Civil Disobedience Today

The Media and Civil Disobedience: Journalism, Political Protest and Free Trade
By Penny O'Donnell

Introduction

As we’ve heard, civil disobedience is a form of political protest that emerged in the Western liberal democratic tradition. It is based on a belief in the rule of law, and involves public political acts that are designed to demonstrate non-compliance with existing laws in a bid to reform them.

Journalism is another political legacy of the same Western liberal democratic tradition. It is a form of political communication that conventionally explains itself in terms of democracy’s need for informed citizens. An independent free media is seen to be the best mechanism for providing information resources and encouraging public opinion formation. And while serious political journalism makes up only a fraction of the information output of most news organisations in Australia today, it is arguably the most significant task undertaken by journalists.

The question here today is, why is it so difficult to get a decent public debate going in our mainstream news media about civil disobedience, about the pros and cons of why ordinary people choose to defy what they perceive to be bad laws?

2002: A busy year

2002 has been a busy year for civil disobedience in Australia. The protests span the political and moral spectrum. For example, there have been ongoing actions against the mandatory detention of asylum-seekers at Woomera and against the logging of the old growth forest at Goolengook in Victoria.

More specifically, you may recall the Gold Coast grandmother, cancer victim and right-to-die activist Nancy Crick who spoke publicly in favour of euthanasia before taking her own life in May this year.

Or, from Melbourne, the more sinister example of the ‘Black Shirts’, a group of fathers opposed to Australia’s divorce and family laws. They made headlines in July by campaigning outside the Family Law Court dressed in full paramilitary uniform including masks and reportedly harassing and bullying women involved in Family Court disputes.

The most recent call for civil disobedience, now on hold since the Bali bombing, involves the Uniting Church. Some sections of the Church are encouraging congregations to boycott a war tax in protest against any Australian involvement in a war against Iraq.

Publicity and media reform

What’s the connection between these acts of civil disobedience and the media? There are two links that I want to explore today: one is the publicity angle; the other is the media reform angle.

I should clarify at this point, my main concern in talking on this topic is with the media, not with the success or otherwise of specific acts of civil disobedience. My aim as a journalism educator is to teach new generations of journalists to strive for professional excellence. That means, in part, teaching students that research and library skills are as vital as shorthand and interviewing technique. We also spend a lot of class-time on why journalism matters.

Journalism research tells us that what distinguishes journalism from other information services in the Internet-age is its focus on democratic institutions and its capacity to organize and interpret information about those institutions in ways that assist people to participate in society (see The Project for Excellence in Journalism).

The research also indicates that political reporting is facing something of a crisis: in-depth coverage of public policies, parliaments and issues is said to be in retreat; replaced at every turn by political gossip, sleaze, scandal and speculation (McNair 2000). Market pressures are blamed for this dumbing down of political debate; for making radio talkback ‘the liveliest form of public conversation’ in today’s society (Lumby 2002).

At the same time, we have research that indicates news professionals and their publics are not on the same wavelength. Mark Pearson, Professor of Journalism at Bond University, tells us ‘the public perception of the news media’s performance across a range of criteria is less complimentary than journalists’ perceptions of their own performances’ (Brand & Pearson 2001).

So where does this research lead us and why might it be useful in thinking about civil disobedience? In his original 1849 essay on civil disobedience, Henry David Thoreau made the point that scores of US newspapers were reporting the anti-slavery campaign but what was missing, what would in his view precipitate the abolition of slavery in America, was not the free press but just one honest man who would defy the law and free his slaves. What Thoreau was forgetting—and it was an understandable omission given that he lived in a ‘low-velocity universe of communication’ (Keane 1991)— is that without publicity that one honest man’s defiance may have amounted to nothing.

Today we live in a media-saturated universe where news is available at any time of the day or night, in multiple formats, and from all corners of the planet. And, as any politician or political activist will tell you, the news media is central to the success of any government, policy or legal reform. We must not forget that where once journalists had a monopoly on reporting politics, today there are many key players in the news game: from PR people managing the information flow to image consultants, media advisers and political minders, to name a few.

My view is that as journalists and journalism educators we need to talk more often and more openly about what people can and cannot expect from their news media. That includes talking about the complexities and challenges of reporting political dissent.

It seems to me to be too important a topic to leave to the talkback hosts, lively though they may be. Especially when by their own admission, talkback hosts see themselves as entertainers, not journalists, and aim simply to entertain their audiences, not to provide them with information resources or opportunities to think and act differently.

