>Folks can also riot, setting fire to cars, throwing beer bottles at cops, etc. -- as OSU football fans regularly do after games -- and make broadcast TV, but that's not what you have in mind. TV (with minor exceptions of occasional programs on C-Span and PBS) basically exists to specifically exclude reasoned left-wing discourse and peaceful left-wing demonstrations. It's a medium geared to sex, violence, and advertisement.
Its geared to advertising, the sex, violence and spectacle in general is merely incidental to attracting an audience so as to sell advertising. Admittedly large media owners are large capitalists and tend to lean towards a capitalist perspective. However it remains true that capitalists will compete with each other to sell you the rope to hang them, so being geared to advertising is a weakness that can be exploited.
Witness the way the black bloc anarchists have exploited the capitalist media's appetite for violent spectacle. Unfortunately of course, while the black bloc spectacles are effective short term tactics, they are actually counter-productive strategically. Historically anarchists have never been very strong on strategy though.
It is pointless to complain that the capitalist media will not give air time to peaceful protests. Since the whole point of such protests is to get media attention, this represents a failure of tactics on the part of the organisers, rather than any breach of the responsibility of the ruling elite. The elite have no responsibility to give their enemies a fair go, rather it is up to us to design tactics which work.
This can be done. It can even be done without adopting tactics which, like those of the black bloc, are strategically counter-productive. If mass demonstrations are ineffective, then it is obviously necessary to adopt different tactics to get a message through to the public. Including different tactics to manipulate the spectacle-oriented capitalist media.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas