Guerrilla theater and sketchy journalism.
When the newsmakers are supposed to be reporting it instead of making it.
“The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people.... From the very beginning he has the intention of destroying an unjust order and therefore an intention... to replace the old with something new.” — Che Guevara
Che Guevara is a romantic revolutionary symbol for historically illiterate activists who have never actually lived in a fascist regime and who don’t seem to realize that he was basically Fidel Castro’s chief executioner. Other than that, I’m sure his quote above makes his idea sound like an exciting, revolutionary New Year’s party. Out with the old, in with the new.
In Spanish, the word guerrilla basically means “little war.”
I’m not sure how little a war needs to be for the term to be viable. Some of the self-proclaimed “citizen journalist” protesters with copy shop press passes made crude propagandistic documentaries with titles such as The War of Standing Rock, so I imagine they saw themselves as guerrilla fighters. I recall seeing several Che Guevara T-shirts worn by protesters. There’s no true revolution without someone wearing a Che or marijuana leaf T-shirt.
Anyway, for argument’s sake, let’s say some of the protesters saw themselves as in a war, and that they were guerrilla fighters. Their language on social media and their description of the protest made it clear that they viewed it as a battle with law enforcement.
Guerrilla theater explains both the crazy drama that played out online and during the waning final months. Guerrilla theater is a first cousin to agitation propaganda (agitprop), both methods of creating scenarios designed to draw attention to a particular issue, but skewed in different ways. Agitprop occurs when a group is deliberately stirred up to react just in time for the press to cover the event in a predictable way.
Guerrilla theater is a bit different. Basically, it’s like Shakespeare in the park with a lot less eloquence and a lot more f-bombs and broken glass. Fakery and acting render the term “activist” an incredibly apt description. In guerrilla theater, the players act out the worst-case and most dramatic scenarios to make people believe they have only two extreme opinions to choose from. For example, during the protest, it seemed as if the options were either no pipeline or we’d be drinking oil out of the kitchen faucet.
“If you support law enforcement, you’ll be invading Poland by next month!”
Etcetera.
You’d get no St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V during this protest’s theater production, I assure you, but they did a pretty good job with the guerrilla aspect. They’d pester private citizens and law enforcement in restaurants, videoing the results. They’d tell stories of racism, so businesses were harassed. They knew what optics they were creating, and why.
“I wanted the world to see this militarized force coming in like it’s the 1800s with their Gatling guns and their advanced weaponry,” protest leader Mekasi Camp Horinek told a reporter, regarding the refusal to remove barricades and camps from private land and highways. “I wanted pictures of them slashing those teepees; I wanted pictures of them pulling open those teepees and arresting families.”1
Horinek wanted a staged moment to make law enforcement look bad. In his own words, he admits it. There was a need to create unnecessary conflict, not to solve a problem, but to get the optics that served other causes.
The sheer volume of guerrilla theater—both online and in real life—still stuns me. It was incredibly successful, too, spanning hashtags, T-shirts, and celebrity mentions. Guerrilla theater is a pretty good way to get money. Fake wars fill coffers.
“Ever read Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent?” I asked a friend. “This is basically manufactured dissent.”
Guerrilla theater is constrained by two factors: the media’s effectiveness in performing its function and the ever-shortening public attention span.
In a 1974 interview, Bradley H. Patterson shed light on the 1973 takeover of Wounded Knee by AIM activists.2 Patterson was an executive assistant to Leonard Garment, an attorney with the Nixon and Ford administrations. Patterson helped with civil rights and cultural affairs, eventually developing a specialty in Indian affairs. He described how the Wounded Knee occupation dragged on without much resolution:
“By this time, of course, the press had gotten a little jaundiced... See, the symbolic, the guerrilla theatre depends on the press, absolutely depends on the press. The press...begins to wane, and the interest begins to wane, the press begins to say, “Wait a minute. We’re being had here, we’re being used.” The operators of the guerrilla theatre realize they have to shut down. Well, that’s what happened in Wounded Knee a little bit, the press began to say, “Hey, wait a minute! This is, they’re putting on a show for us; we’re part of the show.” They were beginning to say, “Maybe we are being used.” Someone wrote an article later on and said, “Bamboozle me not at Wounded Knee.”