Reporting civil disobedience

Firstly, the question of publicity or news access: how do the news media report on acts of civil disobedience, what’s the recent track record in Australia and what particular challenges do civil disobedience stories present to journalists?

How do the news media report civil disobedience? Let’s start by observing some of the features of news production as an industrial process. News is one of society’s most perishable commodities. Journalists constantly work against the clock to publish information before someone else does. It is important to remember this intense pressure and competition that journalists routinely work under in the 24/7 news world of today because it helps us understand why journalists rely so heavily on official sources such as politicians and police, why newcomers to the news game have such a hard time getting access and why protesters who are PR-savvy—like Greenpeace—are often successful at getting their message across. In summary, news production can be seen as a dynamic and complex process that is structurally inclined to favour those who supply journalists with stable, authoritative information flows on matters of public importance (that is, the political status quo). It also favours those who understand and work with media logic: TV needs vivid pictures, radio needs articulate voices, and print needs clear statements. All news media need stories that interest mass audiences. All stories are out-of-date almost as soon as they are published.

So what kind of news window is there for civil disobedience? Journalism research tells us that non-official or outsider sources have to fight particularly hard for news access, especially if they are ethnic minorities (Loo 1998), young people (Evans & Sternberg 1998) or political dissidents (Scalmer 2002). These relatively powerless voices face at least two problems: getting noticed by journalists, and being treated seriously.

Naming, framing and credibility

One theory that seeks to explain why political outsiders have trouble getting serious coverage, asserts that there is a ‘social hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker in Cottle 2000). Journalists must look to our democratically elected politicians, not self-appointed activists, to name political priorities and frame the terms of public debate. In liberal democracies, credibility and the moral right to be heard tend to go hand in hand. Fortunately, experience shows us that Australian journalists do more than slavishly follow the political agendas of our elected representatives, but this idea that the credibility of political demands is linked to the initial way that they are named and framed in public debate is a useful one.

All the acts of civil disobedience mentioned at the start of this paper were extensively reported in the news media. At first glance, that suggests that getting noticed is not such a problem, that political dissent is newsworthy. However, on closer inspection, the news coverage is predominantly negative. News stories focus on the disruptive and/or violent nature of the activists’ actions. In doing so, they obey the media logic mentioned earlier. A good news story has drama, action, conflict. It is well established in studies of news access that when journalists name or stigmatise activists as violent/anti-social, they are likely to frame their interpretations of these actions in terms of illegitimate, marginal and/or unwelcome political demands (Cottle 2000). In this way they are often trivialised and robbed of credibility in the public domain.

As Jim Cairns’ biographer Paul Strangio recently noted, the Australian news media do not frame or explain civil disobedience protests in terms of this country’s civil disobedience tradition (Strangio 2002). As leader of the anti-conscription movement in the 1970s, Cairns was a key spokesperson for the case that robust democracies need citizens who are prepared to directly challenge their governments if they make bad laws. Political dissent was not a recipe for anarchy, in his view, but a challenge to the prevailing ‘democratic lassitude’ and to the ordinary person’s reluctance to change. It was an opportunity to explore and evaluate different political points of view (Strangio 2002).

It is easier to silence political debate when political dissent is framed as anti-social rather than ‘different’. This has largely been the case, for example, with the asylum-seekers: protesting against mandatory detention is discursively linked to queue-jumping by politicians and journalists, both are condemned as un-Australian activities, and there is, it seems, nothing more that needs to be said. But is that really the end of the so-called ‘border protection’ story?

The publicity dilemma

Political scientist Sean Scalmer (2002) has recently captured the key publicity dilemma that negative news coverage presents to the political activist trying to get a message across to the Australian public. On the one hand, ordinary legal protest actions such as street marches are just not newsworthy any more; on the other, mainstream TV news will give airtime to violent or disruptive protests but such coverage is more likely to damage rather than promote the cause. He says:
‘

What can protesters do? How can they successfully negotiate this dilemma? How can a protest be disruptive enough to become newsworthy, careful enough to avoid interference with others, and yet peaceful enough to avoid any hint of violence?’ (2002, p. 142).

