via: The Vanity Press
From The Globe & Mail Protest coverage: All live, all the time, all shallow. It was black versus black on the streets and nobody asked why
See, the G20 is the Oscars of the protest-world. Tons of media attention, not much context. Photo-ops and fame. And television coverage of the G20 Summit and the protests in Toronto has been drearily predictable, and mostly as mindless as Oscars coverage. The protests – representing nothing more than infantile, pay-attention-to-me-Mommy exhibitionism and destruction – are photo-opportunities as much as the politicians’ statements and handshakes, are photo-ops. Getting on television is pretty much the point of everything, and television loves live, violent action as it loves movie stars.
Thus, so much of our TV news seemed to be salivating at the prospect of protests. Dramatic footage! Riot police! Gangs of roving youths. Running battles on the street! And it became stupendously obvious in the lead-up to Friday and Saturday that local TV news was worshipping at the altar of local police authorities. Local TV news tends to gravitate toward authority on a daily basis anyway, but in Toronto in the last week the sense of paranoia fostered by the police was absorbed and spread to a ridiculous extent.
As a result, obvious questions were never asked. No context for the rioting and destruction that was to come on Saturday in Toronto was ever provided. This was an occasion in which all the shallowness and predictability of TV news was glaringly illuminated.
Far as I can tell, nobody ever asked anyone in authority – government or police – if the grandiosity of the security preparations in downtown Toronto wasn’t an invitation, a challenge even, to the pseudo-anarchists to attack and do their worst. Nobody in the TV news racket seemed willing to ask why, if “security†was the main concern, the G20 was being held in the core of a major city in the first place.
Nobody on TV was prepared, or indeed intellectually equipped, one suspects, to see the enormous fences and the extreme disruption of downtown life and business, as a symbolic act of hostility against a population, and as symbolic examples of the remoteness of the powerful from ordinary people.
If you would like to be part of a call for a public inquiry, go to Canadians Demanding a Public Inquiry into Toronto G20
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty refuses to discuss the amendments to the Public Works Protection Act which expire today.
