> One thing I've noticed is that articles covering protests on american
> indymedia sites tend to present mostly photographs with a few lines of
> text, while the german newswire usually has long reports and few fotos.
> And in activism there, everyone has to go to hours long pre- and post-
> meetings for every action and discuss all the ramifications, and much
> more so than that ANSWER marches, you get more of the feeling that
> everyone in the crowd knows what is going and has read a common
> syllabus. The water cannon looks entirely expected and anticipated.
American activists are incredibly lazy and self-centered. They want easy results without doing any of the hard work. That's why permitted protests are so popular. It gives the illusion that you've accomplished something, when the only thing you've done is commuted to a big open air
picnic with no food.
I'm pretty down on Indymedia right now, especially the American ones. There are a few like New York City who are doing awesome work, but the rest are just blah. It's really fucking hard to get activists to do write-ups after demos. I tell activists all the time that writing shit after the demos is as important as doing the demo or action. You going to let the corporate media NOT tell your story? You gotta win the battle of the story, which is one thing that activists did well in the two years after Seattle.
Local news coverage on Indymedias? Good luck. Local activists have opinions and they organize meetings, but they can't be bothered to do any research or even write a good op-ed. Again, the lazy American form of local indie journalism is conspiracy theories. Of course, it's just hard an expensive to do good local reporting, even for newspapers, which is why American Indymedias won't become the 2005 equivalent of the 1969 underground newspaper. The resources and people are there, they are just lazy and want their revolution shown to them on TV.
Chuck