Scalmer’s thesis is that Australian political activist are become increasingly media-savvy, turning to the political gimmick (publicity stunt, theatrical performance or staged event), as a powerful if unpredictable way of getting journalists’ attention and hence a wide audience for their political demands. The broader implication here, he argues is that,

‘In place of either wearied acceptance of media distortion or of intimidated political silence, now looms a third possibility—‘mediatised politics’, that is, politics in which the media’s reporting practices become the object of direct struggle and intervention by protesters. This is a politics that focuses on the process of media framing, that attempts to intervene in that process, and that aims thereby to shape the public ‘construction’ of collective action’ (2002, p. 174).

Interestingly Scalmer’s main case study of activists successfully taking on journalists concerns the conservative, populist movement that grew around Pauline Hanson and the One Nation party. Scalmer provides a fascinating account of the cyberbattle unleashed in 1997 by Hanson supporters who were disgruntled with the media. They used the Internet to provide alternative news commentary on her activities, to report on investigations into the political affiliations of anti-Hanson demonstrators and to co-ordinate mass phone-in, fax and e-mail campaigns aimed at raising One Nation’s media profile (2000, pp. 160-166).

Two things make this case study interesting. One is the very ordinariness of the people who expressed their dissatisfaction with the performance of the news media and who decided to take matters into their own hands. The other is the emergence of media reform pressures that have nothing to do with media law or government regulation.

Challenging the gatekeepers

To put it simply, political journalists are facing new competition from media-savvy political activists. And the competition is generating pressure on journalists to reform the ways they report political dissent. Here is the second way we can link media and civil disobedience. In this case, the media become the target for protests aimed not so much at changing bad laws but at changing inadequate information practices. This is not an insiders’ contest played by the rules between like-minded professionals but a free-for-all with amateurs intent on undermining the credibility of the traditional gatekeepers and, in some cases, on creating parallel news universes.

One final insight here from Scalmer. Here’s his description of how the ‘amateurs’ competed with professional journalists over the reporting of the S11 protests against the World Economic Forum in Melbourne in September 2000. He says,

‘While the press and the Victorian State government attempted to portray the organisers of S11 as violent, un-Australian and threatening, members of the S11 Alliance were quickly prepared to meet and repudiate their charges. When they were interviewed by the mass media, they insisted on their non-violent orientation. Angered at misrepresentation by specific newspapers, they wrote letters outlining their peaceful, if militant aims. The S11 website carefully articulated the meaning and importance of non-violent direct action. A special indyBulletin that covered S11 issues was produced by the Melbourne indymedia group. It emphasised that Melbourne protesters, like those in Seattle that inspired them, were non-violent in orientation. It emphasised the rights of protesters and urged preparation for arrest’ (Scalmer 2002, pp. 171-72).

As you heard, at the heart of this contest is the Internet, an interactive information and communication medium that blurs the lines between the receivers and senders of a mediated message. US journalism educator Dr Jane B. Singer explains it like this: ‘the traditional senders of media messages—the journalists—are faced not just with a new delivery method but with what may be a fundamental shift in their role in the communication process. […] Journalists [are being] swept up in challenges to their one-time franchise of creating and delivering mass-mediated messages’ (1998).

As Singer indicates, the signs of change have been around for a while. In 1995, US journalism scholar Michael Schudson began his book, The Power of News (1995), by inviting readers to imagine a world in which everyone is able to deliver information directly to everyone else through a computer, a world in which everyone can be his or her own journalist. He suggested that journalism would reinvent itself as people became increasingly desperate for assistance in sorting through the endless information and in identifying legitimate sources (in Singer 1998).

Everyone is a journalist?

Seven years later, that world is here. ‘Everyone is a witness, everyone is a journalist’ is the indymedia slogan. Their virtual newsroom bears little resemblance to its mainstream counterpart. It is an open publishing newswire or web-based message board run by media activists to provide a community news forum for the disempowered and marginalised. The first one was set up in Seattle in 1999 and there are now around 100 indymedia sites, in the US, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. They are showing no signs of a desperate need for journalists.

On the contrary, in this kind of news operation, learning about the technology goes hand-in-hand with creating information resources; encouraging audience members to become news producers themselves goes hand-in-hand with promoting open public debate. As the indymedia Melbourne website indicates, ‘open publishing means that the process of creating news is transparent to the readers. They can contribute a story and see it instantly appear in the pool of stories publicly available. Those stories are filtered as little as possible to help the readers find the stories they want. They can see how to get involved and help make editorial decisions. If they can think of a better way for the software the help shape editorial decisions, they can copy the software because it is free and change it and start their own site’ (MIMC 2002).