The press can easily put a stop to guerrilla theater, which means that successful guerrilla theater depends on the press’s failure. The press must be complicit—whether intentionally or not—for it to work. A theatrical performance requires an audience. In this unholy scenario, the press doesn’t report the story, but makes the story possible.
Our media system is very different from that of the early 1970s, of course. First off, thanks to the internet, we don’t rely on a few major newspapers or television stations for information. Secondly, I don’t know that there’s any tendency, by today’s media, to honestly look back and reflect on whether you’d been used or not. After all, being used and using people is how you get clicks and shares on the internet, and that’s a driving force for current media and today’s new generation of reporters. Because of the internet, guerrilla theater operates across many online platforms (which are reflected in society), whether mainstream media participates or not.
That is not a good thing.
That means you get news that includes official statements and classic fact-checking from elected officials and sworn officers of the law and dedicated journalists, placed equally alongside—in your social media news feed—claims that the daily Delta flights into the Bismarck airport are releasing chemtrails on the protest camps. It means you get wild tales of camp atrocities accompanied by photos from protests in Germany, Venezuela, and Chile, or photos from the film Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee or the television show The Walking Dead, alongside the local sheriff’s press conference. (Yes, those examples really happened.) The ridiculous is made equal with the facts.
I wish I could tell you that you could avoid this ridiculousness by deliberately choosing your news source and reverting to established national media outlets that are aware of the danger of manipulation, but I can’t.
Take, for example, the case of the floating buffalo.
MSNBC reporter Cal Perry arrived in January 2017 to report on the pipeline protest, and proceeded to report that the tribe was worried about oil leaking from the Dakota Access pipeline into the Missouri River because it would interfere with the tribe’s ability to feed itself through buffalo hunts.
“The tribe here goes hunting for buffalo, and they tell me they go hunting north of the river,” Mr. Perry reported. “Because the buffalo is so heavy, they kill it, and they float it down the river here to the camp, and that’s, of course, what they feed their families with. The question that was posed to me: What happens when we float that buffalo down the river and the river is full of oil?”3
I can assure you that the most that floats down the Missouri River in this day and age are boats and jet skis. After the 2011 flood, when the USACE opened the spillway at the Garrison Dam and flooded Bismarck and Mandan for about three months, I observed a hot tub and an entire house float away as Hogue Island collapsed into the river. But that’s it. Additionally, the Missouri River runs north-south in the area of the protest, which was on the west side of the river. I’m not sure where hunting for buffalo north of the river would place you, except perhaps at Panera in Minot. The Cannonball River runs sort of east-west, but Perry only referred to “the river” and didn’t seem to indicate an understanding of what river he was talking about.
Protester Steven Jeffery Chrisjohn filmed Perry as he was recording several takes of his elaborate “spring buffalo hunt” report. When Perry had completed all of his takes, Chrisjohn stated (on live video) that Perry’s report was incorrect.
“It’s not gonna be good for the locals, but for the mainstream it’ll be alright,” he tells the film crew. You can hear him chuckling; he knew the value of the PR for the cause, even though it was completely false. He also pointed out that Perry’s understanding of Native Americans hunting buffalo was “romanticized.” Perry was surprised to learn that most Native Americans here buy food at the grocery store like anyone else. On the Standing Rock reservation, at Ft. Yates, the grocery store is called White Buffalo Super Valu.4
It doesn’t float.
While I’d like to think he made a simple mistake due to lack of research or any sense of history whatsoever, Perry went ahead and ran the report on MSNBC on January 26, 2017, for 1.2 million viewers to see, despite many people having informed him publicly that his report was completely bonkers.5 Considering how many lies people had believed up to that point, I’ve no doubt his ridiculously inaccurate report is now lodged permanently in the minds of many and is categorized as yet one more evil thing North Dakota did: we stopped the Majestic Spring Buffalo Float.
Perry had arrived with a preconceived notion about the protest, and about whites versus Native Americans, apparently, and had reported his piece based on that instead of actually talking to pretty much anyone here who could have told him he was way off base. It was actual fake news.
Fake news has become a tiring buzzword because instead of serving as a wake-up call to think about what you’re reading, it’s instead used to dismiss what you don’t want to hear.
