Raise the Hammer

Customers are not advertisers. Customers, whether it's newspaper's circulation or a blog's web traffic stats, are a product sold TO advertisers by those who own the media in question, so that advertisers can market to them more directly. We pay for this entire ludicrous cycle with inflated consumer prices, very little of which actually makes it back to us in the form of half-decent content.

And Chomsky never alleged a media "conspiracy". He wrote about documented evidence that media coverage is slanted, and put forward a large number of factors driving it, such as the reliance of the media on ad revenue, or government sources. He also points out that survey after survey has shown that viewers actually do want more "hard news" and less "fluff", but that it's disappearing due to more economic and political factors (most notably, it's much cheaper to re-print celebrity gossip).

Oh, and for the record, they DID do these things in Caledonia, too. The occupation wasn't the least terribly rowdy until a bunch of grandmothers got attacked and pepper-sprayed around 4am. Later that day, several hundred people took the site back and that's when things started getting really heated.

In all my years protesting, I've seen a pretty clear correlation between police response and protester-related destruction. It takes two to tango, and when there's only a few friendly cops around, it's hard to get people riled up. When there's a few hundred Darth Vaders lining the streets and bullying people, it's a lot easier to rationalize (especially when people figure they're going to be arrested anyway). Keep in mind that this kind of behavior on both sides has been largely absent from big North American protests for most of the last decade (peace marches have a totally different vibe). Not that it accomplished much, despite record numbers, or the fact that nearly every big claim we made has since been proven true (WMDs? Osama?).