The Filtering

[Ed. note: Compare, if you will, the treatment of the relatively small number of these Schiavo protestors with the treatment of anti-war or anti-Bush protests. For the latter, they'll do slideshows of the "meanest" of signs, newscasters will adopt a tone of "oh those silly and/or insolent and/or crazy" people, minimize the numbers and make it sound like a protest was violent or highly disruptive when perhaps a dozen out of 50,000 or 100,000+ people get arrested (and who knows if they got arrested for something legitimate?). The latter also needs to have all these "permits" to protest and are forbidden from impeding normal traffic, commerce, etc. They must disband within a very short period of time. The Schiavo people spent a week there and disrupted everything, aided by the media there to cover them which only added to the chaos. Fascinating what a stark contrast in coverage these present.]

For all the hours upon hours of live and recorded TV coverage of the protestors at the hospice where Terri Schiavo died last week, we certainly "missed" a lot.

Look at some print accounts that deal with other aspects of the protest - other businesses affected, a school shut, the treatment by police, etc. - and you got dozens and dozens of hints about a situation that was very carefully missing in all those hours of live video.

Examples:

* we never saw the old lady who would spend hours each day going up and down the sidewalk directly in front of the hospice, with a bullhorn, blaring some egregious shit that people inside (including the staff, the other patients, and their families) did hear
* the people there selling t-shirts and their own religious CDs or books or their ministries or their "health cures" and other crap
* the profanity and object-throwing the protestors targeted at kids, business people, and hospice visitors
* the worst of the signs that greeted families of hospice patients - not just ones calling Schiavo's husband every name in the book (and a few besides) but also calling these families horrible names, called the staff killers and Nazis
* so-called men of God inciting violence and obscene behavior and spewing hatred (yes, above and beyond what we say from Randall Terry, Brother Murphy and that true mental case Father Pavone)
* the kids used as pawns to try to run into the hospice with food and water (while we saw some of this, we didn't see what the press saw: kids being solicited - some paid - to do this just so the protestors would get worked up when a kid was arrested
* the incredible nastiness directed at the police
* the man who walked around with a skeleton all the time, approaching small children
* kids from a nearby school being told they would be murdered by the government if they got sick
* the protestors who would use the worst profanity as well as do damage when business owners tried to open their businesses or customers tried to visit those businesses
* the idiots there to goof on the protestors

Why didn't we see it? Because even when the media is tempted to do its job, they've discovered it's just far too much trouble - and far too risky - to go against the rabid wrongies. Newscasters who say boo these days are treated to thousands upon thousands of nutcases with nothing else to do but listen to an O'Reilly or a Limbaugh or a Randall Terry or a Hal Turner or a Fr Pavone or Mahoney or Falwell or worse.

So what we heard and saw was the cleaned up version. While almost everyone agreed it seemed like a crackpot festival, they had no way of knowing how much worse it really was. The media did us no favor here, of course, because these same people will be back because - even if not every certifiable psycho got on TV, they know the media will give them non-stop airtime.