https://www.threads.net/@nprpubliceditor/post/DIhOEQQOyqP
EDIT: Also worth noting that the next nationwide protest date for 50501 is May 1st
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.
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
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.
Okay but I’m sure you can answer many of those questions without the article right? So why send journalists constantly to rehash something people aren’t going to end up reading?
Maybe the compromise is a monthly roundup of protests on general, so there’s no attention fatigue?
Who says people wouldn’t read it? If they interviewed people on the ground, I would absolutely read that. Also, if they had the dates listed and people counts of last ones, I would read that too to see how it’s comparing and if it’s getting more tailwind. People are always saying they haven’t heard about the protests until they finally do. I’m sure there are tons that haven’t heard about them because NPR isn’t even covering them.
Why would you stick up for less coverage? That makes no sense in this community.
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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.
- Press releases aren’t very good if the press doesn’t cover them
- They show some signs. And a handful of signs don’t convey just how many people are all shouting in unison. Cherry picking the witty quotes is like a BuzzFeed list.
- Nope. Hard no. A picture speaks a thousand words, but those words are up to interpretation by the viewer. It can mean different things to different people. Photos don’t convey the chants, the yelling, the questions, and the raw emotion of a crowd.
- Cherry picking a few signs missing the whole point of the protest in that MILLIONS are demanding answers and change. The reason of the protest isnt what’s written on the signs. It’s that we are large swaths of people organizing and demanding change or answers. That they need to answer to the citizens at large. And not just the quips on a sign.
And that’s not even representative of how many different fucking signs there are and if media pick up those that are more niche and don’t align with the protests at large.
If only those assholes covered trump the same way and not report every little fart he or his administration expresses. There is a reason that fox talks about the d’s being evil and trump is a monarch over and over, it’s because it usually takes 7x for someone to hear what is being said. But you know that, don’t you.
Everything the President says is consequential, because he is the head of the largest(ish) military in the world, America hasnt been shy of economic and military imperialism over the past 25 years, and the Americans have decided to give their political head extreme power. To ignore him would be to ignore the gorilla in the room just because that gorilla is deranged. Excuse me, the gorilla in the room is deranged, that is NOT a gorilla anyone should be ignoring. The media are doing their job by reporting the White House. The Americans fucked up their one useful job by allowing him to be the most powerful man in the world. Again.
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This thread glows so much my insides hurt.
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.
Are there non-American news that are covering it?
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!
I’m in Portugal and the anti-Trump protests in the US have been covered in prime time TV news here.
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
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.
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Just start with blocking some lanes during rush hour
Peaceful protests are more likely to succeed. We need to get 3.5%
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
NON-DISRUPTIVE protests don’t change anything. Typically, violent protests are risky and potentially counterproductive. They make it harder to recruit larger numbers and easier to justify a proportionate police/government response, further discouraging recruitment. It’s also just bad PR. People are stupid, and gullible. All it takes to turn people against your movement is to convince them you’re violent and dangerous, which again, bad for recruitment. One thrown brick, especially early on as a movement gains momentum and tries becoming sustainable long term.
Sometimes the thrown brick kicks off the movement, like Stonewall, but you can’t count on moments like that with planning. Those are powder kegs set to go off from a spark with decades, CENTURIES of fuel. And even then, the LGBTQ+ rights movement took decades of work and organizing and planning after the fact.
The most successful movements take a long time to build support and establish organization to commit supporters to disruptive actions. And it gets harder the bigger a country is, harder to organize and coordinate over greater distances and life circumstances.
BUT, once you get to that point, by katamari-ing fellow protesters with marches and days of action, getting larger groups to commit to an action organized within the movement, building social support infrastructure to maintain things, you can go further, organize more specific disruptions. Sit ins, boycotts, strikes, blockades, occupations, slow downs, vandalism, interrupting police/ICE operations, shop ins. There’s a lot of powerful methods of non-violent protest you can get up to if you’ve got the support and are coordinated enough.
