Lies, Damn Lies Media gets creative with a16 by Jamie Cohen and Adam Hurter Nearly a dozen people, most of them Wesleyan students, were locked together in devices known as lockboxes on the corner of G and 21 in Washington D.C. on April 16. It was a happy little corner, as blockaded intersections go, with plenty of chanting and talking, eating and even back massages with those locked down without use of arms. In between the circle of people linked together with lockboxes were a handful of activists with their necks connected by U-Locks or bodies connect by thinner bicycle locks. Many people, mostly Wesleyan students, lined the perimeter and formed a "soft block" of a road- linking arms to prevent delegates from entering their meeting. With no police standing over the intersection all was relatively relaxed. At about noon that all changed when a band of police officers came tearing up the street in a car and a van. Within fifty yards of the protesters they hopped out, batons in hand, and approached the demonstrators. The cops walked right up to the intersection and started physically tossing aside demonstrators, evidently uncaring about the fate of those they were attacking. They marched right into the crowd and swung their batons randomly. Never did any of the officers speak, even to ask the protesters to clear the intersection. The police instigated the violence entirely, attacking peaceful demonstrators. Other protesters came from both sides to provide relief, and the cops backed off, but two student activists who had been in lockboxes were left with broken noses. This incident didn't end here. The cops charged again, and this time members of the Black Block, a radical and sometimes militant anarchist collective, pushed them back. At some point during this time someone threw a yellow construction barrel at the cops, and this apparently upset them. Eventually the cops retreated as the protesters chanted "Peaceful protest! Peaceful protest!" over and over. Within minutes musicians were on the scene, filling the air with notes of love and hope, to fill the spirits of those who had been attacked. All this was witnessed by dozens of Wesleyan students. The following day, this blurb appeared as part of the Washington Post article on the protests: "According to witnesses, including reporters, police also hit demonstrators with batons in confrontations at 14th, and I streets NW, and 21st street and G streets NW. In the last incident, they were responding after an officer was struck by an orange construction barrel thrown by a protester." “A bus accompanied by two dozen police officers tried to make its way along G toward 21st and came right up on her crowd of protesters. Black-clad anarchists, waving their black and red flags, faced off against them. Some protesters heckled officers. About that time, a plastic orange construction barrel was thrown over the crowd, striking an officer. A videotape showed several officers rushing the group, knocking over protesters and striking some. When order was restored, protesters massed and called for reinforcements. Eventually police backed down G toward 22nd." When questioned about that segment of the article, the Post reporter, David Montgomery, said that the information came from a videotape that another reporter viewed. Montgomery did not even see the tape himself- it’s like the game telephone. As is evident, the Post misrepresented what actually happened at the Wes-dominated intersection. If this were the exception to the way the mainstream media wrote about the a16 event, that would be one thing, but the manner in which the Washington Post distorted what happened at G and 21 is typical of the mass media coverage of the D.C. event. Often the press was blatant in its inaccuracies, and it started even before the major action on April 16. The day before, on April 16, about 75 cop cars and the fire marshall raided the protesters’ convergence center, kicking out the many hundreds who were there. The convergence center was a totally legal space that the activists were using for meetings, non-violence trainings and other trainings, a place to make puppets, etc. It was very evident to the activists in D.C. that the cops had planned the raid as a tactic of breaking up the protesters at a key time, of damaging organization and morale. It was a very important tactical maneuver by the police, who initially didn't even allow protesters to take the puppets or food that had been made there. It sent the protesters into a wild scurry to find another place to use as a base. To rationalize the bust, D.C. Police Chief Ramsey said that the building was a fire hazard and that a bottle with a rag was found in it, what could potentially be a Molotov cocktail. A lot could have been said (and was being said on the streets) speculating why the center was shut down, what that meant for both the protesters and cops, etc. The article in The Washington Post the next day stated: “About 8:30 a.m., D.C. fire and police officials raided the protesters' convergence center headquarters on Florida Avenue NW, citing fire code violations. They ordered as many as 200 people out, cordoned off the 1300 block and brought in bomb-sniffing dogs. "I saw a plastic liter-type bottle, with the label removed, stuffed with a rag and a wick," Gainer said. "There was no accelerant in the bottle. But to me, that's a Molotov cocktail ready to go." The article then went into the puppets. There was no quote, and