The Media, Occupied

“Occupy Wall Street was not a media phenomenon, it was, and is, a grass-roots combustion that happened to have a lot of cameras pointed at it.”

—David Carr, media columnist, The New York Times

First, it was a near-total blackout. Then confused, on-everychannel saturation. Along the way, the media at turns sensationalized, name-called, lionized, tsked, denounced, and embraced the nascent movement. Mainstream coverage of Occupy Wall Street has been a fickle, ornery beast.

Most outlets struggled to find a clear narrative to build around OWS, while conservative cable shows and radio pundits wasted no time attacking it. Reporters were routinely roughed up, arrested, or barred from doing their jobs, and a number have lost those jobs in the process, evidently skewing too close to activism for their employers’ tastes. In other words, the Occupy movement has done nothing less than test the very standards of what objective journalism should look like in a modern, free society.

The movement’s notoriously rocky relationship with the media was born alongside the initial, inauspicious protests on September 17, 2011. Despite attracting a thousand or so people to lower Manhattan for a spirited march on the financial district, Occupy Wall Street’s first action drew a blind eye from the mainstream media. A mention in a couple dailies, a single blog post in the New York Times’ City Room. Even as the protesters hauled tents to Zuccotti Park and proceeded to set up camp, few major outlets paid attention. Cameras and news vans were nowhere to be found as protesters staged marches and gained in numbers. Instead, news of Occupy spread through the blogosphere, by word-of-mouth. Michael Moore and Roseanne Barr visited Zuccotti, and helped get the occupation a little ink. But by and large, silence.

Moore went on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC to lambast the media blackout.

“People are down on Wall Street right now holding a sit-in and a camp-in down there,” he said. “There’s virtually no news about this protest. This goes on with liberals and the left all the time, and it gets ignored.”

A few days later, Keith Olbermann did a comprehensive Countdown segment on Current TV, and a handful of articles appeared on blogs and in left-leaning outlets. And yet, outside of liberal circles, Occupy Wall Street wasn’t even a blip. Until September 26, and the now infamous pepper spraying of young women protesters by the NYPD, Occupy Wall Street coverage didn’t even register on the radar of Pew Research’s media analysis.

This not only irked the activists, but also less involved supporters who’d discovered the movement from unconventional sources. Thus #OWS and #OCUPPYWALLST hashtags proliferated on Twitter, decrying the lack of coverage, and readers bombarded their news outlets with complaints that they were ignoring the occupation. That the media was turning a blind eye to OWS became a story unto itself. NPR would later dedicate an entire segment explaining its lack of coverage. In an article called “Newsworthy? Determining the Importance of the Protests on Wall Street,” NPR’s executive news editor Dick Meyer explained why they hadn’t run a single story on OWS for the entire first week of its existence: “The recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.” Comments quickly appeared online pointing out that NPR had covered Tea Party rallies attended by as few as 40 people.

But it wasn’t celebrity support or progressive kvetching that finally tipped the needle. It was, as is depressingly so often the case in protest movements, police brutality. News that 80 protesters had been arrested in a peaceful march to Union Square, and shocking video of four young women being casually and pointlessly pepper sprayed while corralled in a police pen, was what finally pushed Occupy Wall Street into the national news cycle. The media was left grappling with how to explain what had happened and why; why hundreds of young students were willing to brave aggressive policing and rough living conditions to march around Wall Street and camp in a park. They listened to occupiers talk about income inequality and corporate greed; they had no choice but to absorb and relay at least chunks of OWS’s core message.

The media immediately felt compelled to evaluate the movement, to attempt to create a neat, overarching storyline out of its disparate elements. Pundits and opinionators began puzzling over the occupation, about who was behind, who were its spokespeople, what were its demands? The framing of the movement as a “left-wing Tea Party” was about the best the commentators on CNN, Fox, and NBC could muster.

Much of the early coverage—even the non-Fox News coverage—was downright condescending or dismissive. CNN’s Erin Burnett mocked the protests in a derisive segment called ‘Seriously, Protesters!?’ in which she mused “What are they protesting? Nobody seems to know!” before going on to trivialize everything she saw at Zuccotti. One of the New York Times’ first pieces on the protest, “Gunning for Wall Street with Faulty Aim,” adopted a similar tone. In it, Gina Belafonte “documented” the “intellectual void” of OWS and “the group’s lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it.” She dismissed the occupation as “an opportunity to air societal grievances as carnival.”

But there was simply too much grassroots momentum behind OWS for the public to lose interest, even in the face of the wave of pooh-poohing from the media’s armchair pundits. The sweeping arrests of 700 protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, followed by a union-supported march of nearly 20,000 people in Foley Square, offered unambiguous evidence that the movement was growing, and the hitherto sporadic media attention turned quickly into a deluge of around-the-clock coverage, with news vans taking up permanent station in the environs of Zuccotti.

By October 6, comedian Jon Stewart quipped that the media had “moved its coverage dial from ‘blackout’ to ‘circus’. But those are the only two settings it has.” And sure enough, Occupy Wall Street was thrust front and center into the cultural zeitgeist, amidst a sea of talking heads, newspaper ink, and magazine covers. OWS now commanded attention at dinner table conversations, father-daughter arguments, and dorm-room debates across the nation.

News organizations eagerly dug in for angles, and dispatched reporters to Zuccotti to find answers to questions that continued to nag: How were they organizing? How did they eat, sleep, go to the bathroom? How could there be no leaders? Were there still no demands?

