Riot Rant

Guess what?  This is going to be me ranting about the media.  Turn back now if you can't handle it.

In the last few days there have been major riots going on in Seattle.  The media has devoted a great deal of coverage towards these riots.  And what do we know about the situation?  That some idiots smashed a bunch of windows and stole from some stores.

I'm not going to go into those idiots who used the situation in Seattle just to loot.  I watched the same thing happen years ago when riots hit Los Angeles.  And the same thing holds true then as it does now, these people are morons.

But then, so is the media.

Why am I pissed off at the media over this situation?  Because they aren't reporting the story.  The new reports that I saw are leaving out important details, such as WHY are these people rioting.  They rioted because of the WTO conference, but that's all the public knows.  What caused the riots to happen?   Why did a ton of protestors show up to shut down the conference?  What went wrong in the protests to cause the riots?  And why the hell is the media so damn useless?

The first thing the media failed to report was the incredible amount of people who came to protest this conference.  The numbers were in the ten thousands.  There were enough people to shut down the streets around the conference building.  That's a lot of people, makes a person wonder what they were doing there.

Not that the late night news was going to tell us. 

The WTO conference is going over a number of different topics in this convention, from taxes to unions to genetics.  I'll be honest, I don't know a lot about the issues that are going on, and thanks to the evening news, I still don't.  I know whatever is being discussed is going to effect people.  But this wasn't important enough to tell the unwashed masses that watch the news for their information on the world. 

One subject I know a little about is the genetic developement of food.  Many food manufactuers are tampering with the genetics of their produce and products.  They do this for a great many reasons, but ultimately it usually makes things cheaper to sell, so it's a profit issue.  The long term effects of altering food isn't known yet. It could be very bad for people, we don't know.  But most of these companies aren't required to label their food if it's been genetically altered.  This is one of the topics up for discussion at the WTO.

Again, I know little about if the WTO is trying to stop this practice or continue it.  My gut feeling is that the WTO isn't interested in slowing down trade with laws that ban geneticly altered food.  If I'm wrong, I invite anyone to email me otherwise. 

Then there is the other minor point the media forgot to bring up.  From what I have heard from direct witnesses, the police helped inflame the riots as much as any of the protestors.  Apparently the police who were unable to do anything to stop the protest with non-violent means, resorted to more physical methods to make protestors disperse.  Apparently most of the protestors resisted the police with non-violent means.  The few who went wild were the minority.  You would never know that from watching the news.

But then why should you.   It seems to me the media's goal was to make out the WTO to be the good guys in this case, without ever going into the issues that were involved.  Or maybe the media just thought that the issues involved weren't interesting enough to maintain ratings. 

It would be nice if we could get the full story.