Covering the March 1st Day of Action

About a week ago, I received a Facebook event invite for the March 1^st National Day of Action.  The description stated “We refuse to pay for the crisis created by the 1%...this is a call to work together, but it is up to each school and organization to determine what local and regional actions.” I found out that they were going to be in Berkeley and I decided to check it out.  

On March 1^st, 2012, UC Berkeley students and supporters attended the Day of Action for Public Education. Approximately 150 attended at Sproul Plaza in Berkeley, California for a noontime rally to “protest state cutbacks to education” say the UC Berkeley News Center. Briefly passing by and checking it out, I noticed that there weren’t as many supporters as the Occupy Cal movement demonstrations. After looking at a few articles, one even named “Slow, soggy start for Day of Action”, I was curious as to why the protest seemed so small this time around.

Upon further inspection, I realized that the university website articles and other traditional media articles seemed very objective and boring, simply stating the movement’s objectives, but didn’t include any juicy gossip. However, the protests twitter (Occupy Education) told a different story. Every tweet was positive and uplifting, exemplifying the protesters accomplishments and actions. They tweeted all aspects of the protest from many different schools, a livestream containing actions such as Humboldt’s samba circle and fire show and occupying a theater.  YouTube was also very subjective as they made short videos on the march to Sacramento while interviewing many of the leaders of the movement who showed strong support for rebelling against public education cutbacks.

While all of the sources had different views on the day of action, it brought up the bigger issue: Which sources are we supposed to look into? How often are people misguided by different social media outlets? Was the movement actually successful? (I can’t tell because all my sources are telling me something different.)