While a bewildered mainstream media sought to make sense of the notion that, yes, a diverse coalition of people could protest income inequality and the rampant Wall Street greed without a specific policy platform, “Occupy” became a full-throttle cultural meme. The word pervaded national discourse, and metastasized into a modern riff on “protest.” Clean energy advocates launched ‘Occupy Rooftops’ to promote a solar power action, for instance, and environmentalist groups tapped into the “Occupy” aesthetic to help gather 12,000 for a protest at the White House. Less seriously, the “Occupy” meme proliferated online—football fans started “Occupy Couch,” “Occupy Sesame Street” condemned monsters eating 99% of the cookies, and “Occupy the URL” filled laptop screens with images of digital protesters.

The outlets continued to binge: they ran human interest stories about the daily life in the camp, they embedded with the protesters, they obsessed over the activists’ artwork and style, they profiled the occupiers. During the second week of October, 10 percent of all national news coverage was devoted to Occupy Wall Street. The movement was undeniably in the nation’s bloodstream; it seemed that reporters and anchors had more trouble making sense of OWS than average Americans.

The conservative media, however, did not find it difficult to manufacture its own narrative about OWS. Fox News, the rightwing blogosphere, and radio pundits like Rush Limbaugh hastened to lay into the movement. They went to lengths to discredit OWS by focusing on fringe characters who hung around the park, playing up instances of alleged bad behavior, and claiming the whole shebang was funded by Democrats and Obama’s reelection campaign.

In one segment of his cable show, Sean Hannity painted a lurid picture of the occupation for Fox News viewers: “Garbage is everywhere. The New York Post describes a scene where drugs are being sold, people urinating and defecating in public. By the way, there’s a picture in the Daily Mail of one guy going to the bathroom, number 2, on a police car. You can’t make this stuff up. They’re passing out condoms, there’s open sex, drugs are easy to score.” The photo run by the Mail circulated extensively on rightwing blogs in an attempt to discredit the protest, though the disheveled-looking man who appeared in it was never proven to be linked to OWS.

Rush Limbaugh, predictably, out-fulminated even Fox, revealing on his radio program that “This whole thing is a construct of the media-Democrat complex, industrial complex.” Karl Rove described the protesters as a “group of nuts and lunatics and fascists” and Fox host Greg Gutfield called OWS “a bunch of wusses.”

The smear jobs didn’t come without blowback. Fox News was famously ridiculed after it decided not to air an interview with the quick-witted protester Jesse LaGreca, who gave as good as he got in front of the microphone and went on to become one of the first, entirely unofficial media stars of OWS. “It’s fun to talk to the propaganda machine and the media,” LaGreca told a producer for Greta Van Sustren’s show. “Especially conservative media networks such as yourself. Because we find that we can’t get conversations about the Department of Justice’s ongoing investigation of News Corporation, for which you are an employee. But we can certainly ask questions like you know, why are the poor engaging in class warfare?”

There were journalists, however, and more than a few, who attempted to portray the movement in a more accurate fashion. Some even came of the fence and openly sympathized with the protests they were covering. Those who did so frequently paid a heavy price. Natasha Lennard, a freelancer for the New York Times who reported on her arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge, was subsequently canned by her bosses for voicing support for the movement. Two NPR contractors lost their jobs for participating in OWS, though their involvement was marginal at most. Lisa Simeone, host of the entirely apolitical “World of Opera,” was chastised by NPR for supporting the movement, and syndication for her show was dropped. Caitlin Curran, a freelance reporter for the WNYC/PRI’s The Takeway, was fired after a photograph picturing her holding her boyfriend’s pro OWS sign circulated online.

Both Lennard and Curran were able to share their stories on nontraditional media, however. Curran’s post “How Occupy Wall Street Cost Me My Job" on Gawker has registered nearly 200,000 page views. And Lennard penned a piece for Salon explaining that the arbitrary guidelines of what could be transmitted as fact in the mainstream media was leading her to abdicate those institutions altogether. “If the mainstream media prides itself on reporting the facts,” Lennard wrote, “I have found too many problems with what does or does not get to be a fact—or what rises to the level of a fact they believe to be worth reporting—to be part of such a machine.”

News coverage of OWS peaked at extraordinary levels in mid-November with the eviction of Zuccotti and the pepper spraying of peacefully protesting students while seated on the ground at UC Davis three days later. The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism reported that “All totaled, the Occupy Wall Street story accounted for 13 percent of the overall news during the week of November 14-20.”

It wasn’t just coverage of the evictions and the police confrontations that came across in these news items. OWS was also one of the primary drivers for economic coverage that week stories dealt with the movement’s messages concerning income inequality and corporate greed too. Operating an approach that eschewed the conventional media’s demand for top-down, ontopic, sound bites, the Occupy movement nevertheless managed to broadcast around the nation and the world a powerful message about the way the economic system no longer adequately serves the 99%.

Perhaps it was precisely because of the evident authenticity of a movement that spurned professional spokespeople and PR-hype that its message spread so powerfully. “Occupy Wall Street was not a media phenomenon,” David Carr, the New York Times media columnist, wrote on November 20, “it was, and is, a grass-roots combustion that happened to have a lot of cameras pointed at it.”

Those cameras were not present, however, during the NYPD’s military-style operation to clear Zuccotti in the early hours of the morning of November 15. Reporters were blocked off from covering the event, and airspace above the park was closed to news copters. Mayor Bloomberg described this move as an effort to “protect the members of the press” from the raid he himself had instigated. And so, an occupation that had begun with a comprehensive media blackout ended in the midst of another.