Stop Polarizing Talk must respond to propaganda on yesterdays NYC climate march being put out by Glenn Becks right-wing online publication, The Blaze. From Wiki: On August 31, 2010, three days after his Restoring Honor rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C., Beck launched TheBlaze website. Describing it as an alternative to mainstream media outlets which he said are distorting facts to fit rigid agendas. ~ But it is the distortion of fact to fit a rigid agenda that is PRECISELY what Becks press is doing in the article below. Lets look at this, sentence by sentence: The story opens with early (grossly underestimated) figures on the number of participants: “tens of thousands of protestors” (crowd estimates range from 310 to 400K people). ...much of the “People’s Climate March” appeared to be made up of fringe elements of the political left. I was there, and I did not see many people with signs around their necks saying they were communist or socialist, or even that they vote Democratic. i was there for 5 hours and saw only one Hillary Clinton sign. I saw several signs like Mormons for action on climate change, Republicans are Green, too!, etc. Dozens of signs denouncing capitalism were spotted at the demonstration, often held by self-proclaimed socialists. I saw a few signs, maybe half a dozen, that denounced capitalism. But I saw many more posters with anti-fracking themes. Beyond the main issue of climate change itself (the climate is warming, polar bears dying off, drought affecting the worlds poor), a secondary theme seemed to be anti-fracking or many signs attacking Big Oil ~ and our individual consumption of oil-based products. But instead of showing the broad (and accurate) picture, this report immediately highlights the signs of a handful of people, accuses them of being the majority (much of ..the March is made up of fringe elements , and from the left. To back up this false claim (i.e. distorting facts to fit a rigid right-wing ideological agenda), the article highlights the actions of a few individuals (who are not representative of the whole): “Capitalism is destroying the planet,” a sticker on one woman’s shirt read, “We need revolution, nothing less.” Propaganda message: These people are dangerous! They are revolutionaries who hate capitalism! In one instance, activists shouted “f**k the police,” demanding justice for the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Embedded in the article, there is video of a group (including a woman wearing a hijab, a Muslim scarf) who are supposedly shouting this (I was not able to get sound with this video. If anyone else can verify that is what they are shouting, please let me know.) But at most this seems to be a couple dozen people. Yet The Blaze chooses to use this profanity in the headline for the article, implying that these words, the use of vulgarity, or that anti-law enforcement attitudes prevailed. To the contrary, the marchers interacted in a very friendly way with the NYPD officers along the route, who were themselves friendly and helpful. And again: An individual with the socialist newspaper “The Militant” was selling newspapers to attendees, while Occupy Wall Street members asked for “donations” in exchange for shirts. ONE person, no doubt largely ignored by most marchers, handing out a socialist newspaper is selected as representative of more than 300K people, is hardly an indication that this is the orientation of the 25-block long march. As for OWS protestors, I met 3 of them on the subway on their way to the march, all well-dressed, immaculately groomed, terribly polite and friendly 50-60 year-old women visiting NYC from Hawaii. And finally, a fifth example: Members of the Socialists Workers Party also manned a table, passing out flyers attempting to make “the case for ecosocialism.” I did not see this table, nor any other SWP table. But I did see perhaps a half-dozen different groups of Catholic sisters representing their churches. And these were large groups, of perhaps two or three dozen each time. The youth section of the march was gigantic, filled with well-scrubbed, nicely groomed, happy, fun-loving, cheerful, environmentally aware twenty-somethings from across the country. I saw very few people that looked downright grungy, as Limbaugh (and other rw hosts like Beck) like to portray anyone participating in non-Tea Party gatherings. The final manipulation in this article is this one: The Associated Press contributed to this report. This is highly manipulative. AP is known for its objectivity, for simply reporting the facts, without ideological spin or bias. In showing the reader we got our info from the AP, The Blaze here attempts to further pull the wool over the readers eyes, to give her/him the sense that s/he is getting the real story. To read the actual, factual report from the AP, please see the AP article linked in comments below. Beck certainly does offer an alternative to mainstream media, but the alternative he offers is built on a model more characteristic of a centralized ministry of propaganda than anything else.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Sep 2014 10:24:20 +0000
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