Making the News: Anarchist Counter-Public Relations on the World Wide Web

Abstract

Traditionally, radical social movements faced a dilemma regarding media coverage: focus either on mass media, but lose control of their representation, or on alternative media, but fail to get their message to the broader public. The World Wide Web overcomes these problems, allowing movements to create their own media with mass distribution. However, it has two key weaknesses of its own: mixing public and private audiences and attracting audiences. In this paper, we show how the structure and content of the anarchist Web-based media work together to separate private and public discourses. We then demonstrate how the anarchists attracted an audience to their Web media. The Black Bloc tactics at the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization brought an increase in media attention, albeit negative. We examine how anarchists took advantage of the larger audience created by this bad publicity and mounted a counter public relations campaign online. We argue that the Web alters the power relationship between mainstream and alternative media without displacing the need for mainstream coverage. 1