

Despite the rising number of casualties, death, and property damage from the “protests” in Greece, the media continues to make the dubious distinction between “protest” and “riot” in favor of the former for a Non-Muslim or non-Eastern country like Greece. However, when the situation is reversed, and the “protest” occurs in a country like Egypt, Turkey, or Libya it is described as a riot, even though no deaths or violence against the state police is occurring.

It’s interestingly kitsch, that we attribute the “protest” with its kitschy connotation of freedom, individualism, autonomy, and civil rights to actions against the state in Western countries, yet the term “riot” continues to be ascribed to any sort of organization or demonstration of the hoi polloi in a Muslim or other Eastern country despite even a total lack of real violence. That’s because the media perpetuates the kitsch classification of Muslim or other Eastern societies as lacking a true demonstration of civil rights or freedoms and only being able to express themselves through violence, death, hatred, bigotry, religousity, and ignorance.

The media operates so much in kitsch that despite the numerous images of violence from the Greek “protest” (see below) and the consequential rise in deaths, it is of course, as the media will continue to try and convince you of, a “protest that has only accidentally turned violent”. Sad, isn’t it?





The headlines from around the world, despite the prodigious escalation of violence against both police, other persons, and property, continue to read “protest” rather than “riots”. Nor is this some liberal vs. conservative demarcation. This trend is pervasive throughout our increasingly “global” media.

The Huffington Post’s article reads “The F Word: Responsibility for Greek Protest Deaths‎”. The New York Times article on the same subject reads “Greek Workers Protest Austerity Plan”. Even Reuters has the headline “Greek Anti-Austerity March Erupts in Violence”.

In contrast, demonstrations in primarily Muslim or Middle Eastern countries are described with headlines like “Dozens of activists injured during riot in Egypt” and “Egyptians riot over bread crisis”. Even more ironic is that a group of mere investors are described as rioting in this headline pulled from Marketwatch.com – “Investors riot in Pakistan as market tumbles”.

A comparison of the headlines from a semantic level illustrates that in Greece, the demonstrations have only “incidentally” become violent because of the actions of a few, and that the violent events occurring there are not part of the “actual protest” but rather an unfortunate side-effect of it all. In contrast, viewing the headlines of Egyptian and Pakistani “riots”, one can clearly see the difference – it is the violent riots which are the actual subjects of the headlines and there is not indication that there is any legitimacy behind them, unlike the Greek headlines which describe the demonstrations as “protests” and “marches”. The entire populace of those countries is implicated in these articles, yet in Greece the writer is careful to demarcate the “violent few” vs. the “legitimate many”. In the East, all of the protesters are culpable because they have been falsely and generally characterized as “rioting” by the writer.

For example, see the picture of the Pakistani investors “riot” below and the Egyptian “bread riots”. Clearly, the amount of violence is so substantial there that it must be characterized as a “violent riot”, right? Of course not, the only violence occurring in that Pakistani demonstration was against that poor rubber tire which was used symbolically to express the protesters disagreement with the new financial regulations.





Kitsch leads to this dubious and morally bankrupt distinction – these media interpretations for the benefit of the “common Western man” result in an increasingly kitsch and stereotypical depiction of situations that have very different and very unique circumstances and roots. Yet, the media transforms such individual events into a classification of either “protest” or “riot” as can be seen fairly clearly when one possesses a certain emotional and cultural maturity. The classification is arbitrary, capricious, and not based upon any logic or reason, rather it is based upon race, religion, and the kitsch distinction between the “violent East” and the “democratic West”.

For a more domestic situation which brings the media bias to light, all one has to look to is the criticism and outrage over the media’s depiction of whites and blacks during Hurricane Katrina – scavenging/foraging/surviving vs. looting/pillaging/stealing.

The sooner we realize such kitsch distinctions are merely creating racism, bigotry and hatred….the sooner we can transform the media into something that it was originally supposed to be – accurate and truthful reporting.