Measuring and Muffling Dissent -- By the Numbers 
by Glen Ford
www.dissidentvoice.org
February 1, 2007
First Published in Black Agenda Report



 

Organizers are once again crying foul over the corporate media's undercount of last weekend's massive anti-war rally in Washington, DC. The danger here is not the undercount, which is to be expected from a lying media, but a "movement" practice that focuses on Big Events, to the detriment of grassroots organizing. After all, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Either the largest or second largest U.S. demonstration yet against the Iraq war occurred in Washington, this past weekend, or it didn't. There will be no official figure. Ever since the U.S. Parks Service got caught brazenly underestimating the multitudes that converged on the Capitol Mall for the Million Man March, in 1995, the feds have refused to release protest crowd counts. In effect, the Park Service was saying: believe our undercount, or you'll get no count at all.

Federal silence on the numbers actually better serves the interests of the powers-that-be than the previous policy of lying about crowd size. In the absence of an official estimate, corporate media become the default public arbiters of protest numbers. Thus, corporate media tell tens of millions of us that merely "tens of thousands" showed up for the United for Peace and Justice rally, on Saturday, while organizers inform their far more limited audiences that 400-500,000 people participated.

U.S. corporate media -- collectively, as cynical and dishonest a human cohort as has ever been assembled, far out-slicking the business/political class they serve -- are sticklers for the numbers when the interests of the powerful are involved. Mass audiences are bombarded with ephemeral daily statistics from stock exchanges, despite the fact only a tiny fraction of the public cares about or has any direct interest in the cascade of digits and decimal points. Commerce-related data are infinitely interesting; people-related data are not, unless related to consumer spending habits. Data that tend to affirm the superiority of the American political-economic order, such as GDP (gross domestic product), are celebrated. Data that illuminate gross disparities in wealth and income are left buried inside the grand macro-measurements -- secrets made unavailable to the general public by the corporate organs that claim a special mandate (privilege) to inform the public.

Corporate media analyze ad nauseam the slightest movement of polling data among corporate-vouched candidates for national office; every twitch and quiver of the graph is deemed a vital statistic on which the fate of the nation and planet might depend. But facts that pertain to economic and political issues that actually are vital to national and world survival, such as public sentiment for removing a criminal president from office, are treated as quasi-reality: facts that, if left unmeasured and unreported, might just disappear like an elusive quark. In 2005, activists were forced to finance their own poll to plumb the depths of pro-impeachment opinion, a subject none of the major polling firms -- whose reason for being is to slice and dice public opinion -- thought worth exploring on their own. The corporate pollsters boycotted reality in the knowledge that there was no market among their prime customers -- corporate media -- for unwanted facts.

Anti-establishment activists bitterly bemoan the constant corporate "white-out" of their mass actions, and many blame business media boycotts for all the failings of various progressive "movements." Yet many of these same activists nevertheless buy into the game, measuring their own effectiveness by the size of the crowds gathered on the appointed day, and then crying foul when corporate media predictably fix the scorecards or ignore the event entirely. Despite the certainty of corporate media bias or indifference, many activists persist in making large public demonstrations the focus of their organizing agenda, constantly "moving" towards the next demonstration -- as if that is the definition of a "movement." If the numbers are large, the whole exercise is seen to be validated. However, this is a balloon that corporate media can easily deflate, actively or passively, by either lying about the numbers or simply pretending the Big Event didn't happen.

Activists often forget whose field they are playing on when they choose to invest large proportions of their resources in the game of media event-creation. In many cases, the overarching demands of the Big Event detract from political education among potential cadres in the long term struggle, and from actions at the point of oppression, so to speak, far removed from the hoped-for glare of cameras.

They forget that The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. Or, maybe, all they're looking for is a media event.

This is not a critique of United for Peace and Justice, a coalition of 1,400 local and national organizations, or of any particular anti-war grouping. Rather, it is an experience-based observation of an activist tendency that is peculiar to hyper-media societies, especially the United States -- a tendency whose logic leads to "virtual" struggles, rather than the real thing. The weaknesses of such Big Event-oriented organizing were painfully evident in the 1995 Million Man March and the Millions More March, ten years later.

Literally hundreds of groups and grouplets committed prodigious energies to bring a major cities-worth of Black humanity to the Capitol Mall for a day. However, when the sun set on the vast, dispersing crowds that had been drawn from big places and small across the nation, there was no master list of participants -- no mechanism to bind these "millions" together except the collective experience of a day on The Mall. As usual, much of the post-rally discussion revolved around the corporate media undercount.

If the ten-year "Millions March" interval is a guide, there will be another massive gathering of African Americans in the year 2015.

Given the anti-war movement's ability to draw on much more abundant white resources, we might look forward to another massive event within six months to a year, the minimum time it takes to inflate that kind of balloon. Unfortunately, the imperial juggernaut does not stand still, even when it is objectively defeated -- rather, it lashes out in all directions, altering the terms and terrain of conflict. Slow-moving domestic resistance cannot hope to keep up the pace, especially if the measure of success is bodies present on The Mall -- much less the corporate media's reporting of these episodic events.

Mega-events have their place and purpose. Properly, these events provide a catharsis for ever-growing legions of cadre developed under local conditions yet knitted together in a larger political mission. When the events, themselves, are the purpose for organizing -- when the message is dependent on transmittal by the enemy's media -- disappointment and demoralization are inevitable.

The revolution will never be fit for prime time, until we take over the cameras. Stop complaining about the coverage. Organize!

Glen Ford is Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, where this article first appeared. He can be contacted at: Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Other Articles by Glen Ford

* Barack Obama: The Mania and the Mirage
* James Brown: The Man Who Named a People
 

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