So, how effective are the competitors? Media scholar Christina Spurgeon (2001), from the Queensland University of Technology, has examined the news coverage of the World Economic Forum and the S11 protests in detail. She draws our attention to the following points.

First, the protest movement’s use of the Internet as an information and communication medium was impressive. Spurgeon notes that this assessment was also made by at least one columnist from the Australian Financial Review. The S11 site provided previously little known background information on WEF, links to supporters’ sites, networking capacity, discussion lists, links to mainstream news media as well as independent commentary on the protests. The S11 protest site drew international attention, and apparently became ‘the 400th most popular website in the world over the first two weeks of September [2000]’ (Scalmer 2002, p. 173).

The experience of the events was totally different for the TV news viewers sitting at home in their lounge rooms. Spurgeon indicates that TV coverage of the events followed predictable, well-established news values and scripts, oscillating between reports from the World Economic Forum and images of stand-offs and violent clashes between protesters and police. A separate analysis of the same coverage undertaken by Melbourne historian Bernard Barrett (2000), concluded that commercial news media had given sympathetic coverage to the views and actions of the WEF, a global business network, but had incorrectly portrayed protests against the forum in terms of ‘an outbreak of criminal violence and traffic snarls’. In addition, the commercial news media had largely failed to report protest events organized to discuss the issues of global corporatisation and economic rationalism. The implication here is that journalists largely failed to look beyond the protest actions and provide a decent public debate about the issues that gave rise to the protests.

It’s timely here to pause a moment and remind ourselves again why journalism matters. News is one of our most important social commodities. It is the cheapest, most accessible, shared information resource available. Most of us know about what’s going on in Australia by watching TV, listening to the radio and reading the newspaper. Internet use is growing but recent research by the Australian Broadcasting Authority indicates that 88 per cent of us still rely on traditional free-to-air television for news while only 11 per cent use the Internet (see Commonwealth of Australia, 2002).

Which brings us to Spurgeon’s third and, perhaps, most interesting point. Some journalists are clearly aware of the need to argue the case for legitimate agenda-setting in the new competitive news environment. She highlights a claim made by the then editor-in-chief and publisher of The Age, Steve Harris, in explaining to readers the newspaper’s decision to publish a 40-page supplement on globalisation to coincide with the World Economic Forum. Harris said, ‘the media must meet the challenge of the times: to give a voice to both the leaders and the voiceless and, through debate with focus, to give shape to the issues and to the dimensions, options and implications of the changes and opportunities we face’ (see Harris in Spurgeon 2001, p. 153). Spurgeon sees in his argument what we might term the journalist’s comeback to the amateur media activist’s challenge: it is journalists, not activists, who can ‘more responsibly represent the popular will in matters of national interest’ (Spurgeon 2001, p. 153). This is of course, as Michael Schudson predicted above, a restatement of journalism’s historical claim. And as Singer (1998) indicates, if journalists want to keep arguing the case, they will need researchers to assist them in investigating and evaluating the changing role of the gatekeepers in the online environment.

Conclusion: free trade in news

Why is it so difficult to get a decent public debate in the news media about civil disobedience? As indicated earlier, the research suggests that standards of political reporting are suffering as a result of accelerated market pressures (McNair 2000). Journalists themselves argue that to maintain high profit levels, their news organisations are reducing newsgathering resources and sidelining investigative news practices that are costly and time-consuming (Nieman Foundation 2002). The straightforward answer seems to be, there is no market for such a debate and few journalists willing to make it happen.

One final observation. Although many political journalists may choose to ignore alternative media initiatives like indymedia, treating them as the propaganda arms of the protest movement, their growing significance does not escape the attention of the political elite. In September, the NSW Police Minister Michael Costa referred a complaint over three sites, including indymedia Melbourne, to the Australian Broadcasting Authority in a bid to shut them down before next week’s World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Sydney. He claimed the sites should be censored because they contained information ‘designed to incite violence against the NSW police’ providing security for the WTO meeting. In a ruling that has received minimum media attention or public discussion, the ABA last week disagreed with the NSW Police Minister.

The law that permits the censorship of Internet content came into force in January 2000. It is not within the scope of this paper to deal with this or any of the latest changes, or proposed changes, to Australia’s media laws in any detail, fascinating as they may be. Suffice to say, that the future of free trade in news is one of the great unknowns of the globalisation debate. Who knows, perhaps journalists and media activists will find themselves as strategic allies rather than competitors in facilitating public discussion of this vital issue.

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