Catching up on some pre-(municipal) election reading, and came across this nugget from ThinkProgress:
A ThinkProgress review of the media coverage of the last week of July found that the word “debt” was mentioned more than 7,000 times on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News, and “unemployed” was only mentioned 75 times.
Yet now, things have changed… A ThinkProgress review of the same three networks between Oct. 10 and Oct. 16 finds that the word “debt” only netted 398 mentions, while “occupy” grabbed 1,278, Wall Street netted 2,378, and jobs got 2,738.
The ThinkProgress report credits the Occupy Wall Street movement and the broad public support it enjoys for shifting the narrative and focusing the media on unemployment, and there’s a lot of truth to that. But I suspect it’s a little more complicated. After all, this is not the first enormous left-of-center protest in this country. Just in the last decade, we’ve had dozens of medium-to-very large anti-war rallies, a number of other large one-off events, and multi-issue protests at seemingly every major party convention and political summit.
All of them, regardless of how their issues polled (and on issues like reproductive choice and the invasion of Iraq, the public was partly to largely on the protesters’ side), were treated dismissively by corporate media, just as OWS initially was.
The first catalyst for the shift in tone of the OWS coverage was several incidents of NYPD overreaction – but, again, preemptive arrests and cop thuggery have been standard operating procedure at big progressive protests for at least the last decade, and media usually looks the other way.
I suspect three things made a difference here: the sustained (and eventually expanded) nature of the OWS protests, their location a few dozen blocks from the headquarters of most of the country’s major TV networks, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that Beltway politicians started responding to the protests and talking about jobs.
Our country’s political news corps is staggeringly myopic; if neither major party is talking about an issue, that issue disappears. Period. That’s why nobody was talking about jobs in August, and why everyone was talking about curtailing federal spending even though it wasn’t a high priority at all for most Americans.
The Obama White House also deserves credit (and I’ll grudgingly even extend that to Harry Reid) for continuing to talk about Obama’s jobs plan even after it got a DOA reception in Congress and a collective yawn from both the media and most of Obama’s base. The latter were suddenly too busy embracing a new movement that has conspicuously rejected the efforts of Democratic Party politicians and operatives to make common cause. OWS activists saw the co-optation of the early Tea Party efforts by the Republicans. They saw Democrats, led by Obama, allow the financial criminals who plunged tens of millions of Americans into misery not only skate free for their past crimes, but continue their amoral behavior unchecked. They want no part of the Democrats.
But they need them. Because without the continuing Capitol Hill focus on pieces of Obama’s jobs plan, and without the reaction by both Democratic and Republican elected officials to the protests, protesters wouldn’t have gotten the media critical mass they’ve achieved. Conversely, the Obama package would be just another Beltway squabble, tuned out by most Americans, without a very visible grass roots movement demanding that something meaningful be done. Obama needs the Occupy Movement, too, even though it’s not a reaction to his initiative.
The media narrative would not have shifted without both efforts reinforcing the other. Will it be a prelude to actual policy change? Not likely; the Republican House will block anything meaningful enough to accrue public credit to Obama in an election year. But the effort helps Obama’s political goals of identifying Republicans as the problem in time for 2012, just as the media coverage helps the protester goals (in the U.S., anyway – this is now a global movement) of undermining the legitimacy of any financial or political institutions that don’t address the real and immediate needs of what’s now known as The 99%.
For OWS, Obama and the Democrats, at least for the moment, aren’t the enemy; for Obama, neither are the protesters. They won’t work together, but they’re inadvertently helping each other anyway.
President Obama moved the conversation to jobs the second he announced that he was going to write a plan AND give a major speech on jobs. The beltway and the blogosphere was all atwitter about what’s he gonna and what’s he gonna propose. THEN he gave the speech, proposed his legislation and the topic has been jobs ever since. The OWS helps I guess, but they claim to be apolitical and have a pox on both houses attitude. So much so that I have YET to hear an outcry from them on the defeat of the American Jobs Act in the Senate. TWICE now there has been a vote and TWICE it was voted down. Where the hell is OWS?
What’s also keeping jobs in the spotlight is Obama’s bus tour and the naming of his political enemies. So a HUGE part of this goes to Obama. Period.
If OWS wants to gain even more legitimacy then they should vocally call out those in Congress who oppose it and demand its passage.
The OWS helps I guess, but they claim to be apolitical and have a pox on both houses attitude.
Not true. If you have followed OWS over Twitter, which is really the only place a lot of us can, you’ll know what they the GA at OWS did the other day. Someone wanted to vote on a resolution telling both parties to go pound sand. The resolution got tabled, which at the least means it wasn’t approved. According to everything I read, they won’t put the pox on both parties, but they know the Democrats aren’t exactly OWS’ best friend. If I was part of OWS, I wouldn’t want to be co-opted by the DNC either.
Thanks for this Calvin. Not only is OWS (appropriately in my view) cautious about being coopted by the DNC (and others), it’s probably in the best interests of OWS, the DNC and the country that the two maintain a certain distance. They have (again, appropriately) different roles in our politics.
P.S. Based on this list assembled by Chris Bowers over at the Great Orange Satan, it looks like it’s easier for many of us to connect (and not just online) with OWS.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/10/04/1022722/-Occupy-Wall-Street:-List-and-map-of-over-200-US-so
lidarity-events-and-Facebook%C2%A0pages
Unless I counted wrong, that’s every state in the country represented with “Occupy” groups. 4 in Kansas, 8 in Montana…Go Heartland!
