Introduction
Violence at the Republican National Convention is the topic of a Los Angeles Times article and a news release from PR Newswire, which is associated with Amnesty International. Both papers inform about barely lawful arrests of demonstration participants and unsanctioned use of non-lethal weapons.
Both also contain quotes from eyewitnesses, involved in the event. Although the major issue of the stories is similar, the release from PR Newswire is based upon the position of Amnesty International, a human rights organization, and thus focuses on recording the violations of the corresponding regulations without providing the accounts of third party observers, whereas the Los Angeles Times article includes more comprehensive background information and more objective facts about the events like numbers and stories of non-participants.
Main body
The concerns the two articles are dedicated to are unexpected violence and arrests, used by law enforcement agencies against the unarmed antiwar protesters, who were publicly demonstrating their opinion at the Republican National Convention. Although the four-day protest action implied no aggressive or criminal behavior from the participants’ side, the police started using non-lethal weapons in order to force them out from the site. As a result of the event, around 102 civilians were arrested allegedly for unlawful assembly.
The first obvious bias that can be found in the report from PR Newswire is the lack of introductory information about the event, its organizers, and the happenings which catalyzed the arrests. In fact, it is not clear from the article which political and civil society organizations were involved and what happened before the non-lethal weapon was used and arrests were made. On the contrary, the Los Angeles Times article reports, “Police repeatedly ordered demonstrators to get off the street. Many moved to the sidewalk, and some dispersed, but a few dozen did not” (2).
Given that the article also states that the police officers were wearing riot gear, so there was clear evidence that the failure to comply with the police order would result in forceful suppression of the protest action. As one can understand from the article, the police also gave the protestants enough time (about two hours) to make a decision, so the use of force was not actually sudden or surprising. Furthermore, the Los Angeles Times paper informs that “Thursday was the last of four days of protests.
Monday was the busiest day when more than 280 were arrested after nearly 10,000 antiwar protesters had marched on the Capitol” (2), so one can assume that the arrests followed practically every day of the demonstration and derived from the participants’ disobedience. The lack of background information in the PR Newswire release leads to the assumption that the situation was not researched profoundly and that the article is based rather on judgments than on pure facts.
Furthermore, release from PR Newswire fails to include the opinions of several sides of the confrontation and focuses predominantly on the official attitude of Amnesty International that requires a step-to-step legal inquiry into the appropriateness of the law enforcement authorities’ actions. There is also evidence of law enforcement representatives preventing journalists from accessing the site and recording the events: “I was kicked in the chest several times.
A police officer ground his knee into my back…I was also, the entire time, telling them, ‘I’m media. I’m press….,’ but…that didn’t seem to matter at all” (1). At the same time, Hohmann, the author of the Los Angeles Times report, incorporates multiple accounts including the police, the participants, and impartial observers.
In this sense, one can learn from the writing that law enforcement officials are not yet able to estimate the exact number of the arrested and the leaders of antiwar groups tend to charge the police with attempts to provoke the participants. In addition, the report contains the accounts of two witnesses who were watching the clash and who confirmed that the police were following the protestants after they began to leave the site: “It’s almost like they herded them like cattle, like the old cowboys used to do it. That was it for the people in the middle.”.(2).
Given that the purpose of journalism is first and foremost to bring comprehensive and correct information to the reader, several different positions should be included in articles, especially those which somehow challenge the legitimacy of certain actions. Each confrontation in certain sense originates from a dialogue or a failure to establish a dialogue, but in both cases, the audience should find out the objective causes and subjective reasons of the outcome.
Tertiary, as opposed to the PR Newswire report, Hohmann’s article is full of facts and other objective information that allows assessing the scope and importance of the event. The entire timeline of the clash is provided so that the whole story appears to be logical in the relationship between the happenings and their temporal frames. It has also been noted that the overall scale of the demonstration is communicated through numbers and facts. Moreover, the author also includes evidence about the number of protestants directly involved in the conflict with law enforcement officials: “An estimated 150 to 200 people started running toward another bridge, farther away from the Xcel Energy Center, hoping to get across. Police pursued them on horseback, all-terrain vehicles, and bicycles. A handful of people who ran toward the bridge were pepper-sprayed” (2).
Given that the article from PR Newswire presents the position of the international organization, the objective grounds of such position and, particularly, of the requests for an official investigation, should have been articulated. The author of the latter article mentions the facts of excessive use of non-lethal weapons and violent responses to media representatives’ attempt to gather information about the demonstration: “police are reported to have fired rubber bullets and used batons, pepper spray, tear gas canisters and concussion grenades on peaceful demonstrators and journalists” (1).
Finally, despite the lack of facts about the purpose and the scope of the protest, the PR Newswire article assesses the situation and recommends that authorities investigate it: “However, some of the police actions appear to have breached United Nations (U.N.) standards on the use of force by law enforcement officials” (1). Although the supposition does not blame or charge anyone directly, it is aimed at proving the importance of the legal inquiry.
However, the supporting evidence is quite scarce; moreover, whereas the police’s violations of U.S. and international legislation are described in detail, the protestant’s disobedience to the orders of law enforcement officials and the proposals that the overall legitimacy of the demonstration is explored are not included. On the contrary, Hohmann avoids any judgments of such nature, giving, instead, the conflicting parties and readers an opportunity to assess the event by themselves.
Conclusion
To sum up, notwithstanding the fact that the two articles address the same event, Hohmann’s version more refers to classical journalism and provides objective and confirmed information, whereas the Amnesty International-based report is focused rather on finding the points of human rights violation during the demonstration, so it is initially biased by the preliminary assumption that the contraventions with U.S. and UN laws took place in fact.
Works cited
Use of Force Against RNC Protesters ‘Disproportionate,’ Charges Amnesty International. Anonymous. PR Newswire. New York: 2008.
Hohmann, J. Police clash with protesters, arrest ‘a couple of hundred’; Authorities set up roadblocks to stop a march from the Capitol to the convention arena. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: 2008. pg. A.20.