The civil rights movement wasn’t just standing in crowds with signs asking nicely to have civil rights laws pass, they were breaking the law and interrupting the functioning of society. We look at other effective non-violent protest movements. Hong Kong’s coordination and disruption tactics were AWE inspiring, and would be effective here if we can get to the point of large scale coordinated disruption.
Actually, here’s the wikipedia page for tactics and methods used in the Hong Kong protests for anyone who wants to read it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactics_and_methods_surrounding_the_2019–2020_Hong_Kong_protests
What sticks with me, as it applies to organizing in the states, and the west in general, is the fundamental organizing principle of “Do Not Split”. There’s a lot of infighting and division among protest groups (much of which is intentionally manufactured to weaken said groups) on the basis of specific issues. Communist groups fighting Socialist groups over how society as a whole should be organized. Purity testing over individual belief systems rather than uniting over shared goals despite differences in approach. The fascists don’t have this problem. They’ll step in line with each other over their shared hate even if the details differ, and it’s why they’re WINNING…I mean, aside from all the inherited/exploitation gained wealth and power.
If you’re someone looking to join the 50501 protests, or are wanting to organize your own, maybe you’re unhappy with some of the methodology, remember this: DO NOT SPLIT. If you despise someone and they’re fighting the same fight as you, THEY ARE STILL YOUR ALLY. There is no greater cause than fighting fascism together.
May Day, May 1st, is the next major protest event. We are in the early days of this movement. Yes, we should’ve been doing it years ago, but the next best day to plant a tree is today.
Why would you point to the Hong Kong protests?
The Hong Kong protests were a massive effort, but also a complete failure.
They lost the city and are now under undisputed CCP rule. Hundreds of participants arrested, 0/5 demands met.
People have given up and a lot of them are just moving out instead. The only good thing is that some were able to move out.
Because their tactics are not why they failed, and they were a modern protest movement using sophisticated modern tactics to put up an incredible fight against a much bigger, equally modern enemy they could almost certainly never beat on their own, whose tactics and strategies we can appropriate and use for our own movement.
They were coordinated, smart, disruptive, fighting a panopticon mass surveillance military superpower with resources and political sway other superpowers would also struggle with. We hear about the underdogs winning because it’s notable. Underdogs usually lose, no matter how big their fight, and they were the underdogs, by a LOT.
We should absolutely take from the more successful civil rights movement of the 60s, Ghandi’s Indian independence movement, the Suffrage movement, but looking at stuff like the Hong Kong protests gives us a look at tactics and a general approach that can be used in the modern day to combat modern day oppression effectively.
You can do everything right and still lose. Hong Kong’s protesters did everything they could, went far above and beyond what a weaker movement could have managed. The tools and tactics they used shouldn’t be ignored just because they were beaten. They were powerful methods of disruption and resistance, ways to fight and protect the most people in the movement at once as possible.
Hong Kongers would not go the last step.
They chose not to make the city dangerous to the CCP. They chose to resist and disrupt gently.
How many men and women fit for fight lived in Hong Kong? A few million? They chose to fold, rather than commit to civil war. The protest never went that last step, to put their lives in the line to fight for freedom when it became clear the government would not budge to disruption and “resistance”. They chose life over freedom, and I expect most Americans will make the same choice. They’d rather accept Gilead and try to live with it, than die in the effort to stop it.
Could they have made the city dangerous to the CCP without inviting a proportionate (or disproportionate) military response? Protesters get violent and things start looking a lot more like Tienanmen Square. There was not the sort of external support to enable that sort of rebellion on the scale that would be needed to directly combat China. Because someone has to supply weapons, information, medical support, something they’d need help with but China would not.
They would have set themselves up to die for nothing. Not even their own freedom, they didn’t have the backing of their own government and the necessary resources that’d have required, and so would have to secure food, water, shelter, medicine, defences, security both physical and informational, on their own, at a bare minimum to even put forth a token guerilla warfare effort like that. Even the US had the support of France during the American revolution. These things don’t just happen because there’s the will for it. Non-violent resistance is not a compromise on violent resistance, it is a strategic decision.
