Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal had large photos on their front pages yesterday of student thugs attacking the police in London (framed by a huge graffiti scroll “REVOLUTION”), Rome, and Bologna to “protest” tuition and education cuts. What a boon to anarchy—having your self-righteous tantrums treated as important and newsworthy. I don’t know how to break out of the dilemma that all such preening displays of lawlessness pose. Ideally, they would not command any breathless coverage from reporters who come running, cameras flashing, at the slightest hint of revolt against the “establishment.” Pretending that such theatrics are significant is especially galling when the protesters are ignorant students who don’t understand anything about the world and certainly not about work and commerce. Yet at some level one does need to know what is going on. Perhaps photos of riots against common-sense government reforms or good-faith police actions could be balanced by photos of businessmen struggling to balance their books while drowning in a sclerotic, state-sodden economy.
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I read several books that predicted that the proles might whine.
I don’t have a problem with the coverage, I just wish the headline would be “Why are we funding these ignorant jerks?”
It’s an unfortunate problem that the beneficiaries of government action are often visible, but the people harmed are invisible. There are all sorts of stories about how people suffer because government cuts a program, but few stories about how people benefited because their taxes went down because they didn’t have to pay for the program.
Sometimes I wish the voting age were 30.
You are making quite the assumption that those photos are representative of what is happening.
Kele, I think Heather’s point is they’re not representative, or at least that such photos often aren’t. But no matter how unrepresentative, the photos are the core of the media coverage.
Oh come on, these “riots” are handbags. Real riots yet to come.
If it bleeds, it leads. I know a reporter who was assigned to cover a protest. When he got to the scene, there wasn’t one. His editor told him to create one. As W.R. Hearst said, when sending a photog to cover the Spanish-American matter: “You provide the pictures; I’ll provide the war.”
Well, Calfornia did the same. In the past 30 years, Ca went from almost no fees for college because of heavy property taxes prior to prop 13 to charging 6,000 at the cal state system and 10,000 and the youth went crazy and protested but not as bad as Europe which had college freebies longer than California did.
When drunken jerks run on the field at baseball games, there’s an understanding between the various broadcasters and the league that those people will not be shown on television, precisely for the reason Heather implies: they’re doing it to get attention. Treating it as newsworthy purely because it happens would be rewarding them.