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The new media offensive against Occupy Wall Street: "protesters wearing out their welcome"
The greater media threat to Occupy Wall Street comes not from right-wingers but from the more subtle attempts to frame the protests as unpragmatic and past their time.
The new media offensive against Occupy Wall Street: "protesters wearing out their welcome”
As the Occupy Wall Street movement stretches deep into its second month, the media is picking up a new and negative message: “After weeks of cautiously accepting the teeming, round-the-clock demonstrations spawned by Occupy Wall Street, some stressed-out cities have run out of patience.” (The subhead of yesterday’s New York Times article.)
Conservatives are eagerly trying to smear Occupy Wall Street for the odd deranged participant (and in a wide-open movement/tent city like this, they’re not hard to find: homeless people with mental illness, Ron Paul types, and people who are recently laid off and pissed off, but just plain uninformed). They are also trying to work the referees, accusing the mainstream media of secretly supporting the movement (including a freelance arts journalist who worked on — gasp — public radio’s “World of Opera”! So that’s where the liberals sneak their bias into the media ... ).
The greater media threat to Occupy Wall Street, however, comes not from right-wingers but from the more subtle attempts to frame the protests as unpragmatic and past their time. The first such message was the round of publicity given to the price tag of paying overtime to police. This failed to catch on: It seemed crass to put a price on the right to public assembly, especially given the vast public monies wasted on Wall Street.
The newest media threat to OWS is an attempt to portray the movement as something that, however noble, has run its course. While this isn’t a coordinated offensive on the part of the media, it could very well reflect a concerted effort on the part of urban mayors.
Philadelphia has been somewhat immune to this trend, drawing largely sympathetic coverage that focuses on protesters' demands for economic justice. The Daily News ran an op-ed saying, “the [police overtime] cost is a gnat on an elephant, considering the cost to Americans from the Wall Street meltdown.” This could be in part, as the Inquirer noted today, a reflection of the fact that “Police, city officials, and the movement's members are praising one another for their civility and respect.”
Nationally, the “protesters-are-wearing-out-their-welcome” narrative may already have been defeated: the shooting of Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, struck in the head and seriously injured by a projectile (perhaps a tear gas canister) fired by the Oakland police, has cast a more sinister light on cities' efforts to evict the occupations. Today, The New York Times noted that the shooting had sparked “outrage,” in part because of “the oddity of a Marine who faced enemy fire only to be attacked at home.”
Another threat is on the way, however, and it is more climatological than linguistic: snow.
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