Source: Nation of Change
It’s all kicking off everywhere in 2019. Haitians are revolting against a corrupt political system and their President Jovenel Moïse, who many see as a kleptocratic US puppet. In Ecuador, huge public manifestations managed to force President Lenín Moreno to backtrack on his IMF-backed neoliberal package that would have sharply cut government spending and increased transport prices (FAIR.org, 10/23/19).
Meanwhile, popular Chilean
frustration at the conservative Piñera administration boiled over into massive
protests that were immediately met with force. “We are at war,” announced President
Sebastián Piñera, echoing the infamous
catchphrase of former fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Piñera claimed that those
responsible for violently resisting him were “going to pay for their deeds” as
he ordered tanks through Santiago. (See FAIR.org, 10/23/19.)
Huge, ongoing anti-government
demonstrations are also engulfing Lebanon, Catalonia and
the United Kingdom.
Yet the actions that have by far
received the most attention in corporate media are those in Hong Kong, where
demonstrations erupted in response to a proposed extradition agreement with the
Chinese central government that opponents felt would undermine civil liberties
and Hong Kong’s semi-autonomous status. A search for “Hong Kong protests” on
October 25, 2019,
elicits 282 responses
in the last month in the New York Times, for example, compared
to 20 for “Chile
protests,” 43 for
Ecuador and 16 for Haiti.
The unequal coverage is even more pronounced on Fox News, where
there were 70 results
for Hong Kong over the same period and four, two and three for Chile, Ecuador and Haiti,
respectively.
This disparity cannot be explained
due to the protests’ size or significance, the number of casualties or the
response from the authorities. Eighteen
people have died during the ongoing protests in Haiti, 19 (and
rising) in Chile, while in Ecuador, protesters themselves
captured over 50
soldiers who had been sent in as Moreno effectively declared martial
law. In contrast, no one has been killed in Hong Kong, nor has the army been
called in, with Beijing expressing
full confidence in local authorities to handle proceedings. The
Chilean government announced it had arrested over 5,400
people in only a week of protests, a figure more than double
the number arrested in months of Hong Kong demonstrations (Bloomberg, 10/4/19).
Furthermore, social media have been awash with images and videos of
the suppression of
the protests worldwide.
One way of understanding why the
media is fixated on Hong Kong and less interested in the others is to look at
who is protesting, and why.
Worthy and Unworthy Victims
Over 30 years ago, in their
book Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky developed their theory of
worthy vs. unworthy victims to explain why corporate media cover certain
stories and why others are dropped. They compared the media coverage of a
single murdered priest in an enemy state (Communist Poland) to that of over 100
religious martyrs, including some US citizens, murdered in Central American
client states over a period of two decades. They found that not only did
the New York Times, Time, Newsweek and CBS
News dedicate more coverage to the single priest’s assassination, the
tone of coverage was markedly different: In covering the killing of Father
Jerzy Popieluszko, media expressed indignation, demanding justice and
condemning the barbarism of Communism. The killings of religious figures in
Central America by pro-US government groups, on the other hand, were reported
in a matter-of-fact manner, with little rhetorical outrage.
In other words, when official
enemies can be presented as evil and allies as sympathetic victims, corporate
media will be very interested in a story. In contrast, they will show far less
enthusiasm for a story when the “wrong” people are the villains or the victims.
On Hong Kong, the New York
Times published three editorials (6/10/19, 8/14/19, 10/1/19),
each lauding the “democracy-minded people” fighting to limit “the repressive
rule of the Chinese Communists,” condemning the Communist response as evidence
of the backward, “brutal paternalism of that system,” in which China “equates
greatness with power and dissent with treachery.” Hong Kong, on the other hand,
thanks to the blessing of being a former British colony, had acquired “a
Western political culture of democracy, human rights, free speech and
independent thought.” (The Times has not elected to publish
any editorials on the other protests.)
The Times also
ridiculed the idea that “foreign forces” (i.e., the US government) could be
influencing the protests, calling it a “shopworn canard” used by the Communist
government. Yet the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has officially
poured over $22
million into “identifying new avenues for democracy and
political reform in Hong Kong” or China since 2014. The Times editorials
did not mention this funding as possibly complicating their dismissal of
foreign involvement in the Hong Kong protests as a “canard.”
However, media (e.g., Voice of America, 10/11/19; Miami Herald, 10/9/19; Reuters, 10/9/19) are taking seriously the accusation that the Ecuadorian protests are, in fact, masterminded abroad, by President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, with the Guardian (10/8/19) going so far to describe the Ecuadorians not as “democracy-minded people,” but “rioters”—a label not appearing in connection with Hong Kong, except as an accusation by Chinese officials (e.g., Time, 10/2/19; CNN, 10/22/19), are almost universally condemned in coverage as part of a “repressive” (e.g., Vox, 8/29/19; Guardian, 10/19/19) “dictatorship” (New York Times, 8/29/19).
In the cases of the less-covered protests, the “wrong” people are protesting and the “wrong” governments are doing the repressing. As the Washington Post (10/14/19) noted on Haiti,
One factor keeping Moïse in power is support from the United States. US officials have been limited in their public comments about the protests.On Ecuador, the State Department has been more forthcoming, issuing a full endorsement of Moreno’s neoliberal austerity package:
The United States supports President Moreno and the Government of Ecuador’s efforts to institutionalize democratic practices and implement needed economic reforms…. We will continue to work in partnership with President Moreno in support of democracy, prosperity, and security.In other words, don’t expect any angry editorials denouncing US client states like Haiti or Ecuador, or arguing that the Chilean government’s repression of its protest movement shows the moral bankruptcy of capitalism. Indeed, corporate media (e.g., Guardian, 10/8/19; CNN, 10/8/19; USA Today, 10/10/19) emphasized the violence of the Ecuadorian protestors while downplaying Hong Kong’s—the New York Times (6/30/19) even inventing the phrase “aggressive nonviolence” to describe the Hong Kong protesters’ actions, so eager was it to frame the demonstrations against China as unquestionably laudable.
Which protest movements interest corporate media has little to do with their righteousness or popularity, and much more to do with whom they are protesting against. If you’re fighting against corporate power or corruption in a US-client state, don’t expect many TV cameras to show up; that revolution is rarely televised.
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