Activists also play the game. The protest's aim often becomes spectacle. They aim to get on the news, the news is literally about "The New" so it needs endless different things, not the same old stuff. They view getting their message on the news as reaching people.
You can see also the many complaints from activists when mainstream media do not cover their protest. Or when they view it as biased.
Ultimately what is a protest for? In a way the radical environmental activists which caused actual disruption to normal peoples day could be seen to have more real life effect than getting on the news about it. To me it's interesting that these environmental activists have changed tactic away from the unpopular but effective disruption to more media friendly traditional protests with the occasional spectacular event. e.g. the very media friendly and almost predictable arrest of Ms. Thunberg on camera after a peaceful walk with banners.
Thinking about Dune. He who controls the media controls the universe. The Dune solution would be to take control over the media which is why we see television studios as initial targets to be seized during any coup or revolution. This is still playing the game.
The article doesn't go all the way and stops with "media is biased". They see the value and need of the news media and it does not criticise the whole system. Their complaint is that the other player in their game isn't being fair (often true), not that the game itself is spectacle.
But the solution is not more disruption or revolution but to ask: How do you change one's own mind about something and then how can you begin to change someone else?
>The Dune solution would be to take control over the media which is why we see television studios as initial targets to be seized during any coup or revolution.
This is an interesting piece but seems to treat journalism as a natural process outside of human control. Like, they made a graph and learned/proved that newspapers only write about student divestment demands when they do physically visible protests and clash with police. Then, the stories that get written focus on those clashes with police rather than the substantive demands of the students. Sure, this is all true, but it's all passive voice, like journalism and policing are something akin to gravity that we can only interrogate experimentally. This is the same trick that journalists themselves pull with language like "officer-involved shootings" to talk about incidents where cops shoot citizens.
The honest way to say this is that mainstream outlets don't want to publish pieces that indicate what the students' demands are, and instead prefer to quote the Governor. Then one could ask why that is, and try to come to some answer.
You can see also the many complaints from activists when mainstream media do not cover their protest. Or when they view it as biased.
Ultimately what is a protest for? In a way the radical environmental activists which caused actual disruption to normal peoples day could be seen to have more real life effect than getting on the news about it. To me it's interesting that these environmental activists have changed tactic away from the unpopular but effective disruption to more media friendly traditional protests with the occasional spectacular event. e.g. the very media friendly and almost predictable arrest of Ms. Thunberg on camera after a peaceful walk with banners.
Thinking about Dune. He who controls the media controls the universe. The Dune solution would be to take control over the media which is why we see television studios as initial targets to be seized during any coup or revolution. This is still playing the game.
The article doesn't go all the way and stops with "media is biased". They see the value and need of the news media and it does not criticise the whole system. Their complaint is that the other player in their game isn't being fair (often true), not that the game itself is spectacle.
But the solution is not more disruption or revolution but to ask: How do you change one's own mind about something and then how can you begin to change someone else?