The recent editorial, “Leave the McDonald’s alone,” (Sept. 26, 2002) is yet another instance of the biased, close-minded and poorly reported media representations of anti-corporate globalization protests that have dominated coverage since 1999. The editorial consisted of nothing but fabrications, counterintuitive inferences and baseless accusations, while managing to ignore completely any of the real issues.
True, anti-corporate globalization activists are generally not violent, you got that part right, but that was about all. And it is through editorials and slanted reporting such as this, that the media perpetuate the completely unfounded stereotype of “violent protesters” by focusing only on the small minority of protesters who consider property destruction to be an effective and positive tactic.
The reference to a supposed “anarchist scavenger hunt” posted on infoshop.org was also a complete fabrication, as the Washington Post came to realize after running an article on it and the next day being forced to retract the story after doing some actual reporting and discovering that the “scavenger hunt” was posted months ago as a joke on an anarchist group’s website. No group organizing for the weekend endorsed that action or even those types of actions.
Additionally, the editorial mentions the fact that in April 2000 1,200 people were arrested at IMF/World Bank protests in D.C., inferring from this, “[a] history of violence,” on the part of activists. The facts prove to be quite to the contrary. Not a single individual has ever been convicted of a crime stemming from an arrest at an anti-corporate globalization demonstration in the United States. Currently, there is a lawsuit pending against the Metropolitan Police Department due to its handling of arrests in 2000, and another just was just filed after this weekend’s illegal mass arrests. The high numbers of arrests indicate that police were violent and that they violated the civil liberties and basic constitutional rights of protesters, not the other way around.
This past weekend I was one of five Georgetown students and 644 others arrested illegally by MPD in the largest mass arrest in D.C. since 1971. I did nothing violent and neither did anyone around me. When arrested, we were standing in Freedom Plaza chanting, “We would like to leave the park peacefully.”
Any “tainted image” that protesters have is manufactured and perpetuated by misrepresentations and fear-mongering in the media. Your editorial mentioned nothing about the violent and illegal actions of the police (which actually happen, unlike the fabricated claims about protesters) and the corrupt and demented policies of the IMF and World Bank which engender such police violence.
You could have dedicated your editorial space for calling on these institutions to cancel Third World debt, to open their meetings and become democratic, to stop their environmentally destructive projects, to end structural adjustment programs, to raise labor standards or any number of other things these institutions could and should be doing. It disturbs me greatly that your paper would, instead of writing about the issues, conform to the trend in mainstream media by selling out to the practices of yellow journalism, conformity and sensationalism.
