so... there's a reason for thishttps://twitter.com/terrence_mccoy/status/1028707136405209089 …
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a lot of anti-fascists are really distrustful of the media for a variety of reasons
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the main one, at least for me, is that white supremacists use photos and video shot by the press to find targets to dox, stalk, threaten, etc
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very few news outlets have taken it upon themselves to blur out the faces of protesters who are already risking themselves to protect their community; this is an act of decency that is, for some reason, limited to license plates
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the other reason is that the media landscape seems to be dedicated to treating people who volunteer their bodies to create a barrier between their communities and white supremacists who threaten it and those white supremacists as morally equivalent
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a year ago yesterday, a group of torch-wielding Nazis terrorized a group of anti-racist protesters. yesterday, cops were the ones that came out to do the terrorizing
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i've never been in situations as rough as the protesters in Portland, Charlottesville and DC have been in this week, but i've put effort into spoiling footage by flipping off cameras and yelling swear words before, just as an attempt to keep my unmasked comrades slightly safer
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whether they're doing it on purpose or not, the media has acted as allies to fascists, Nazis, the alt-right, etc over and over for the past several years
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the media has been letting Kessler air his white supremacist views on NPR unchallenged, doing soft-focus profiles of Nazis, letting the cops' version of the story go unchallenged, or releasing photos and video that make it dead easy for Nazis to harass and threaten activists
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i'm drawing broad strokes around the media as a whole here because when you're on the ground trying to deal with a photographer you often don't have any way to know who's paying for them to be there
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the other big mistake that the media makes when dealing with protests is assuming that by not wanting to talk to them, anti-fascists are somehow betraying their own cause by not making a case to the public
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you don't usually go out in the streets and block traffic and carry signs and do chants to convince the undecided. you do it as a show of force against your opponents (in this case, nazis) and as a show of solidarity with people dealing with the oppression you're fighting against
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there are lots of other reasons, too, but a lot of people are just not interested in going on camera and trying to convince the tv news watching audience that being a Nazi is bad and murdering protesters with cars is also bad.
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the fact is that the majority of the media coverage of all of these protests is gonna take the "both sides" approach, and it's gonna pretend that the cops are neutral and not there to beat anti-fascists and protect the Nazis
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there's no way to pick out which journalists in the crowd are interested in covering it with nuance and decency, and a lot of people aren't interested in being used to support the kind of narrative where "should Nazis be marching in the streets" is something that's worth debating
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if you don't want to have protesters telling you to fuck off and obscuring your photos, you have to build some trust with them, and right now there's no guarantee that they'll be treated any better than honest-to-god swastika-tattoo Nazis
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i think most people interested in actively opposing fascism have found channels they trust far more than believing any particular platform
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the platforms we can trust to not take the cops' side as true by default and deliver coverage are groups like Unicorn Riot and It's Going Down
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and though those two are particularly valuable, the people who do the best job of providing news that doesn't put protesters in danger tend to just be anti-fascist activists livetweeting what's happening from the ground
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here's the thinkpiece angle: no matter how much a paper claims that reporting is separated from op-ed, years of shitty editorials from people who aren't actually politically involved beyond scolding the people doing the work from on high have eroded trust in *every* paper
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chances are a lot of the people in the streets are there because media institutions haven't given them the opportunities that they deserve to be heard. they've no reason to believe that all of a sudden the journos and photogs there are gonna start listening today
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they have every reason to believe their image will be used to push a distorted narrative and/or that they'll be senselessly put in further danger than they already are choosing to risk for someone else's profit
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to those of you out there putting your bodies on the line to fight white supremacy: thank you for your work and your bravery.
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solidarity from the bot family.

. stay hydrated, stay brave.Show this thread -
god the piece that guy filed was so exactly the kind of shit that is why protesters distrust reporters and photogs
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acting like associating the cops with nazis is some kind of stretch for the protesters to do, as if the cops didn't stand by and watch while nazis attacked anti-fascist activists for two days last year until they managed to murder somebodypic.twitter.com/p7Fonuu6kV
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check out the ProPublica/Frontline documentary for some choice footage of Nazis beating up someone protesting them right next to a police station with 0 police intervention; that's one of a dozen similar events. Charlottesville has good reason to think the cops are fash
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McCoy also failed to note that the police literally wouldn't allow access to downtown Charlottesville yesterday unless people consented to having their bags search
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he's happy to tweet about how mean the protesters are being to media, but he didn't seem interested in coming to his collegues' defense yesterday when they weren't allowed into a public space with their camera equipment
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the entire framing of McCoy's WaPo piece attempts to undermine the fact that anti-fascists & the people of Charlottesville in particular have every reason to identify the police with fascists and white supremacists
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last week, the cops of Portland protected white supremacists who came in from out of state to gather and terrorize that community. they assaulted the people who came out to side against racism. they nearly killed somebody by shooting a flashbang grenade into the back of his head.
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