A president tried to read her protesters through muted TV footage

Evidence

Over the entire week, President Dilma Rousseff developed her own technique for trying to read the streets. She would sit in the presidential palace, watching television feeds of the protests—GloboNews, specifically—with the sound off. If she removed the mediation provided by the channel’s commentators, she could stare intently at the people themselves and make note of the signs they were holding. She could try to let them speak to her directly. Of course, this method was limited to the images the Globo conglomerate chose to record and transmit, but it’s not like she could wander among the crowd, as I had done—and even if that were possible, demonstrations took place in a hundred cities at the same time. So she sat, and she studied the screen. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 434

Categorization

• SEED: A powerful image for an essay on how rulers, protesters, and journalists all filter the same street events through competing mediations — the president watching the people through a channel that selected the images.
• XREF: connects to: A president tried to read street protestors only through one media conglomerate’s chosen images — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 434