many people certainly would have given one, about the bullshit of the bust and how it was merely a move by police used to slow the protesters. This is all that The New York Times wrote on the issue: “The day began with the police, contending that the ramshackle warren of warehouses known as the "Convergence Center" was a fire hazard, evicting more than 200 protesters shortly before 9 a.m. and sealing it off indefinitely. The site was the nerve center for demonstrations planned for the next two days as a repeat of the chaotic Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in December. "The fire marshals were concerned about the safety and well-being of the people who are staying at that location," Chief Ramsey said. "It's a safety issue." Other mainstream media sources covered the issue similarly. The independent media covering D.C. reported about the issue in much more depth. After the action itself, the reporting didn’t get much better. In general the mainstream media's account of the violence between the protesters and police was hugely distorted. The papers make it very clear that the police used force only when directly, physically challenged by protesters. The April 17 Boston Globe article states, "[Police] confronted protesters only when they tried to break within the security zones." Almost every description of a violent encounter in any of the major newspapers fingers the protesters as the instigators. "Protesters who knocked over barricades and attacked officers were met with nightsticks, pepper spray and smoke bombs," the Globe wrote. The New York Times went so far as suggesting that the protesters would have liked to have recreated the chaos of Seattle. "The combination allowed the police here mostly to avoid the kind of widespread chaos that disrupted world trade meetings in Seattle last year, a feat protesters said they hoped to repeat." No protester would have said he/she wanted “widespread chaos.” That chaos was caused by the police in Seattle in the first place, not the protesters. However, the majority of the images on TV and in the papers pictured acts of violence (either on the part of police or protesters), leading the general public to conclude that the protest was violent on the part of its participants. Instead of concentrating on the overwhelming non-violent nature of the protests, the media devoted the majority of the coverage to the violent instances followed by inaccurate descriptions of what occurred. The press misled the general public. The mainstream media also did a great injustice to the events of a16 by deeming it a failure. The headline of the Washington Times on April 17 read, "Protest fails to disrupt meeting." The article begins, "A handful of World Bank protesters charged police with a length of wire fence and pelted officers with rocks and bottles two blocks from the White House during scattered skirmished that did nothing to interrupt the scheduled meeting of International Monetary Fund delegates yesterday." Furthermore, the lead of this article is actually untrue. While the protests may not have shut down the meetings, they most certainly disrupted the meetings. If nothing else, they caused the delegates to rearrange their entire schedules so they could arrive at the building at 5:00 AM, or in some cases spend the night there. While some newspapers did recognize that the protesters were able to disrupt the meetings and send a powerful message, many were quick to label the protest a failure simply because the IMF meeting did take place. More importantly, this label of failure accentuates the fact that the vast majority of the mainstream press did not address the real issue at hand: the problems with the IMF and the World Bank. The press was very quick to write about the police who "outwitted the protesters" and escorted the delegates in pre-dawn, and even quicker to write about the instances of violence which the protesters instigated. But they hardly addressed the reason the protesters were out on the streets, trying to prevent the delegates from attending their meetings. In fact, looking through The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Boston Globe, there was not a single article written about the problems of the IMF and World Bank. These were the fundamental reasons the majority of the protesters were even on the streets on April 17. Part of the job of a journalist covering a protest is to delve into the issue from many different angles. While there was a little bit of that due in newspapers it was virtually non-existent in April 17 papers, when the most people would be reading. The mainstream media also paid very little attention to the issue of globalization. The articles simply reported that the world finance leaders would take the demonstrator’s claims into consideration. The Washington Times wrote, “World finance ministers celebrated the health of the world economy in daylong meetings yesterday at the International Monetary Fund building, largely oblivious to demonstrations outside.” There were a few journalists who reported the events of a16 with accuracy. Sadly, the vast majority of the mainstream media printed inaccurate information which often demonized the protesters and portrayed the police as simply responding to the violence of the demonstrators. They also completely neglected to address the most important aspect of the day, namely, the focus on the failure of the world’s financial institutions to help the world’s poor.