[lbo-talk] A Form Letter for Corporate Journalists

Chuck0 chuck at mutualaid.org
Mon Feb 28 19:34:41 PST 2005


From Infoshop News: http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20050228163331712

A Form Letter for Corporate Journalists

Dear self-styled journalist;

The inaccuracies your profession produces about people with my political affiliation have become so common that I no longer have the time to respond to each instance individually. I have therefore created this form letter.

The fact that you are reading this means that you either made something up, or repeated a ridiculous statement, about anarchists. Don't feel bad, it's a old journalistic tradition. Perhaps you said we throw water balloons filled with urine at cops. Perhaps you printed a profile of one of us under a picture of someone else holding a gun. Perhaps you flippantly called us violent terrorists while ignoring the terror and violence that police officers routinely inflict upon demonstrators at large protests, not to mention communities of color. Perhaps you spent columns talking about an injured police officer while ignoring reports of rape and torture coming out of the jails where some of us were held.

Don't worry, par for the course.

Maybe something bad happened and you instantly assumed we did it. Maybe the cops said something outlandish about us and you obediently acted as their press release distribution service. Maybe you picked up a story from some “Is-Elvis-Alive?” tabloid and presented its shock-jocking entertainment as news. Maybe you gave one of us a one-sentence sound bite in which to respond to paragraphs worth of unattributed allegations. Or maybe you went to a protest, found yourself a creatively dressed young person, got him to say “Fuck the system!” and then had a slick pr flack from the other side respond to it. That's OK, it happens all the time.

Looking through the lens of corporate journalism, it seems that there are only three kinds of people in America: liberals, conservatives, and crackpots. Not only that, but you don't seem to be allowed to be a very liberal liberal or a very conservative conservative. Any attempt to step out of that narrow band of allowable discourse results in being ignored, pathologized, or lied about. I admit that I'm not very comfortable sharing a social position with Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, and Michael Badnarik, not to mention the hoards of Greens, liberal democrats, Libertarians, socialists, and other flavors of dissenter who only appear on your radar when they get in the way of something that you consider important. It's not your fault, that's what higher education does to people.

We anarchists love to debate about how we should respond to this problem. Some of us simply refuse to have anything to do with you. They ask why we should legitimize something so blatantly unfair by unnecessarily participating in it. Others like the idea of building alternatives, but recognize that you folks have the power at the moment, and engaging with you couldn't hurt, might help a little, and doesn't have to take much time. I fall into the latter camp, and so I enclose a link to a web page of frequently asked questions about anarchists, in the hopes that you are simply naïve as opposed to willfully ignorant.

http://www.infoshop.org/faq/index.html



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