Statement to the "Media"
Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 09/07/2008 - 12:43.
Dear Self-Proclaimed Media,
We, a number of the self-proclaimed anarchists (as you so delicately refer to us every time), are growing a bit weary of your refusal to honestly report the offenses perpetrated by groups of self-proclaimed law enforcement. As our friends are gassed, beaten, and arrested, all you publish are repetitive statements from self-proclaimed Republicans. The mindless babble of a few dozen, it seems, is more important to you than the passionate actions of thousands. This, all you self-proclaimed journalists and reporters, is horrifically irresponsible, as is your insistence on qualifying any perspective which disagrees with you as "self-described" or "self-proclaimed" - through the above actions, you are not only complicit in the existence of a hegemonic police state, but you are actively furthering it. The self-proclaimed politicians rely on you to allow them and their lower-level apparatuses to operate with impunity, and you indulge them every step of the way.
Until you acknowledge the non-ruling class to be legitimate human beings with legitimate perspectives, you will never be legitimate media. You will continue to be a self-proclaimed joke.
love,
an anarchist, without qualifiers or quotation marks.
Statement to "TwinCities.Indymedia"
Dear lunatic children,
Perhaps if you were the type of self-proclaimed anarchists who didn't believe in attempting to deceive other people and believed firmly in not engaging in acts of wanton destruction, you'd stand a chance of winning the media "war".
As people who you call your friends are gassed, beaten, and arrested while attempting to hold a peaceful protest, you guys are merrily celebrating the acts of petty vandalism and disruption that without fail gives the people who you claim to be your enemies the excuse to come down on your friends hard. Stroking your own egos and celebrating the fact that you can get away with doing something useless and stupid and then hiding in a crowd, it seems, is more important than actually allowing the evil going on around you to be seen for what it is.
Under normal circumstances, it's at least implicit that people carrying press credentials are in no way engaging in, encouraging, or participating in what they are covering, but you self-proclaimed journalists and reporters have failed miserably in this respect. There have been enough snarky comments to both the site and the audio streams to make it clear that you've been at least partially complicit in several events that simply should not have taken place had people's intentions been to remain 100% peaceful. You've been actively using the top level page of twincities.indymedia.org to rebroadcast instructions telling people where to go to make pedestrian congestion issues worse at best. ...not things about where a march supporting this and that is taking place, not details about which rallies are still on and which are not, just locations and telling people the equivalent of "hey if you want to get your fight on, go here". This is horrifically irresponsible, and it's positively mind-blowing that you express astonishment that the police are arresting people regardless of whether or not they bear press credentials in light of what you've been doing to cast serious doubt on just how impartial the smaller news outfits might actually be.
You've not just been giving the police a "good excuse" to bring a heavy boot down on your heads, you've been giving reasonable people plenty of reasons to suspect you're a part of the problem, if not near the core of it. It doesn't matter how many video clips of police brutality you collect if your hands are not clean as to why the police started busting heads. Reporters for big media have no problem with being "arguably wrong" by reporting that some lunatics broke some windows and as a result the police had to try to scatter the crowds before someone started throwing firebombs, when that's actually close (even if an incredibly skewed perspective) to what happened. That's something they can at least defend as being what it seemed like the truth while they were investigating. What they won't do is risk sticking their necks out for you while there's a chance that the story they broke about how "police attacked and brutally beat 112 innocent peace protesters" could turn into "reporter was duped by 10 kids into believing protest goals were peaceful" while you have failed, utterly to maintain "clean hands". That sort of mistake would put them out of a job instead of simply being embarassing.
Until you learn that in order to report on events you must be 100% above and 100% separate from the fray you will never manage to report effectively without in some way contaminating the events you wish to report on. You will continue to be ignored by "big media", and you will continue to be a waste other people's time.
The saddest part of this is that judging from past events, had none of you actually done a thing except simply observe and report, and had everyone been very clear that not only was destruction not the goal of the protests, but that destructive acts would not be tolerated by the people at the protests, the police being driven by the Republican Party would have likely engaged in mass arrests anyway and would have given you all the ammunition and arguing points you needed to effect some actual changes and get the people responsible for those abuses of civil rights out of those positions of power. By doing less than you did, you could have accomplished ten times more.
With great disappointment,
an actual anarchist
Indymedia should moderate
Indymedia should moderate out "An Actual Anarchist's" lengthy comment calling the 2008 RNC protests a failure for its shortcomings as insulting and off-topic. The truth is that the RNC was disrupted, the RNC delegates knew the protests were there, the word got out by the people in the street and Indymedia. Coalitions and cooperatives can accomplish great things over time, despite how single events appear to the uninformed public.
No, leave it there
Let their ignorance speak for itself. The poster points to "petty acts of vandalism" without giving any examples, because they never happened (two windows were broken all week, I heard a cop car got its tires slashed; more property damage happens in south Minneapolis every day of the week, and it somehow doesn't make the news). They self-righteously make accusations of "ego-stroking" and call our hands "unclean" for delivering the real news about what was really happening to people that needed that news desperately. They set an absurd standard of being "100% peaceful" in the midst of a police state that waged chemical war on us, peaceful or not. Their issues about "using the front page to rebroadcast instructions" and independent media not being "100% above and 100% separate" (as if that was even possible in an environment where even the mainstream media was risking injury and arrest simply by showing up) show that they have not the slightest understanding of what "movement media" is about, or what was actually happening in St. Paul last week. Call it a hunch or accuse me of talking smack, but I don't even think they were there.
But the last paragraph, to me, really demonstrated how far up their back passage their head was. "Had none of you done a thing other than observe and report, then everything would have been just peaches and pie!" So, kind of like... Amy Goodman and the Democracy Now! crew? Yeah, they got arrested, so where's the great public outcry? I heard one of the local TV news crews even got maced (unconfirmed rumor). People got their cameras destroyed and their tapes confiscated all over town, all week long (and that's no rumor). Does this person seriously believes that every one of those victims somehow "had it coming?" To those of us who were there, it's such obvious nonsense that I don't even know how to respond to it.
Bottom line: I met all kinds of Indymedia (and other movement media, such as I-Witness and Uptake) journalists during the course of last week. They were without fail and without exception completely selfless and courageous people who did their jobs with total devotion and without heed to their own safety. I met a couple people who had to bury their tapes in a park and go back to retrieve them after being arrested. And they got those tapes out. I have nothing but admiration for the people who so courageously put themselves in the line of fire (sometimes literally) to get the story out. Thank you all. We couldn't have done it without you.
So, Mr./Ms. "Actual Anarchist..." did the medics have it coming too?
yours sincerely,
an actual realist