More dangerous than outright fake news is partly true news. If you want people to eat the poison, you gotta hide it in some sugar. Partly-true news cherry picks information. Partly-true news misquotes a law enforcement officer out of context and posts it on Twitter to inflame anger. Partly-true news contextualizes a story to suggest something that isn’t true without being blatant about it.
Whatever else you think about the phrase “fake news”, however, Perry chose to create it in the floating buffalo story. And to reward Perry for his excellent reporting, NBC News named him their global editor of digital content in May, just four months later, basing him in London to help the network expand its video content around the world so he can, perhaps, help other people lose all sense of history. I eagerly await his reports on Chupacabra sightings.
It’s not just willful bad reporting that makes it so you can’t mindlessly trust national media. When there’s a breaking news story, the news agencies from the big cities on the coast drop some guy in the middle of it, and he grabs at whatever information he can from whoever is most willing to talk. I could give you a list of about six people from Standing Rock who appear in nearly every interview; most are women. It should give journalists pause when the same people are eager to get their name in print every time; perhaps there are others they should be talking to.
I suspect the national media knows they can’t win at that game. They are fully aware that how people get their information has changed, and they’re chasing after it by using the videos and reports created by citizen journalists.
ABC News obtained drone footage from the night of November 20, 2016, at Backwater Bridge, shared it on social media, and repeated the protester’s account of the incident. By doing so, they spread serious inaccuracy to tens of thousands of people and helped protesters raise even more money and foster more harassment for North Dakota law enforcement and citizens. Imagine having a national media platform with millions of viewers and decades of storied news reporting by previous generations of journalists to lend credibility, yet choosing to accept the narrated report of a citizen without verifying it. Lots of clicks and social shares, sure, but it’s sort of like getting all of your weather reports from the guy in overalls telling a reporter how the storm sounded like a big train. By promoting unverified content out of a desire for immediacy, news organizations like ABC were responsible for pouring millions into the bank accounts of some serious protest scammers.
Other supposed news sources, such as The Young Turks Network, sent reporters like Jordan Chariton into our midst. Chariton proudly admitted, on video and by action, that he was there not to report the full story but to report the version that best fit his personal opinion. In a video, a local resident asked him which side he was on, a question no journalist should be expected to answer.
“I’ve made it clear what side I’m on,” Chariton responded.
His fans applauded his approach, saying that they finally had news they could trust because he was telling them what they wanted to hear.
The only godsend out of all of this is that, because of the second reason, guerrilla theater can have a short shelf life. It is the reality of a fickle public with a short attention span, addicted to a perpetually churning social media news feed. Guerrilla theater and agitprop are like sugar that constantly spikes your insulin; you end up tired, and after a while, you don’t get the rush like you used to.
As Patterson pointed out, even back in 1973, interest waned, and after a while, any good media source should start to ask questions in the opposite direction; if not out of curiosity, then at least out of boredom or regurgitating a movement’s talking points. As I saw during this protest, however, there is a new generation of reporters who, like a dog returning to its vomit, actually seem to enjoy talking points and journalism with a cause because it’s how they think they resist and stay woke. After seeing what happened with the media during this protest, I have difficulty believing any news, including mainstream sources.
Floating buffalo. Floating buffalo.
Do better, media.
Brown, Alleen. “The Battle Of Treaty Camp” The Intercept. First Look Media, 27 Oct. 2017. Web. 28 Oct. 2017.
“Bradley H. Patterson, Jr. Exit Interview.” Nixon Library and Museum. 10 Sep. 1974. Web. 12 Mar. 2017.
Port, Rob. “Fake News: MSNBC Aired #NoDAPL Report on Buffalo Hunting Even After They Were Told It Is Inaccurate.” Say Anything. Say Anything. 03 Feb. 2017. Web. 22 Apr. 2017.
Richardson, Valerie. “Burning Teepees, Floating Buffalo and Zombies: Dakota Access Pipeline Protest Plagued by ‘fake News’.” The Washington Times. The Washington Times. 05 Feb. 2017. Web. 13 Mar. 2017.
Port, Rob. “Fake News: MSNBC Aired #NoDAPL Report on Buffalo Hunting Even After They Were Told It Is Inaccurate.” Say Anything. Say Anything. 03 Feb. 2017. Web. 22 Apr. 2017.