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Big Media Afraid to Take Wall Street Protest Seriously

That's how it appears, given the thin, dismissive coverage of Occupy Wall Street so far.

By Katrina Orlowski, 26 Sep 2011, TheTyee.ca

Occupy Wall Street protests

Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park, Manhattan. Photo: Shankbone, Creative Commons.

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It's been over a week now of protests, meetings, and confrontations with police on Wall Street, and yet mainstream North American media outlets, who have provided us with daily updates on uprisings in Egypt, Libya, and Spain, to name a few, have given either thin or dismissive notice to what is happening on Manhattan. Known as the Occupy Wall Street campaign, it started on September 17 with thousands marching into New York's financial district, waving slogans such as "Wall Street is Our Street" and "We are the 99%." Cops were waiting for the crowds on Wall Street, so they set up camp a block away and have been there ever since, day and night.

Fueling these protests is the widening gap between the wealthy and everyone else, which continues to grow because of rising unemployment and mortgage foreclosures. In other words, this is a much different kind of movement from the tax-cut loving Tea Party protests that the media eagerly covers. This might make more sense when one considers that the Tea Party protests are funded by the ultra-right billionaire Koch Brothers, and treated as a grassroots mega-story by Rupert Murdoch's Fox News.

The Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal has run a handful of stories on Occupy Wall Street, seeming to take a close interest only when protesters began being arrested.

On the day the protest launched, CNN filed the story not as general interest news about a developing social movement, but as a business item. The story was published on CNNMoney, which advertises itself as "A service of CNN, Fortune and Money."

The New York Times tucked its September 23 story into its regional section (as if this weren't a story of significance beyond New York) and topped the supposed news piece with a dismissively biased headline: Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim. In case readers didn't get the point, the writer's snide asides included describing Occupy Wall Street as "a diffuse and leaderless convocation of activists against greed, corporate influence, gross social inequality and other nasty byproducts of wayward capitalism not easily extinguishable by street theater."

Indeed, this tone of patronizing distancing from the supposedly naïve and therefore irrelevant protesters saturates much coverage of the protest. The Associated Press account that the Wall Street Journal and others published four days ago led this way: "In a small granite plaza a block from the New York Stock Exchange, a group of 20-somethings in flannel pajama pants and tie-dyed T-shirts are plotting the demise of Wall Street as we know it." Aren't news reporters taught to adopt a fair and objective voice? Would that not include simply relaying the actions and ideas of the protesters without first making fun of them?

Violence sells

Only when violence broke out at the protests this weekend did ABC News break ranks from other big television broadcasters and begin treating the protest as a real story -- but now the frame was on the clash between police and citizens rather than the ideas those citizens sought to bring to public attention.

Perhaps the Occupy Wall Street protesters ought to count themselves lucky that they are allowed to publicly protest at all. If the right to freedom of speech is a sign of a healthy democracy, though, then why hasn't the media proclaimed with effervescence that here, at least, is proof of the strength of our North American democracies? Many commentators speak of our waning democracies, yet there is almost complete silence on a very important aspect of a healthy democracy, namely, non-violent social movements attempting to be heard.

As even the news this week affirms, America and other western nations are grappling with one financial crisis after another. Could it be that the physical presence of these protesters claiming to represent the "99 per cent" of us who have not benefitted from the corporate bail-out packages makes that one per cent squirm? Perhaps the media moguls in charge of newsrooms across the continent are feeling the sway of this uncomfortable squirming from the economic elites.

Certainly the New York police were uncomfortable from the start with this peaceful yet persistent crowd. For two days, protesters sported Guy Fawkes masks, after the legendary British rebel from yesteryear, as a proclamation of their association with the nebulous group Anonymous. Last Monday, the NYPD responded by deciding it was high time to enact a law that prohibits concealing masks in public. One clever protester mused on Twitter that it would be interesting to see what the city's police decide to do on Halloween. When, last week, protesters began to be arrested, there was virtually nothing in the mainstream media about any of this. Saturday, the number arrested had grown to 80, some maced and thrown to the ground by police.

