seattle David Greising in Chicago Tribune

[Maureen Therese Anderson]

Carrol wrote:
>Greising's story was based on the failure of a polite French delegate to
>get the protesters to "reason" with him. Greising's theme was that no one
>can reason with people who, like the protesters, don't know what they
>want. In general, a play on "they're all hippie-dippies."
>
>But Greising gets one nice item into his column: "He [ the French
>delegate] stopped to watch as  a woman in a yellow slicker and
>purple sweat pants [real relevant, huh?] directed the human wall
>while dancing and chanting atop a white mini--van. 'Shake your
>booty to the left, shake your booty to the right, hook your
>elbows and hold the line,' she sang out."

And he did get in a pretty good line (re gassed protesters who'd upended a
dumpster) about "now we know how Seattle stays so maddeningly clean:
litterers get gassed."  But yeah, his "hoping as only grown-ups can that
reason could triumph over enthusiasm" is an echo of the whole tone of the
ChiTrib's cover article: those window-breaking radical environmentalists
and anarchists on one side (number of protesters put at 5,000, up 2,000
from yesterday), and on the other the all-choked-up Mike Moore who speaks
on behalf of the "poor and marginalized of the world" who are looking to
the WTO as their saviors.

Then, in what's also proforma for mainstream press, the Trib will run
little articles that bring up other issues (e.g. today's back page one on
lack of democratic accountability in the global economy and the big
presence of "grown-up" progressive NGOs at the protests).  But none of this
ever gets integrated into the cover stories about anti-cap yahoos vs.
voice-of-reason, which is all most Trib readers will bother to read.

--M