CNN’s coverage of the recent mass protests in Thailand has been impressive in a dismal sort of way. Suspecting that its viewers are unable to cope with concepts more complex than vivid colours it constantly referred to clashes between “red shirts ” and the police. To be fair the article to which I’ve linked does give a helpful “colour code” but that was entirely absent from any of the TV coverage I saw over three of four days. The nadir was when Kent Brockman – or someone awfully like him – interviewed a representative of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship  (UFDD). His questioning was along the lines of “if you chaps in red shirts get your way then those chaps in yellow shirts will be jolly cross, so why kick up a fuss?” The UFDD person replied “what is happening in Thailand today is a class struggle. Some leaders of the movement want to give up but we will go underground and carry on the class struggle.”

By any reckoning there was enough in that answer to give the making of an interesting interview. Who wants to give up and why did they hand themselves into the police? Why do you say it’s a class struggle? That was not Brockman’s approach. His angle was that it was a lot of foreigners with unpronounceable names creating a hoohaa because that’s what they do in those places. I may be conflating some elements of the torrent of drivel that sounded like it had been written by the State Department’s press office but the only bits of the news that the average CNN  anchor gets genuinely interested in is the material about the Obama family’s new pet.

There is much to be indignant about when you watch news reporting that is this shoddy. The first thing is just how little you learn about what’s happening in the world from watching CNN news. The excellent Australian journal Links which, and this is pure speculation, is run on a couple of quid less than CNN’s budget gives a lot more information about what is actually happening.

“Most of those in the Red Shirt movement support Taksin for good reasons. His government put in place many pro-poor policies, including Thailand’s first ever universal health-care system. Yet the Red Shirts are not merely Taksin puppets. There is a dialectical relationship between Taksin and the Red Shirts. His leadership provides encouragement and confidence to fight. Yet the Red Shirts are self-organised in community groups and some are showing frustration with Taksin’s lack of progressive leadership, especially over his insistence that they continue to be “loyal” to the crown.”

The second thing is the casual way in which a major protest movement is presented as a clash over colour preferences or as trivial as something like soccer. The more unusual the names involved to the American or European ear the less serious the analysis that is presented. It’s probably unfair to single out CNN but it was the channel that I had occasion to see over a few days while the protests were featuring in its bulletins. Nonetheless it was as good an example of the mainstream press downgrading mass political activity as you could wish to find with the added bonus of casual racism