MemeStreams | Statement to "Indymedia"

Perhaps if you were the type of self-proclaimed anarchists who didn't believe in attempting to deceive other people and believed firmly in not engaging in acts of wanton destruction, you'd stand a chance of winning the media "war".

As people who you call your friends are gassed, beaten, and arrested while attempting to hold a peaceful protest, you guys are merrily celebrating the acts of petty vandalism and disruption that without fail gives the people who you claim to be your enemies the excuse to come down on your friends hard. Stroking your own egos and celebrating the fact that you can get away with doing something useless and stupid and then hiding in a crowd, it seems, is more important than actually allowing the evil going on around you to be seen for what it is.

Under normal circumstances, it's at least implicit that people carrying press credentials are in no way engaging in, encouraging, or participating in what they are covering, but you self-proclaimed journalists and reporters have failed miserably in this respect. There have been enough snarky comments to both the site and the audio streams to make it clear that you've been at least partially complicit in several events that simply should not have taken place had people's intentions been to remain 100% peaceful. You've been actively using the top level page of twincities.indymedia.org to rebroadcast instructions telling people where to go to make pedestrian congestion issues worse at best. ...not things about where a march supporting this and that is taking place, not details about which rallies are still on and which are not, just locations and telling people the equivalent of "hey if you want to get your fight on, go here". This is horrifically irresponsible, and it's positively mind-blowing that you express astonishment that the police are arresting people regardless of whether or not they bear press credentials in light of what you've been doing to cast serious doubt on just how impartial the smaller news outfits might actually be.

You've not just been giving the police a "good excuse" to bring a heavy boot down on your heads, you've been giving reasonable people plenty of reasons to suspect you're a part of the problem, if not near the core of it. It doesn't matter how many video clips of police brutality you collect if your hands are not clean as to why the police started busting heads. Reporters for big media have no problem with being "arguably wrong" by reporting that some lunatics broke some windows and as a result the police had to try to scatter the crowds before someone started throwing firebombs, when that's actually close (even if an incredibly skewed perspective) to what happened. That's something they can at least defend as being what it seemed like the truth while they were investigating. What they won't do is risk sticking their necks out for you while there's a chance that the story they broke about how "police attacked and brutally beat 112 innocent peace protesters" could turn into "reporter was duped by 10 kids into believing protest goals were peaceful" while you have failed, utterly to maintain "clean hands". That sort of mistake would put them out of a job instead of simply being embarassing.

Until you learn that in order to report on events you must be 100% above and 100% separate from the fray you will never manage to report effectively without in some way contaminating the events you wish to report on. You will continue to be ignored by "big media", and you will continue to be a waste other people's time.

The saddest part of this is that judging from past events, had none of you actually done a thing except simply observe and report, and had everyone been very clear that not only was destruction not the goal of the protests, but that destructive acts would not be tolerated by the people at the protests, the police being driven by the Republican Party would have likely engaged in mass arrests anyway and would have given you all the ammunition and arguing points you needed to effect some actual changes and get the people responsible for those abuses of civil rights out of those positions of power. By doing less than you did, you could have accomplished ten times more.

With great disappointment,
an actual anarchist

Statement to "Indymedia"