Signs of a growing movement -- and story

Those engaging in the Manhattan protest remain adamant that they represent hundreds of thousands of others far from the site of action. Spreading the word largely through Twitter, protesters associated with Anonymous -- the elusory group known best for their Internet hacking schemes -- continually devise strategies to get more and more of the "99 per cent" involved. The other day operation #BankerBlackFax was introduced, in which templates for taunting messages were posted, along with the fax numbers of various Wall Street-related stock companies. Anonymous and the Occupy Wall Street protesters pride themselves on being a leaderless collective -- as the group's slogan states: We Are All Anonymous.

For more than a week now, these protesters claiming to be voicing grievances on our behalf have maintained their ground in Manhattan and proclaimed their strength over the Internet despite a near media blackout. Anonymous and the Occupy Wall Street protesters may seem a world away for those of us living in a country that continues to maintain a facade at least of sailing through the global financial tidal waves. Perhaps the ongoing occupation of Wall Street is not so far away, though, in the least because Vancouver-based Adbusters is one of the movement's original proponents.

What will come of mass movements such as the occupation of Wall Street, or the many that have and continue to take place around the globe this year, remains to be seen. For now, however, we can content ourselves in knowing that there are those among us who still believe in the power of democracy, who feel that the current financial instability needs more voices heard than simply our elected political representatives, bank CEOs, and media pundits. They continue to protest in spite of the mainstream media's failure to alert the rest of us.

[See more Tyee rights and justice coverage.]

Katrina Orlowski is a writer and filmmaker in Vancouver.

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A Drop in the Bucket

1 year ago

Suggest as offensive

Maybe when the bailouts reach $700 hundred trillion dollars...

Wallstreet...You mean got ballsstreet...

http://powellriverpersuader.blogspot.com/2011/09/233333-for-every-man-woman-and-child-in.html

scallywag

1 year ago

Suggest as offensive

What's really at stake??

What makes this taking to the streets beguiling is how insidious it has been referenced to by the press and local police officers who have even taking to invoking murky laws from 1865 to arrest individuals (which should be tipping us off how threatened authorities really are). That said the lack of concern by the press and the bullying tactics of authorities ought to strike some degree of consternation in all of us, because even if a collection of individuals choose to scream at the top of their lungs about something they don’t like and even we don’t like what they have to say, they should nevertheless be allowed to state their claim as the constitution asserts the freedom of expression, as opposed to being rounded up and roughed up...

http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2011/09/occupy-wall-st-rebel-with-a-cause-suddenly-youth-who-dont-care-about-celebrity-and-fame-but-will-this-consciousness-have-legs/

pwlg

1 year ago

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ahh...the bailouts, taxes, and offshore earnings

One of the biggest benefactors of the Great Recession of 2008 was Goldman Sachs (you know the company with the most former employees running the US economy from the White House these days).

GS received more than $700 billion in government loans to keep its operations intact. GS used some of this money to purchase companies at bargain basement prices.

In 2007 GS paid $6 billion in taxes yet in 2008 paid only $14 million.

Most believe the significant reduction in taxes paid by GS had little to do with the Recession but more to do with GS creating subsiduaries in low taxation countries where they could funnel their profits.

The same year, 2008, they paid $14 million worldwide on taxes they gave out billions of dollars in bonuses to those who helped engineer the crises we are still reeling from.

GS did pay back its government loans however it gained significant benefits (purchasing of assets of failing companies at bargain basement prices) from those loans and again shifted profits out of the US to low taxation countries.

Now a cynic might say that the revolving door between government and former GS employees may have something to do with the benefits GS receives from government and the lack of criticism it receives from lawmakers and the corporate media. One can't imagine a media on hyperdrive informing its listeners and viewers relentlessly about corruption in arab states while glossing over the obvious influence one investment house has over the US White House, Senate and Congress.

How can the US media not hit hard on a company that received significant government handouts and preferential treatment when it deliberately organized its business to reduce its corporate taxes in the US by several billions of dollars.