If there’s not a solution to a proportionate military response to violent retaliation from Hong Kong movement, then it doesn’t matter if they fight and die for their freedom or not, they won’t be keeping it. Making the decision to kill and die for a cause that will collapse under the weight of its opposition is not an effective act of resistance, the force needed to scare off the CCP with violent retaliation did not exist in the Hong Kong protest movement. Like Russia with basically any and all prolonged military problems, China could afford to throw bodies at the problem until it went away, and Hong Kong, as organized and efficient as their movement was, did not have the material support to survive an onslaught like that.
But none of that matters to the bigger point, the tactics used, the anonymity, the discrete messaging apps and security protocols adopted by protesters, the decentralized organizational structure for direct, disruptive protest actions, the countermeasures against police force and tactics like using laser pointers en masse against helicopters and security cameras to make it difficult to fly, aim, or identify protesters, the counter measures against tear gas and protocols for dealing with it quickly, pre-arranged escape routes and ditching any markers identifying you as a protester before merging into crowds , burner phones, all tactics they used that were extremely effective at countering typical police tactics, and were methodologies we should be using when organizing our own direct actions. None of which were tactics that were necessary in periods before mass surveillance states were the norm.
Don’t like the implication that they were cowards or failures for choosing to live, when they chose to fight the best way they thought they could under the circumstances they were under. They certainly weren’t sitting on the internet asking someone else to do it for them, and they weren’t just standing around with signs chanting either (though they were also doing that, building support and solidarity is necessary).
If you’re willing to give up, then you’re willing to give up. I’m guessing Americans are willing to give up.
The rest of your fluff is lost in the weeds as history goes on.
I’m not. Don’t put words in my mouth.
Fighting without a plan for success is the same as fighting for nothing. In Hong Kong, there was no plan for success that could involve violence, strategically. It’s easy enough to say people somewhere else should kill and die for a cause you believe in, it’s another thing entirely to commit millions of people to doing so. They would have been treated as an invading army and far more than the active protesters would have been targeted and killed as “collateral damage”.
My actual perspective on it is that if I thought killing and terrorizing the CCP, or any authoritarian government like that would work, I would be here screaming from the rooftops to pile the bodies high. I have no qualms about dragging fascists out of their homes and butchering them like animals in front of their families, because that is the world they want to build for others, but you cannot commit to violence like that without a rock solid plan, a plan that would involve being able to count on non-combatants seeing violent action and sticking around or joining in. And even if that was the right course of action, this is not Ukraine being invaded by Russia, people getting their homes and cities bombed to pieces, you’d have to convince people that level of retaliation was necessary when the danger was in the form of powerful people signing documents making agreements out of sight. You have to CONVINCE people to do it. And then those people have to actually see it through.
And I’m NOT saying they’re even the main movement we should be taking lessons from, but to ignore the usefulness of the tactics they used that DID work, and not looking at what SPECIFICALLY DIDN’T work, at what caused them to fail would be FOOLISH. Take from the Civil Rights movement. Take from the Suffragate movement. Take from the Indian independence movement. There’s even lessons to take from revolutions that turned violent. The Boston Tea Party was a non-violent act of economic terrorism that cost the British government the equivalent of almost 2 million dollars. That’s the sort of thing we can do TODAY. But we are in the early stages of this thing, and the organizational infrastructure IS NOT THERE. That’s WHY we do the marches. To build momentum. To make each next step easier and easier to commit to, and to build communities and networks around protesting like this, making it routine and just another part of people’s lives so it can be done sustainably. We want them to be fighting us all day every day on every front without rest, and it takes a LOT of time to set something like that up, especially across an entire nation and ESPECIALLY one as big as the US.
