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.