'Suicide Bomber' or 'Peaceful Protester'?

Like many TV viewers around the world this week, you probably saw this guy being spectacularly crash-tackled by police outside the US Capitol:



Australian protester Wen Hao Zhao was knocked to the ground by SWAT-squad-style police while standing outside the Capitol building, where had had been asking to speak with George W. Bush.

Zhao, who had earlier visited the White House and unsuccessfully asked to see Bush, was standing in a zone which is normally open to tourists but had been temporarily cordoned off. So he may have been in breach of the rules but it is hard to image he could have represented much of a serious threat to staff in the building. He also refused to tell police what was in the two bags, but it's hard to imagine the police response would have been much different if he had told them something like "clothes", isn't it?

Police violently removed Zhao and then blew up his bags for good measure. All of the action was expertly captured on film for TV news. Predictably, the media response was immediate and - like the police action - overwhelming.

Zhao was universally characterized as potentially dangerous and probably a lunatic. The words "suicide bomber" kept turning up in media headlines long after this possibility had been disproved.

Now think about it. Insane or not, this guy was really just a peaceful protester. If the police had not chosen to tackle him so aggressively, and if it had not been captured for TV consumption, Zhao's protest would not even have been news. And given the other news stories that are being ignored every day, perhaps that would not have been a bad thing.

Most TV viewers will have the impression that Zhao's protest was a ridiculous, futile and even slightly frightening. But stop and think about it: this was just a peacfeul protest! What Zhao's small protest really did is show up Bush World for what it is: a fiction-based landscape of paranioa, fear and violence. So I say, "Well done, Wen Hao Zhao!"

UPDATE: Ted Rall today looks at widespread media labelling like this. For example, Muqtada al-Sadr is always called a "radical cleric" rather than "popular leader", Giuliana Sgrena is always called a "communist journalist" and Rall himself is always called a "controversial cartoonist."