Something doesn’t add up about these “reopen” protests
Each day we see a new round of crazed idiots risking their lives so they can protest against governors who have shut their states down during the coronavirus crisis. These people are literally protesting for the right to… get themselves killed? Get others killed? You can spend a long time trying and failing to find any logic in the behavior of the far-right, but something feels particularly off here.
We’ve already seen reports that the “reopen” protests in Michigan are linked to Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. There’s also evidence that the “reopen” protest websites in every state were registered by the same person on the same day, suggesting the whole thing is indeed being puppet mastered behind the scenes. But there’s more going on here.
Every grass roots protest movement ends up complaining about the same thing: no matter how important or timely their cause may be, or how large they are in number, they still struggle to get sufficient media coverage. That’s because the media – particularly cable news – equates “newsworthiness” with ratings-worthiness. Occupy Wall Street got no cable news coverage because the people watching TV at home weren’t going to sit there and watch a report about people who were just sitting there in a park. It may have been important, but it wasn’t entertaining.
Even the Women’s March, one of the most important and timely protests of this era, complete with millions of protesters only got one day’s worth of TV news coverage – because it only lasted one day. Grass roots movements think their best shot at news coverage is to have everyone protest on the same day, because they’re too earnest in their thinking to understand how to best manipulate a ratings-complicit cable news industry.
Each of these “reopen” protests has taken place in a different state on a different day. The numbers have often been small, but that part doesn’t matter. Each day this movement has given cable news a new storyline to chase, complete with new footage of new idiots doing new idiotic things. This whole thing feels like it’s being orchestrated by someone with a keen understanding of how cable news cycles work, and how to get the same story on the air every day. It feels like it’s been orchestrated by some media consulting agency.
The good news is that whoever is pulling the strings on this highly inorganic “reopen” movement, it’s backfiring. The entire point of a movement like this is to convince the people in the middle that your side is the reasonable one, and that the other side is being unreasonable. But the lasting images of out of this movement have been of someone shouting racist things at a nurse, and of a bunch of crazed zombies pulling a Night of the Living Dead routine outside a government building.
These images serve to convince the people in the middle the protesters are whack jobs, and that their movement must therefore be the unreasonable side. Whoever is orchestrating these “reopen” protests, it’s someone who understands how to get sustained cable news coverage, but doesn’t understand what kinds of messages have what persuasion on the political populace. The media shouldn’t be covering this nonsense to begin with. It’s a reminder that the media will do literally anything for ratings. But the coverage is hurting the “reopen” side, meaning the media is unwittingly doing us a favor.
