Media containment frames protests as both trivial and gravely disorderly

Evidence

In addition to the physical kettling of the protests, we’re also seeing a media strategy of containment. Hold your nose and take a look at Jan Moir6 if you want to see a prize example of this kettle logic. The preferred strategy of the old guard seems to be one of phobic panic disguised as insouciant disdain: witness the way Moir shuttles between sexist and ageist belittling (“St Trinian’s Riots”, “fem-factions”, “boys and girls”, “throwing tantrums”) and moral horror (the deploring of “violence and damage”). The protest, in other words, was both a trivial jape and breach of civil order so serious that it merited “detain[ing] thousands of the students for hours in a ‘kettling’ movement”. … Then of course we get the wheeling out of the capitalist realist canards… “the cold reality of the economic times. There is no money left to fund further education for all. Which in any case is an extraordinary privilege, not a right.” — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1511

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the capitalist realism thesis running throughout Fisher’s book — media and ideological containment of dissent. — connects to: Large vocal protests can force mainstream media to platform dissenters; A protest’s media success can diverge from its organizers’ goals — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 393; Media dismissal of protesters as self-interested reflects media’s own assumptions, not protesters’ motives — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1516 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Media dismissal of protesters as self-interested reflects media’s own assumptions, not protesters’ motives #corroborates (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1516
• Media castigated BLM protesters as looters to delegitimize grievances #corroborates (0.80) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1142
• Media could not comprehend altruistic motivations among student protesters #corroborates (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1516
• Media portrayals amplify activist passion while muffling their reasoning #expands (0.78) — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 1418
• Large vocal protests can force mainstream media to platform dissenters #qualifies (0.75)
• A protest’s media success can diverge from its organizers’ goals #expands (0.75) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 393
• Media coverage persistently equated protest property damage with police violence #expands (0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1548
• Political movements that become media spectacles lose their real-world referent #expands (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 888