Larger Editorial: The Infuriating Media Coverage of Occupy Wall Street

By now, it’s almost like shooting fish in a barrel for people to criticize the mainstream media. I mean, they please virtually no one. Liberals don’t like the MSM (which sounds like something you don’t want in your Chinese food) because they stubbornly refuse to cover stuff like the Wisconsin union protests. Conservatives such as Sarah Palin don’t like the “Lamestream Media” because they quote her verbatim and play “gotcha” journalism by asking her questions…any questions.

So it may seem very easy to pick on them for the way they’ve covered the Occupy Wall Street Protests. [And, for once, it has nothing to do with them not covering it.] Still, if I never took on easy targets, I’d never get to write any pieces about Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, or Big Momma’s House-style movies, and the site would be less interesting for it.

What I’m talking about in their coverage is three things: 1. The repeated and completely wrong criticism that the protesters have a muddled message. 2. Focusing almost solely on the tiny number of arrests that happen at each event. 3. All out bias against, derision of, and generally disdain for the protests…but not mentioning their conflict of interest in covering them (almost all of the corporations and people the protests are against own or buy ads at these media outlets).

Let’s start with the repeated-so-often-people-believe-it criticism of the Wall Street protesters having a muddled, sprawling, impossible to fully grasp message. Generally, it goes something like this “These protests have been going on” and they act mystified at this part “for over a month, but still no unified message has been put forth. It’s hard to tell what they want or what they hope to achieve.” NO IT ISN’T! [Excuse my illiterate all capital letters but sometimes message board rage is the only appropriate response.] If you put the movement in two words, it would be “Income inequality.” That’s the core issue and it makes perfect sense for those willing–and most are not–to hear it.

I don’t know what is so confusing about seeing hundreds of signs saying “We are the 99% percent,” and hearing dozens of protesters talk about income inequality. To get more general, we are mad that more money flows to the top by downsizing U.S. jobs (a factory gets shutdown and the CEO pockets the “cost cutting measures” instead of creating more jobs), we are angry that corporate subsidies for banks and oil companies exist why we see no relief, we don’t like the staggering income inequality that has happened since Reagan took the White House, and we really don’t like the strangle hold that corporate money has put on our government system. Conservatives keep saying “Well why don’t these people go to Washington and complain.” Because we are smart enough to know that they are not in charge, and we want to talk to the string pullers, not the puppets. Besides, as they are quick to remind us, the government can’t create jobs, only the private sector can, so we are complaining to the appropriate people (who might want to hold the purchase of that second yacht and use that money to create ten jobs…as in today).

Anyone saying that the protests have a muddled message (I guess because some Afghanistan war protesters have also joined us) is forgetting that the Tea Party was, literally, all over the place in messaging when it first started. It wasn’t a “smaller taxes, smaller deficit” movement for a long while and still isn’t, as numerous polls (and “Obama is hitler” “No Obamacare!” and “Go back to Kenya Obama!” signs) have shown, there is a huge racist, xenophobic, and ultra religious element in the Tea Party that just never gets talked about by anyone who isn’t Sean Penn or Morgan Freeman.

Then there’s the equally maddening insistence on portraying the Occupy Wall Street crowd as violent. Uhhh, I’m sorry but we aren’t like the Tea Party or anti-“Obamacare” crowd, who regularly carry guns to their rallies. Occupy Wall Street is overwhelmingly non-violent and it pisses me off that a rally with 5,000 protesters is mostly covered by the media for the THREE people that get arrested at it.

And finally, there’s the core reason behind most of this derision of the movement: we are protesting the same people that either own the media outright (Rupert Murdoch) or buy heavy ad time during news coverage (any oil company, big pharma company, and you can’t watch CNN without a Bank of America commercial). So no wonder they don’t “understand” us. As Upton Sinclair said “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”