corrects a frequent misconception among the critics of nonviolence (and many of its less-informed proponents as well): classic nonviolence never, in truth, sought to convert its opponents; rather, it played to the cameras of mass media by embarrassing its opponents before a wider audience—and very effectively so. As one civil rights movement participant said, “We were not simply addressing our immediate opponents. What we were doing was addressing the larger audience, the nation, the world, because the strategy in nonviolence is that you educate a large number of constituents and win them on your side. In fact, even though we as African Americans were the minority, no change could happen unless you have the sympathy of the majority, if not the active participation.”55
Classic nonviolence, in the hands of figures such as Gandhi and King, was anything but a naive faith in the innate goodness of the imperial British officers with their bludgeons or the Bull Connors with their dogs. However, just as past means of successful dissent have been skillfully preempted in the neoliberal age through indirect rule, consumerism, nonprofit recuperation, and policing patterns replacing explicitly racial laws, so the mass publics that classic nonviolence relied on have been reconstituted by shifts in the nature of mass media. Once again, hegemonic forces have done quite well in foreclosing the opportunities successfully exploited by previous generations. Modern images analogous to those of My Lai are scant when journalists must choose between “embedded” reporting and being shot. The only exceptions are occasional internal leaks carried out with great courage in the certainty of terrible reprisal: Chelsea Manning, rather than receiving the Gandhi Peace Prize, as Daniel Ellsberg did for his leak of the Pentagon Papers, instead gets solitary confinement, pain-compliance holds, and a thirty-five-year prison sentence; Edward Snowden, as of this writing, waits in uneasy exile, likely facing worse than Manning if he is extradited. These are precisely the acts which, a generation ago, won accolades for Ellsberg and for the courageous exercise of free press powers by the Washington Post and the New York Times. Coverage of domestic dissent has followed suit; nearly all media outlets are owned by the same few parent companies that set their editorial policy, with disastrous consequences for breadth of permissible dialogue on domestic issues. Mass media in the neoliberal era works to hide rather than publicize the present-day Little Rocks and other forms of state and racist violence. The highest rate of incarceration in world history, with a total of seven million citizens under correctional supervision; daily killings of African Americans by police (one African American death at the hands of police and vigilantes every 28 hours);56 daily deaths by enforced exposure along the United States–Mexico border—all have been rendered invisible to the public eye by near-absolute exclusion from mass media coverage, at least until the limited successes of Black Lives Matter and more local movements.
In a tragic synecdoche of this shift, Elizabeth Eckford’s only child, her son Erin, a student at University of Little Rock, was gunned down by police on New Year’s morning in 2003, after reportedly firing an assault rifle into the air. Police did not allege that Erin was directly threatening anyone, merely that he fired it into the air, just as many thousands of others do across the country on New Year’s morning. The killing barely merited a paragraph of local coverage for Erin’s relation to his mother’s past role in Black freedom struggles, but nothing was said of Erin’s own freedom struggles in his time; his voice silenced by six bullets before he could give his own account to a mass media unlikely to listen in the first place. A grand jury declined to indict the officers who gunned him down, and media outlets showed no interest in following through with the story. No one seemed to remark that the very tool that had saved his mother’s life was actively complicit in Erin’s murder.
When older movement participants fail to appreciate these shifts in media, it is not that they naively trust mainstream media or expect it to transparently convey their messages. As one veteran nonviolence trainer who I interviewed suggested, in an attitude she attested as “old guard,” mainstream media can be seen as a reliable way to get a message across, even while the representation of this coverage is likely to be unsympathetic. This might be termed the “message-in-a-bottle” approach:
I would never assume that mainstream media were going to cover things accurately, but I think maybe I’m old guard in thinking that they still influence a lot of people.… I would never do stuff trying to make it look good for the media so that they would put out the right message—because they don’t.… I like actions that in themselves embody what we’re trying to change, or show without words, without needing words, what we’re trying to do. So I think it’s definitely worth keeping media in mind, mainstream media in mind, to some extent at least, but not designing everything around it.57
In this view, even if media representations of activist events are likely to be unfair, decisions should still be made with the expectation that mass media use a modicum of referential, factual representation in their coverage. Even approaches as radical as ACT UP’s ultimately relied on this analysis of the available means of persuasion: corporate media cannot be trusted to be sympathetic or accurate, but the media can certainly be trusted to be the media.58 Sensational actions, like the public scattering of the ashes of AIDS casualties on the White House lawn by their militantly mourning beloveds, will not be ignored, the logic goes, and can reliably be used as a vehicle of counterhegemonic communication, whatever the institutional bias of the vehicle’s drivers.
Yet, by the time of the alter-globalization movements, feelings toward mass media hardened among many younger activists, who increasingly suggested that the media might not be worth addressing at all. The skepticism of previous generations hardened into a distinct cynicism. According to the statement released by the Barricada Collective during the 2001 WTO protests in Quebec City: “[W]e have nothing to hope for from the corporate media, we should expect nothing from them, and we should absolutely not change any of our tactics or messages in order to pander to them. We should instead treat them as the servants of capital, and thus our enemies, that they are.”59
Although perhaps overstated here, media cynicism has only become more endemic in the years since. In an era of embedded journalism, institutional press releases, and image management, social movement participants are also no longer grappling with the question of which federal power can be invoked against a regional injustice. They face issues involving the nature of federal and transnational dominance, and they justifiably wonder if the media are worth attempting to address at all, however difficult it might be to find alternative means of reaching and constituting a public. The predominance of insurrectionary anarchism in some regions is related to this shift: it involves constituting new publics through direct means rather than mobilizing already existing publics. The insurrectionary anarchist movement has fractured into local sectarian schisms over ambiguities of definition, or even whether to constitute a new public at all, or, rather constitute an illegible antipublic with no attempt at appeal to outsiders at all. While the latter approaches might be excessive for their absolute hopelessness in any appeal to those outside the fold, the concerns expressed through these tendencies are certainly reasonable (however much most insurrectionist anarchists might bristle at being called reasonable).
While the Black Lives Matter movement has been widely covered in mass media (as in both discussed and obscured), excoriated and extolled by commentators of every stripe, the movement itself has consistently prioritized constituting new publics over performing for the cameras. In the words of Seattle’s Black Lives Matter organizing group Outside Agitators 206,
Often, when news reports come out about our movement, our experiences get reduced to feelings, as if there’s no factual basis for why we’re in the streets. Let’s set the record straight. First off, it is a fact that in 2012 there was a Black person executed by law enforcement every 28 hours in the United States, but the mainstream media are completely silent about true injustice committed by law enforcement. Why is that?
We know that the cycle of police terror that we have experienced will never stop until the people who give police their orders are no longer allowed to make a profit from anti-Black racism. Specifically, the owners of 6 media giants who also make money from legalized slavery in the private prison industry. We know that 90 percent of all media are owned by these 6 corporations. We know that these same corporations hire lobbyists that affect