I don’t think it’s necessarily true that OWS needs to talk explicitly about Obama’s job bill in order to help.
If they just keep talking about jobs and the “malefactors of great wealth,” they are preparing the way for the DC-oriented Democrats to be able to talk about the jobs bill and the Republicans, and to do so more effectively.
The Democrats don’t need OWS to be a message machine for their legislative efforts. They need them to keep the public and media focused on jobs and the problem of politicians looking out for the rich. If they do that, then the Democrats themselves can then exploit the environment.
Without OWS Obama would not have budged an iota towards a jobs plan. He’d still be cowering in his bunker howling about The Deficit.
Actually, I think meh (above) has the chronology right. Occupy Wall Street started on September 17. http://occupywallst.org/about/ Obama’s televised speech to Congress about the American Jobs Act was on September 8. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/63043.html
Obama had announced a few weeks earlier that he would be putting together a major jobs initiative.
I agree with the basic argument of the original post and those commenters who’ve highlighted the synergy of Obama’s and OWS’ impact. The challenge (for both) will be to keep it up for at least the next several weeks.
Evdently.
about the “blah dee blah dee da.” See you at the decapitations?
K then, bye.
Text me!
What the fuck?
That asshole is simply a moronic troll. Ignore, please.
Dynamic Tension ftw.
this is true, and this is where it gets tricky. the OWS people are EXTREMELY leery about being co-opted: they have already seen how “change” has worked out for them (some of us with memories of broken promises in 2006).
And yet it is true that the only way the reforms continue is if democrats are elected (there is no national constituency, yet, for greens etc). But the democrats have not lived up to the task, in so many ways. Personally, I would like to see the OWS people run some primaries with their own candidates. I can think of a number of shitty democrats (allyson schwartz comes to mind, for her obeisance to the banks) who deserve it.
the democrats have a fine line to walk right now, a fine line.
And this is EXACTLY why the Dems got shellaced in 2010 – we let the criminals skate, we indicted exactly none, by 2010 tens of thousands of house foreclosures had occurred at the same time tens of billions of bonuses were being awarded.
Obama had better pay attention – we need to take it to Wall Street. INDICT LLOYD BLANKFEIN. Get him on the stand on Nov 8, 2012. It’s not important if he gets convicted, but he should be in court.
Actually, no. About 3/4 of Democratic losses in the 2010 elections can be accounted for by three factors:
*high unemployment/bad economy;
*the governing party typically loses Congressional seats in off-year elections;
*the Democrats controlled most of the vulnerable/swing districts after the elections of 2006 and 2008, and thus had more “losable” seats.
The remaining quarter of Democratic losses can be attributed to any number of factors—Wall Street bailouts, ACA/Medicare reforms, etc.
It’s fine (heck, it’s good) to be angry about how Wall Street has skated these last few years. But we shouldn’t allow that anger to cloud our ability to analyze our situation and to plan and act strategically.
How about Chuck Schumer? He is the single most important reason why the “carried interest” tax dodge persists. He is a fully co-opted senator for the financial industry, and basically a total whore.
OMG! They’re defecating on my stoop!
I agree that the sustained nature and growing numbers in the Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City was a factor. The convenience of coverage from NY studios was a factor, but most of the coverage has been by the local NYC folks, not the national crews.
The last point is a little bit more complicated. Beltway politicians have been talking about jobs for years; the media has failed to showcase those positions. My guess is that the jobs issue gained salience when large numbers of NYC union members showed up supporting the movement. The media industry still is one of the most unionized industries in the US. And most of the union jobs left cannot be outsourced. Sympathy of media union workers with large union support of the Occupy Wall Street movement could shut the media down if push came to shove. It would not be easy to find substitutes in a short times for a lot of jobs necessary to making the media machine run.
Showing Beltway politicians arguing the jobs position allowed them to pivot from debt to jobs.
The last factor is the agreement that Obama and the Congress made at the first of August. That sorta ended the debt issue’s 15 minutes of fame for a while. And Obama pivoted to jobs in a high-profile speech and a continuing national tour. That pivot dragged the media in the direction of covering the jobs issue.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is no longer a left-of-center movement. It has become ideologically unclassifiable, which has allowed it to spread to Amarillo and Tyler TX. gain a large following in Pensacola, Tampa, and Orlando and tempt the Ron Paul folks into trying to co-opt it through their “End the Fed” issue.
The movement is now at a critical point at which its ability to persist in places outside New York is being tested. How long will folks in Raleigh be able to get enough folks to volunteer to stand on a sidewalk overnight in all sorts of weather to make a point? That’s standing with no sitting. How long will folks in Cincinnati be able to legally fight the park rules that are continuing to get them cited at $114 an incident? How long will the mayor of Atlanta, who organized a sit-in back in the day at Howard University, allow folks to occupy the main park in Five Points, the symbolic heart of Atlanta’s CBD? How long will Nikki Haley, Tea Party governor or South Carolina, allow 20-30 people to camp on the portico of the State House? There is a test of determination coming. And that is surviving what Herbert Marcuse described as repressive tolerance and Gandhi summarized as “They ignore you.”