Continuing this, I'm still up in the air over whether it's intentional malice or just that journalism has been a huge steaming pile of shit for years now, but quite a lot of the media coverage of OWS has gone out of its way to emphasize homeless and student involvement and not, y'know, the regular people who actually have salient points and know what's going on.
Little from Column A, little from Column B.
I think it was Franken who said that the media's bias is neither toward the liberal nor to the conservative side but to the profit side. As I've mentioned in other threads, their continued breathless coverage of Palin/Trump/Bachmann/Perry/Christie/Cain isn't due to any particular loyalty to the Tea Party, it's because nobody's going to get excited by media coverage that says "Look, guys, it's obviously gonna be Romney; let's just ignore the rest of these clowns."
And there WAS some early belittling of the Tea Party, and focus on the guys carrying Obama-with-a-bone-in-his-nose signs, but it died off in a hurry, and for the most part any coverage that DID acknowledge the lunatic fringe balanced them with more reasonable/moderate/coherent folks. (MSNBC may be an exception, but MSNBC is MSNBC. And hell, they've got Joe Scarborough, so I imagine at least he didn't spend all morning making "teabagger" jokes.)
The double-standard IS an odd one. Yes, liberal street performers are kinda goofy, but not any goofier than the Tea Party's Revolutionary War Cosplay Brigade.
I think there ARE people in the media who really buy that "liberal media bias" nonsense and overcompensate for it (see Oliver Willis's recent post on Jill Abramson's comments about
trying to bring "balance" to the New York Times, where "balance" is defined as "uncritically parroting lies about Iraqi WMD's to help George Bush drag us into an unnecessary war"), so it's entirely possible that concerns over accusations of bias led newscasters to resist their natural urge to focus on the craziest people in the Tea Party.
That and the OWS protesters are explicitly opposed to the hegemony of the networks' owners and sponsors, which wasn't really the Tea Party's focus. So that probably doesn't help.
I'll just add to this debate with the most cherished of all forms of communication, a graph from the OWS Wiki page on publicity:
Comparison count of news stories on Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street protests
Feels right but I'd like to know the original source.
(Meantime, more charts, these on
income inequality. Via
Mark Evanier.)
The Tea Party doesn't seem like a big deal these days because the first rally started on Tax Day in 2009. And that's before you consider that news stations were covering the movement long before those first protests even took place.
The Tea Party was in my face during the 2009-2010 political seasons. After the election of 2010, when the Tea Party got elected and more people started to realize how horrifying they actually are, that's when attention began to die down. Since then the Tea Party has fallen considerably in favor (now ranking below my own classification, Socialist Atheist Blood-Sacrificer), but they still get plenty of lip service in the press.
Tough call. I would argue that there's a televised Tea Party rally every week at this point; they're called the Republican Debates. Though if you want to make the argument that the general population doesn't give a crap about any of that stuff and it's just the media jamming a horse-race down our throats, it'd be hard to argue with that interpretation.
To answer the question about central organization, OWS doesn't really have any. Which is part of the problem of the protests. They seem to be setting up an anarchist collective in Zuccotti park, but don't seem to have any end-game or demands to be met. OWS considers demands to be "Something a terrorist would do", which is stupid.
I don't think the Tea Party has any coherent philosophy beyond "Cut taxes", though. It's not that they're a one-issue group -- it's that they're (politically) a diverse group, and cutting taxes is about the only thing they all agree on.
And even then, I'm betting quite a lot of them could be convinced to raise corporate taxes by a couple percent.
That said, the Tea Party has establishment backing and OWS doesn't. I'd argue that's a double-edged sword. Honestly I don't WANT the Democratic Establishment to glom onto OWS; I want OWS to make the Democratic Establishment fucking nervous.
But a coherent set of requests is kinda necessary. I mentioned the Tea Party only agreeing on "Cut taxes"; here we're looking at a movement that mostly seems built around "Raise taxes (on the wealthy)" (and maybe also "My college is too expensive"). I'm still a big proponent of "End corporate personhood", and that Taibbi list I posted a couple pages back is a good one too.
I'm also confident that, per my discussion with Rico above, there are plenty of coherent people with specific, reasonable requests at these rallies, and the media keep interviewing the ones dressed like chickens.
Nowadays they're of the variety of "You want Universal Healthcare? We don't need the state. Let's just round up all the doctors we can who are willing to work for chickens". This is evidence in how some of the OWS protesters are fascinated by the barter system.
Bartering is great for local, small-scale stuff. But yes, implementing it on a scale any bigger than the local community is ludicrous.
That said, it's instructive to look at how our financial system works and where all this shit came from. Looking at archaic payment systems like bartering (and the origin of interest as "Take care of my livestock while I'm on a voyage and you can keep any offspring they birth in the meantime") helps to illustrate just how many layers of abstraction we've gone through to get to a financial system based less on cows' babies and more on bulls' shit.
We've gone from objects of actual, tangible value to pieces of paper representing value to ones and zeroes representing that paper to a system where people manipulate those ones and zeroes in an elaborate casino where they shift all the risk onto the public. I'm not suggesting anything drastic like going back to the gold standard (I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the gold standard but neither do I think it would do us a bit of good to go back on it), but acknowledging that at this point Wall Street investors are pretty much making shit up is a good place to start when you want to talk about reform.
