When the police are violent against activists, journalists tend to frame it as though there were violence in some vaguely unascribable sense that implicates the clobbered as well as the clobberers. In, for example, the build-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, the mainstream media kept portraying the right of the people peaceably to assemble as tantamount to terrorism and describing all the terrible things that the government or the media themselves speculated we might want to do (but never did).

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175506/tomgram:_rebecca_solnit,_why_the_media_loves_the_violence_of_protesters_and_not_of_banks/

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