion (and forced a change in our Vietnam policy). This was in part because a far more independent and courageous media covered the views and activities of the anti-war protest movement . Through teach-ins, peace marches, draft resistance, "Seven Senators for Peace," and even music concerts the anti-war movement articulated its message and that message was heard by tens of millions, forcing a sitting war president into premature retirement and sufficiently scaring his successor, Nixon, into committing crimes that led to his resignation from office in disgrace.

None of that could happen today using protest tools of the past because the national commercial media no longer is interested or willing to fairly report the views of the opposition. They turn their conglomerate backs on the caskets coming home and devote almost zero coverage to the more than 10,000 wounded veterans languishing in Veterans Hospitals whose budgets Bush has chopped. A hundred thousand or more Iraqi civilians are killed by our bombs -- and the U.S. national media is silent. Local media coverage at best prints the name or shows a photo of the latest local soldier killed in Iraq, but more often their deaths go entirely unreported.

Now, I mostly don't entirely agree with larre's point, either. Although both mainstream print and television news had higher standards of accuracy in those days and were also more aggressive with their investigative reporting, the mass media largely reflected a prowar sentiment at least until 1968, when it seemed impossible to pretend that everything was going fine. But even after that, the antiwar movement in those days developed a thriving alternative press to report events and comment on them more critically than was the norm in the mainstream press. And despite the sentiments expressed by Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, the press coverage of the war even during Nixon's administration never fit the myth of the Liberal Press! Liberal Press! Liberal Press!

But larre is right in that today's press corps is much lazier in their reporting and much less willing to look at perspectives critical of the war. And in some ways, Zachary's article is an excellent example of that. The inaugural protests in Washington did attract some press and public attention. But Zachary just brushes them off in the first paragraph.  And for people who were following the news with a little more effort than the average Fox News fan, it was clear that those demonstrations representive active protest against the president's policies, especially on the Iraq War. Zachary is actually doing what larre makes into a general criticism of the media, ignoring the real existing protests to complain that its not like what the news clips show from the 1960s.

But, on the other hand, a big part of the laziness of the press corps today is their reliance on "this side says/the other side says" stories. So, while they aren't going to go dig up as much critical information as the press corps of the 1960s on their own, if the antiwar movement becomes more visible that will add more of "the other side says" to the mix.

So I don't think that traditional types of protests like demonstrations and marches have been made completely obsolete by the deterioration of the press.