BIG MEDIA PLAN ATTACK ON WTO OPPONENTS

by Larry Duncan, co-producer of Labor Beat - Dec. 16, 1999

How will the Government of, by, and for the Corporations prepare its counterpunch to the political victory of the anti-WTO forces in Seattle? The recent 60 Minutes II (Dec. 14, 1999) segment on the anarchists suggests that the new world order is getting ready to play the terrorism wild card.

Why did 60 Minutes II pick a group of Oregon anarchists? Labor journalist Hal Sutton notes his concern about the way in which the focus on street violence in Seattle has obscured a much more fundamental development that occurred during the WTO protests -- the strike by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union that effectively closed the West Coast to shipping on Nov. 30...the fate of that job action has been completely obscured by media coverage of the street violence and police repression.

Getting some of their footage from independent media activists, the shows producers painted these particular WTO protesters as a group fixated on violence. Tony Cecala, publisher of The Holistic Networker, commented that 60 Minutes II...aired an incredible schmear of the entire Seattle event tonight. Incredible indy footage was labeled as anarchist footage that THEY hoped to use to show police brutality. This footage was probably submitted in hopes of a fair showing and was used in a complete betrayal of the truth. I watched in utter disbelief. Of the forest of information regarding the events they focused on a single leaf on a single tree. They linked the entire movement to anti-technology, anti-capitalist anarchist extremists.

The producers of 60 Minutes II then went on to interview a theoretician of the Oregon anarchists who, the show noted emphatically, exchanges letters with uni-bomber David Kazinski. This detail was again savored in questioning of a handful of young anarchists interviewed throughout the segment. The object: paint the anarchists as bombers. The formula, simplified, is the following: WTO protesters = anarchists = bombers = terrorists.

The shows producer, CBS/Westinghouse, in case there is anyone out there who doesnt already know, is not simply in the business of randomly reporting interesting news events. How deeply is the collusion among the Pentagon, CIA and the major networks plus CNN is hard to pin down, but the circumstantial evidence is plentiful. The Dec. 14 60 Minutes II segment was simply laying the early groundwork for a new corporate media/government PR project: groups opposed to corporate globalization are terrorists.

The fact that this is a falsehood should not deter them. For how they will get around this minor detail we can look to the reports now beginning to emerge that describe police agents provocateur operating within the ranks of street protesters in Seattle:

Jim Desyllas, Seattle reporter for <www.emperors-clothes.com> writes: The cops would blockade three or five blocks of an area, give the angry kids room to operate, keep gassing them -- when you gas a person, let me tell you, it gets them fighting mad. Tuesday night the police gassed all of downtown. This was going on from 3 PM, till 6 PM. Gas everywhere. The kids broke a few windows -- McD's, Starbucks -- small stuff -- burned a few garbage cans. The police were using these people as extras. It was staged. I believe also the police had their own people in there, encouraging people to break stuff -- if people think I may be exaggerating, I saw supposed protesters -- they were screaming and so on -- and then later, when everything was over, the same people tackled other protesters and put handcuffs on them.

Another eyewitness, Peter Corr, notes that, as windows were being broken at Starbucks, a police line which was watching the crime did not move, let alone make arrests. Corr believes that the police did not want to interrupt a pretext to crack down on demonstators later. Not until the cameras got their fill of it.

These tactics of the police and authorities fit in well with a long tradition of dirty tricks against forces organized against oppression. During the 60s it was COINTELPRO. In the 70s you had such strange concoctions as the preposterous Symbionese Liberation Army, which somehow fell out of the sky one day without any legitimate community, labor or leftist organization ever hearing about them. As a set piece for the bourgeois radical-chic Patty Hearst, the SLA was a cop operation from the get-go, festooned in high guerrilla drag with machine guns and criss-crossed bullet belts. And in the 80s there was the case of the NASSCO shipyards union organizing campaign in San Diego, sabotaged by an exposed police agent. He infiltrated the legitimate militants' organization and made sure he was heard a lot talking about bombing the shipyard. The organizers were arrested in their car while innocently giving this provocateur a ride with dynamite sticks hidden in his bag. The police somehow knew just what to look for.

These warnings should not be construed as a blanket accusation that so-called anarchist groups or individuals advocating adventurist tactics are ipso facto agents. But organizations which allow themselves to be labeled by the corporate media as using violence as a key mode of operation leave themselves open to easy penetration and manipulation by police agents. I make a few suggestions:

1. The Anti-WTO forces should be alert to future attempts to paint opponents of corporate globalization schemes as terrorists. If some secret government agency itself created a nasty incident in which innocent victims were hurt in some anarchist-type bombing, it would not be the first time a government did such an act to manipulate public opinion.

2. The Anti-WTO movement should organize protests and pressure campaigns directed at CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN demanding that it open wide their studios and interview shows to spokespersons who want to discuss the political, substantive reasons for opposing the WTO and similar scams. We need to demand that the media look at the real news here, not people with purple hair smashing store windows. Why wasnt the story about the Longshoremens protest strike against the WTO reported? That wasnt as newsworthy as garbage cans being overturned?

3. We need to continue to develop and support the growing independent, anti-corporate media movement in print, cable-tv, radio, and internet, to insure that when the corporate media lie machine cranks up, we will have our own strong networks of information dissemination. Rest assured, we will need them because the lies have already started and there are going to be some whoppers.

Larry Duncan
lduncan@igc.org

From: Independent Media Center
http://www.indymedia.org