This is a relatively short diary entry, but I was hoping to get some feedback from other Kossacks on the idea.
By now we're all used to the frequent calls to "take to the streets" on any number of the (very serious) issues that have been brought up here. And we do so, to some extent... but whatever public protests we happen to organize/attend tend to have hit-or-miss results, and even the "hits" don't generally get the thing we need most: big media attention. Heck, even the anti-war protests across the country (and the world) on the second anniversary of the Iraq war barely made a dent in the landscape of MSM mindshare.
So I'm proposing a slightly altered approach in getting the MSM to cover major protests: how about we not give them a choice?
Details on the flip.
Forget marching through the main streets of your town or city. Instead, concentrate an entire protest on the street(s) directly adjacent to one or more of your local news stations. And for whichever news station(s) are being protested, call up and invite crews to come over from
competing local stations. After all, don't you think a local CBS affiliate would just love to see a big protest surrounding the local NBC office (just as an example)?
When it comes to massive public mindshare, our first line of offense is getting our media back on the side of responsible reporting. In the meantime, the MSM as it currently stands is the enemy. One of the most basic war strategies is to pit an enemy against itself, and the competing corporate structure of the MSM makes this a possibility. The key is to make sure that one affiliate believes wholeheartedly that it will have the opportunity to cover a protest which, if covered fully, has the potential to permanently damage the credibility of a competing affiliate, ideally without direct harm to itself. To pull this off, the affiliate being protested has to be the specific target of the protest, even if the principle behind the protest would actually apply to the entire MSM. As long as the competitors don't think they're the target, they might just take the bait.
As a hypothetical example, what if your local ABC station were surrounded by people protesting ABC's lack of reporting on, say, the Downing Street Minutes. The whole station gets completely bogged down in protest traffic and attention. But then, even if that station doesn't decide to cover the protest (hoping it'll just go away), suddenly the local NBC and CBS affiliates show up and start going hogwild at all the negative attention their competitor is getting. Not only that, there might just be enough tension from this that those competitors might suddenly be prompted to talk about the Downing Street Minutes themselves, all the while being thankful that they "dodged a bullet" before they themselves may have been protested.
On a large enough scale, an effort like this could bring up a Rathergate-style slam against any given MSM corporation, as long as it's spun as if that one specific corporation was trying to coverup/ignore reporting of a given issue. Obviously it would be true that the other MSM corporations would be just as guilty, but as long as the "scandal" isn't directed at them, they may be more than happy to have a feeding frenzy at the expense of a competitor. Repeat this on several occasions at different MSM outlets on different serious issues (which we have plenty of), and maybe they may start taking the hint.
Divide and conquer.