GET SMART EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT FALL 2006

Nose for news: An effigy of George Bush served as a focal point for protesters-but not for media.

Learned Apathy?

A Temple professor and her students document a demonstration rebuffed by local media.

by Arielle Emmett

It’s the first week of October, and a group of Philadelphia protesters—no more than 300 by eye count—have assembled beside a larger-than-life George W. Bush puppet at the Municipal Building Plaza adjacent to City Hall. Poised to march in the World Can’t Wait: Drive out the Bush Regime rally, a series of antiwar speak-ins and demonstrations staged in more than 230 U.S. cities over the course of the week, the group is surrounded by black-suited Philadelphia police officers and their video cameras. No media are present.

Patrolling the crowd at high noon, in sunlight that throws the shadows of City Hall and police cameras into high relief, the cameramen, who carry no visible identification, refuse to speak with demonstrators. When challenged by several conference organizers who say video cameras are there to intimidate the crowd, the cameramen, all in dark sunglasses, refocus their zoom lenses onto speakers’ faces. They keep shooting.

“We love our country, and that’s why we’re here,” says Bill Kaye, who’s here to sing at the five-hour speak-in and march. “People demonstrating are here for peace.”

Gert Copperman, 84, a Philadelphia physician and demonstrator, says, “I think we need to take to the streets because we’re as close to fascism as we’ve ever been in this country.”

Among the speakers at the peace rally are a Temple professor; antiwar activist Michael Berg, father of slain contractor Nick Berg, whose decapitation in Iraq by alleged Al Qaeda operatives was caught on video; a member of the Penn Faculty and Staff Against the War; MOVE co-founder Pam Africa; several Green Party candidates; members of the Granny Peace Brigade; and spokespeople for the Kensington Welfare Rights Union.

Speeches range from furious to eloquent, from condemnation of the Iraq War to Bush’s endorsement of the recently passed Military Commissions Act (also known as the “torture bill” that denies the writ of habeas corpus to “enemy combatants,” including U.S. citizens and legal aliens), among many other domestic and environmental policies.

Copperman, who was arrested in June with several grandmothers for trying to enlist in the Army at a Philadelphia military recruitment center, decries the administration’s neglect of healthcare and affordable medical insurance. “I’ve been a physician for 50 years, and I’ve never seen such a lack of medical care in our country,” she says. “We now have Third World medicine in the U.S.”

Local media are conspicuously absent from the demonstration. No reporters or cameramen from local TV, newspapers, magazines or radio stations are here to cover the event, save for WHYY-FM, which has sent a contractor to the rally to take an organizer’s sound bite after most of the key speeches are over.

A few Temple University journalism students have come to cover the march, which proceeds in an orderly phalanx around City Hall and through parts of Center City. Shouting “Drive Bush out” and “Hey, ho, the Bush regime has to go,” demonstrators attract a smattering of attention from shopkeepers, pedestrians and drivers perturbed by blocked traffic.

It was a busy day for media coverage in Philly. On Oct. 5 Philadelphia journalists were busy reporting on Presidents Clinton and George H. W. Bush, who were here to accept the Liberty Medal at the National Constitution Center.

Around the corner at City Hall, members of the Philadelphia Phantoms hockey team were signing autographs with reporters in attendance. KYW Newsradio was reporting on a sinkhole that had developed in Fishtown. Then there were the murders in Amish country, and the media’s attention to funerals in Nickel Mines, Pa.

It’s midday. Demonstrators and the crowd are confronting police alone, without the media to provide any watchdog function. Philadelphia Domestic Preparedness Division Inspector Robert Tucker, who’s at the scene, tells one of the university reporters, “Don’t worry. We’re not really interested in the people who are speaking. The radical element in the crowd [is being tracked].”

Certain anarchic elements apparently flock to these events, Tucker says, noting the police are recording file footage of every speaker and demonstrator in case any confrontations or destruction of property should occur during the day. “Eventually, the films [of the majority] will be destroyed or taped over,” Tucker says. He doesn’t specify when.

The event was poorly attended, and demonstrators, including business people, grandmothers, university students and disabled men in wheelchairs, were visibly disappointed by the lack of crowds or media support.

“It’s almost impossible to get media coverage of nonviolent protests unless there are several thousands of people attending,” says Jack DuVall, president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict in Washington, D.C., an organization documenting peaceful democracy movements, and co-author (with Peter Ackerman) of the book A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict, which was a popular PBS series in 2000.

DuVall believes most reporters have become blase and hardened. They’re disinterested in peace movements, finding spokespeople like antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan boring and often strident despite enormous mainstream disapproval of White House policies.

“Each passing year the media become less substantive than they are sensational,” DuVall says. In addition, “there has been an enormous increase in the surveillance of dissidents thanks to the technical means of surveillance available today.”

Surveillance may have a chilling effect on the crowds. Privacy intrusions, the Military Commissions Act, the removal of constitutional guarantees and the Patriot Act, among other concerns, may also be fear factors.

“Fear is a question we’re considering now,” says Debra Sweet, national coordinator for World Can’t Wait, the grassroots organization formed a year ago that has won the support of several celebrity progressives, including Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, Ed Asner and Alice Walker.

“During the demonstrations, we expected, and clearly the police expected, five times the number of people who actually turned out,” Sweet says. “In New York we got 5,000 to 6,000 demonstrators; we were expecting 25,000 to 30,000. We’re trying to find out why people who said they would come out didn’t.”

Surprisingly, the strikes and speak-ins nationwide did attract media attention—400 articles, says Sweet. Media included published reports of the World Can’t Wait rallies in Washington, D.C.; New York; Los Angeles; Seattle; Portland, Ore.; and Chicago by the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, Fox News in Portland, Ore. and La Jornada in Mexico. Philadelphia media were the notable exception, and local demonstrators weren’t surprised.

“We get absolutely no publicity for these events,” says Kay, the musician who attends peace events regularly. “People who are demonstrating here are for peace, and they aren’t radicals. They’re moderates, absolutely pro-America. But most people assume the demonstrators are radical,” he adds. “People assume there’s nothing happening in the streets, but a lot is happening. The papers aren’t covering it.”

Arielle Emmett is a journalism professor at Temple University. Additional reporting for this story was provided by Temple journalism students Katie Annesley, Kyle Brady, Jeved Cumberbatch, Stephen Goslin, Caitlin Grogan, Samantha Kinnan, Liddy Miller, Ryan Ruth and Kristin Zartman. Comments on this story can be sent to letters@philadelphiaweekly.com