I am unwilling to disparage and dismiss the intelligence, effectiveness, and effort of the Hong Kong protesters, or any protest movement that tries but collapses under the weight of their opposition. Unions used to be a stronger force in the US, until they were systematically destroyed by the forces we’re currently fighting. Would you say that of them because they failed and didn’t then choose to die fighting an enemy they couldn’t beat? I wouldn’t. I’d say survive until you can create an opportunity to fight again, better next time.
Because they tried.
At least they fucking tried. Just like this guy tried. With a couple of bags of groceries and woke the world up to what was happening.
They didn’t lay down and say come get me big daddy. They tried.
We don’t have any successful movements to emulate, or?
I mean, what’s next? Try to do like the opposition to the Nazis? Emulate their attempts to stop Hitler’s rise to absolute power?
Try something it’s better than the nothing you are doing now. All talk no action the 'murican way.
My fellow Canadians have stopped buying American goods and services and travelling to your country. It’s already affected your economy but you could give a fuck right. We’re buying guns and training. Joining mutual aid orgs. Fuck…we even had record numbers vote yesterday in advanced polls for our federal election.
General strike would shut your economy down pretty quick in turn stifling your regime but you wouldn’t get a paycheque and you don’t know your neighbors so they won’t help you. I guess that’s out too. I think I’m out of suggestions really. You’ve denied every single one is possible or even worthy of discussion.
I don’t know I guess you’re fucked. Enjoy the couch. See you in another thread later.
I’m not from the US.
I’m arguing that what you should learn from failed movements is to not copy what doesn’t work. That you should learn from other movements with more success, invent new strategies, use old reliable strategies, and push much harder and farther than those who failed.
Following the Hong Kongers’ example is to give up.
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.
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.
we’ve circled the city of Jericho seven hundred times now and we’re no closer to shouting the walls down
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.
What a lazy hands-off way of reporting. What happened to walking in the crowd, interviewing protesters, interviewing innoconous passers-by, interviewing people that are hindered, …, and also getting a reaction/quote from whomever/whatever is being protested against? Instead they apparently want to just publish some photos. That’s not journalism, that’s photography.
Photography is journalism.
Scroll through the Pulitzer winning photographs, and know that some of them have literally changed history. Pulitzer winning photographs from the Vietnam War turned political opinion on the war itself: 1969’s Saigon Execution by Edward T. Adams, 1973’s Terror of War by Nick Ut. 1977’s The Soiling of Old Glory, was a key part in telling the story of what the state of the desegregation movement was at that time. 1994’s The Vulture and the Little Girl (actually a boy) did make a difference in spurring increases in both private and government/NGO aid, and tragically played a big role in the photographer’s suicide a year later.
There is a time and a place for words, for still photos, for video. Visual works like still photos are still incredibly important for journalism, especially coverage of things like demonstrations and protests.
I’m not against using photos in support of journalism, they absolutely make a difference, but photography alone is not journalism. Without a story, it’s just photography. Your examples seem to have all been part of a bigger story.
My opinion is basically reflected in that quote you used: “a key part in telling the story of”. While it was a key part, the photo alone was not the entire story.
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Libs are so sensitive, even this gets censored.
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.
“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.
being the largest protest in us history makes it kinda newsworthy….
Did 50501 send Katy Perry to space? Checkmate.
good point, a washed up celebrity going… well not even to space but… good point, that’s some riveting, important news
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
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…
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.
Blocking roads is not the only method of disruptive protest. There are a lot more options than that. Everything from sit-ins to much more creative disruptions
For instance, one technique that animal rights activists have successfully used before is gluing hands to tables to protest various things. May sound silly, but it gets outsized attention on both traditional and social media. For instance, it’s been a factor to help get over 330 coffee chains to drop their non-dairy milk upcharge (including some major ones like Starbucks, Dunkin, Tim Hortons, etc.)
Thing is NPR should be promoting protests and gs
Why?
They just got defunded, for one. For another, the collapse of our government seems imminent?
How does that affect the newsworthiness of a protest? It seems like you just came up with two bigger, higher priority stories that they should be covering.
Because people need to rise up
