On the 8th of March, FOX 5 News ran a slanderous hatchet job of a story about the Native Nations Rising camp on the Mall behind the White House. They mixed the story about Tipis behind the White House and the Dakota Access Pipeline with old B-roll from the Inauguration showing burning trash cans and riot cops, then ran interviews where protesters were criticized for not knowing irrelevant facts, like states other than North Dakota where the Dakota Access Pipeline passes or its exact length (1172 miles).
Tipis are being set up on the Mall for Native Nations Rising, which will culminate at 10AM on Friday, March 9 with a march to the White House from the US Army Corps of Engineers at 441 G st NW.
FOX whined about a male cameraman being denied access to a Tipi designated explicitly as a women’s space, and tried to imply the entire camp was women only before finally admitting that it was this single tipi from which men were excluded. They stopped just short of legally actionable slander on this point.
Exactly how long the pipe is from the fracking fields of North Dakota to the tank farm at Patoka, Illinois is of little relevance beyond the possibilty that more miles of pipe are more opportunities for a spill. Even the now-routine alt-right/Trump lie about “paid protesters” was raised at the end of the story. Seemingly everyone in the activist community wonders where this mythical money is.
There are several possible reasons for a pro-Trump, pro pipeline TV station to freely mix DisruptJ20 clips with footage of tipis standing behind the White House. Maybe they are not satisfied with calling anticapitalists and anti-Fascists “thugs and terrorists,” and now want to expand that label to anyone who threatens their oil profits? This sort of thing has been seen before, and Fascists in general make a point of accusing their enemies of that which they themselves are guilty of, such as terrorism and thug behavior. The amount of flat-out terrorism and thuggery on the part of the resource extraction firms against Indigneous people is just totally off the scale.
Alternately, maybe someone is trying to get a nasty faction fight going on a “good protesters, bad protesters” split and drive a wedge between anticapitalists and environmentalists. It could also be between white environmentalists and Native American activists that they are trying to set the wedge, and this would be consistant with some of the other parts of the FOX News coverage, notably questioning people who look white until they find someone who cannot answer some irrelevant question like the exact length of the pipeline.
FOX’s DisruptJ20 clips wern’t even good ones. FOX just showed riot cops in a line and burning trash cans. They did not show the protester charging directly into a blast of pepper spray to rescue an elderly Native woman and a protester on crutches pepper sprayed by police. FOX did not show half of the marchers trapped in a blatantly illegal mass arrest charging the police lines with an umbrella as a shield against pepper spray and escaping. They just focussed on a burning trash can probably meant as a barricade to stop police vehicles that ended up accumulating a huge crowd of photographers instead.
Riot cops were in fact been a major part of the events at Standing Rock-as agressors brutalizing peaceful water protectors who generally were on Lakota land praying as police opened fire with water cannon, pepper spray, rubber bullets, grenades, and attack dogs. FOX News could have showed plenty of relevant footage of shocking police brutality in N Dakota, but instead showed marchers months later in DC who could well have concluded that if they were going to be beaten and gassed for praying, they may as well get beaten and gassed for giving Big Business and Trump’s “MAGATs” a headache to remember them by.
FOX News yakked about “out of state protesters,” even though DC is the home of the Federal government and the capital of the entire US. Again they brought up the Counterinaugural, forgetting that an inauguration is a national event and that most of the Trumpers were also from out of town.
Now for the facts you won’t get from FOX about the pipeline itself. The DAPL originates in North Dakota, where oil fracking has led to displacement of Native people to make way for “man camps.” Rape and sexual assault have soared around the camps. The oil is fracked from shale. For Native Americans near the fracking fields this has been a disaster. The climate aspects of unconventional fossil fuel extraction have pulled in environmental activists from all over Turtle Island, but the fight over the DAPL is not about climate, it’s about water. If the pipeline breaks where it crosses under Lake Oahe, the entire water supply for the Standing Rock Sioux reservation will be permanently contaminated. The pipeline was rerouted away from Bismarck, N Dakota for the exact same reason, as a pipeline break at the original river crossing would have destroyed that city’s water supply.
Video assembled from “Resistance Wing” Ustream
