Split Thread BBC news reporting

[Jack by the hedge]

Comparison with a war where few of the soldiers shoot people is dumb. Protesters do not turn up for a fight, whatever you imagine.

Protesting 101: Protestors do not think they are the bad guys. Protesters think they are the good guys. Left or right, doesn't matter. They are standing up in support of their, or someone else's, rights and they do it because they feel it's just. They do not go to a protest to start trouble. If police respond heavy-handedly to some provocation (whether instigated by provocateurs among the protesters or indeed among the police) but what the crowd actually see is that heavy police reaction, they are outraged because it looks like the agents of the state are trampling on their right to protest, and they feel aggrieved and justified in resisting that oppression. That's how opportunists use poorly trained police to turn a protest into a riot.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Comparison with a war where few of the soldiers shoot people is dumb.

Insisting that a protest where there's a material amount of violence as "mostly peaceful" because the violence is coming from a minority of actors is also dumb.

Protesters do not turn up for a fight, whatever you imagine.

Some do though. Not all of them by any means, but some certainly do show up with the intention of instigating violence.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

It isn't "a" protest. It's protests all over the country, as Flo explained. And the great majority of them, excepting a few big cities, are peaceful.

 

[smartcooky]

Comparison with a war where few of the soldiers shoot people is dumb. Protesters do not turn up for a fight, whatever you imagine.

This is not always true.

Take for example the student riots in the 1970s (not just Kent State, but the Hard Hat riots as well) or the protests over the Springbok tour of NZ in 1981. Many of the protesters in those examples turned up intending to be disruptive, and to commit violence and commit property damage. In the Hard Hat Riots of 1970, office and construction workers turned up from the outset with the intent to attack Vietnam War protesters, and they did so.

 

[Ziggurat]

Comparison with a war where few of the soldiers shoot people is dumb. Protesters do not turn up for a fight, whatever you imagine.

Again, so what? Intent doesn't make something violent or not violent.

Protesting 101: Protestors do not think they are the bad guys.

Violent people don't generally think they are the bad guys either.

 

[Ziggurat]

It isn't "a" protest. It's protests all over the country, as Flo explained. And the great majority of them, excepting a few big cities, are peaceful.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

 

[smartcooky]

Insisting that a protest where there's a material amount of violence as "mostly peaceful" because the violence is coming from a minority of actors is also dumb.

Especially when the visual mainstream media such as ITV, BBC and Sky News are showing cars burning, street fighting, shops being looted and police lobbing tear gas grenades into crowds, while the accompanying narration characterizes what they are showing as "peaceful" protests.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Again, so what?

The long-forgotten point being argued over here is whether it was fair reporting or scurrilous lies for the BBC to say the protests on some particular day were mostly peaceful. The arguments against them seem to run along the lines of saying if some of the protests were not peaceful, they should not say most were peaceful. Well, I don't agree.