Activists are used to having their protests ignored, and their numbers downplayed in media accounts. Canadian Journalist Paul D.Boin has been monitoring coverage of recent massive protests in Italy in the afternath of the G-8 summit. Here’s what he reports on his Real News Network:

Yesterday (Tuesday, July 24), massive simultaneous demonstrations occurred in cities throughout Italy in response to what many Italians feel was an unjustified use of force during the Genoa G8 meetings. Yesterday’s spontaneous peaceful protests was also a reaction to the brutal police raid of two schools housing participants in the Genoa Social Forum and members of the Independent Media Center, that also went largely unreported or illreported. Accounts from Reuters {Reuters (Rome) 2001}, the Indy Media Centre {Brabinger 2001}, and other European news sources confirm that approximately 150,000 people marched through the city centre’s of Rome (approx. 50,000), Milan (approx. 45,000), Balogna (approx. 15,000), Florence (approx. 6,000), Genoa (approx. 5,000), Napoli (approx. 5,000), Palermo (approx. 2,000), Trieste (approx. 2,000) and a number of others, bringing the total number of participating cities to about thirty. Remarkably, if you were watching, listening, or reading North America’s mainstream news media, you’d think this real world event never happened.

Participants in these Italy-wide marches represented a broad coagulation of pro-democracy (anti-globalization) activists, environmentalists, union members, parliamentarians, families and children. Apparently such a huge and broad-based expression of outrage aimed at the Italian government, and other G8 nations, isn’t ‘newsworthy’ to ‘leading’ news outlets like the CBC, the National Post, CNN and others. This real news story consistently remained invisible on CBC radio’s World Report, CNN’s Global Minute, and the entire July 25th edition of the Globe and Mail. This while CBC Television’s newscast managed to find time to air “N Sync’s newest CD”, and CNN managed to fit “McDonald’s new public stock offering in Japan” into its ‘Global Minute’ slot (itself struggling for news air through the cracks of the CNN-frenzy over the Condit-Levy affair).

The Globe and Mail, while doing it’s best to ignore the story, managed to include a horribly misleading and skeletal wire copy paragraph piece (in their World Report box on page A9) that read: “Tens of thousands of people, many shouting “Killers, killers,” protested throughout Italy yesterday against the use of police force that left one person dead and more than 230 injured at the recent Group of Eight summit in Genoa. There were no immediate reports of serious violence during marches in Rome, Genoa, Florence, Bologna, Palermo and a host of other smaller cities across Italy.” {Reuters 2001}. The Toronto Star also included a wire copy article that lead with “Thousands marched in cities across Italy…” The piece continued that marchers were “demanding the resignation of the country’s Interior Minister over the death of a protester during the Group of Eight summit.” {Reuters/Canadian Press 2001} Besides scandalously understating the numbers of people in the streets (the Toronto Star actually managed to include the figures for Balogna, Florence and Palermo, while failing to mention the huge turnouts in Rome and Milan. Since the participants for these two cities alone amounted to 95,000 perhaps the crafter of this piece felt the people of Rome and Milan’s role wouldn’t go to well with the lead line “Thousands march…”), both reports again focused on the already internationally known death of Carlo Guilianni, while neglected the terrible beatings that people took while working and sleeping in the two school buildings at the close of the G8 summit.

So why wasn’t this massive news story ‘newsworthy’, or worthy of proper and accurate coverage, to our agenda-setting news media? Thankfully, there are media scholars and authors that can help guide us through the media fog towards an answer. James Winter, from the University of Windsor, point’s out that “the news media in Canadian [Western] society predominantly may be seen as promoting a narrow ideological ‘consensus’ on the world around us.” Winter labels this ‘consensus’, and the process that forms it, ‘Media Think.’ “By this I mean a form of group think on a vast scale which permeates the lives of elites, news workers, and much of society at large…It is a process by which the mainstream, corporate media largely function, wittingly and unwittingly, as the delivery system for neoconservative (and neoliberal) dogma…It’s the means by which the media create particular pictures of the world in our heads, all the while omitting and thereby preventing the formation of alternative, competing pictures.” {Winter 1997 :114}.

Robert Hackett, with other researchers based at Simon Fraser Univiversity, point out that “…the most important and debilitating blind spots in the Canadian media: [are] the lack of coverage afforded to Canada’s deepening social inequalities, growing corporate power, and alternatives to neo-liberal economic perspectives.” {Hackett, et al. 2000: 166}.

And, of course, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s media analysis revealed that “views that challenge fundamental premises or suggest that the observed modes of exercise of state power are based on systemic factors will be excluded from the mass media even when elite controversy over tactics rages fiercely.” {Herman & Chomsky 1988: xii}.

Sure, mainstream publishers, editors, and even many journalists (in perpetual denial), will speak volumes on how this tradition of media analysis is baseless. But actions or, more accurately in this recent G8 case, inactions speak far louder than words.

Paul D. Boin is an investigative journalist and educator based in Ontario, Canada, the founder of the Real News Network (to be officially launched in October), and is presently completing his doctoral degree in Education (in the program focus of Critical Global and Community Issues, at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto). He can be reached at pboin@home.com]

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