And if you think Canada is immune you might want to look at the current Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mark Carney, who spent 13 years with Goldman Sachs prior to his new position with The Bank.

Some may remember Carney as the one who engineered the final nail in the coffin of Canada's national ownership of some its oil and gas industry. Carney helped the Canadian government sell its remaining 19% of Petro-Canada to the private sector leaving Canada one of the 5 nations of the 20 major oil producing countries without a national stake in its own resource.

As other nations work hard to gain control of their natural resources Canada sells its resources and ownership off to the first foreign company that comes to the table with money.

There is little thought to the future when you have transcendental religious fanatics running government policy. These fanatics are so heavenly bound they are no earthly good.

Perry

1 year ago

Suggest as offensive

This reminds me of the protests in Syria

This reminds me of the protests in Syria. Tight control of the media kept many citizens initially unaware that their government was shooting protesters, but they have found a way around that.

*****

By blocking internet access for the entire country last Friday, the Syrian regime demonstrated yet again just how out of touch it is with its own people and with the times in general.
...
Not having a formal, organised, political opposition that can give voice to the protests was initially frustrating and extremely frightening for many Syrians, yet it was also quite liberating. For one thing it has shown that young and old Syrians are capable of taking control of their own destinies without the stale political opportunists and parties of the past.

Young popular committees, deep underground in Syria, are liaising and organising among themselves. They are getting their voice to the outside world at a time when the Syrian regime is forbidding any foreign media from reporting in the country, and they have learned and adapted remarkably quickly. Grainy videos taken with mobile phones now include easily recognisable local landmarks, and the cameraman is careful to always state the date, time and location of the events being filmed. There is even a YouTube channel, Sham SNN, where videos are uploaded almost hourly and, it seems, carefully vetted to avoid hoaxes or irrelevant material being included. ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/07/syria-opposition-young-protesters

Kritical Mind

1 year ago

Suggest as offensive

Great Work

You need to find others like yourself. If Canadians can't get balanced essential information we'll be far too late to react and prepare. At greater and greater costs. Others must amplify you here and with other very critical issues like fair vote or money will have more power than just media and political influence. Great work.

Soon for the very wealthy who can influence and manipulate markets and trends prices will be so low they will invest as their money is worth more after devaluing mutual funds, pensions, salaries and savings.

Great work.

anarcho

1 year ago

Suggest as offensive

They need a Black Bloc?

And you wonder why there are Black Blocs. One broken bank window by some balaclava wearing youth and the media would eat it up.

Amelia Bellamy-Royds

1 year ago

Suggest as offensive

"We are the 99%" ?

I don't know enough about what these protesters are advocating (beyond simply voicing frustration) to say whether or not I agree with them, but I know one thing: they aren't representative of 99% of the population.

The vast majority of Canadians and Americans treat the economy like they treat the weather: something to be talked about, often complained about, but not something you can actually change.

P.S. To anarcho: Sad but true, indeed.

Frank

1 year ago

Suggest as offensive

Peaceful demonstration ignored?

Colour me surprised.

The Right will always tell you that protests should be orderly, not inconvenience anyone and should disperse when asked. They would say that wouldn't they?

I've said it before and will say it again, in a world where the Right owns the media, demonstrations have to contain a violent element or they will be ignored.

Always attack on a broad front. Have a peaceful demonstration of marchers with friendly middle-class faces and a list of reasonable grievances. At the same time have a group who are separate from the main protest but are willing to break windows and finally have a political vehicle working within the political framework.

TYRONE

1 year ago

Suggest as offensive

Misleading headline not helping . . . .

. . . . to cast light on the REAL culprits - the owners of all the news outlets on this continent.
Make no mistake, the shadow government of this world is in full control of the media almost world wide. The reason I say "almost" is, that many people still expect truthful reporting from certain quarters outside the continent, but there are precious few independent news reporting entities around the globe.
The simple truth is, that we are being lied to by zionistic forces and if not lied to, we are kept in the dark through non-reporting. (obviously the Tyee is borderline, because we get to see SOME news, but it is also teinted!)