UPDATED: Big media's shameful news brownout on the Wall Street protests
Why the American news media can cover protests halfway around the world in Tahrir Square, but imposes what amounts to a brownout on news about the protest taking place on Wall Street
UPDATED: Big media's shameful news brownout on the Wall Street protests
UPDATE: Corrected and edited to reflect the fact the one of Colin Moynihan's earlier blog posts was reverse published in New York Times editions delivered to New York City residents -- but not here in Philly and elsewhere -- still doesn't change the basic fact of undercoverage, at least until the mass arrests and pepper-spray incidents in the second weekend.
What do you think was running in the pro-government, pro-Mubarek newspapers in Egypt back in February, when crowds of unhappy and often un- or under-employed citizens began crowding into Tahrir Square? I don't know the answer to that, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say there probably wasn't a lot of coverage of what was happening in Tahrir Square, at least at first. They were probably running cute feature stories about an old-time falafel stand in a changing Cairo neighborhood, or maybe articles on parking problems at the Great Pyramids. They certainly weren't going to call attention to the elephant in the room that was about to knock over a corrupt and decadent society.
I was thinking about that this week, during the extra time I had on my hands because I wasn't reading in the pages of the New York Times (not much, anyway) or the Washington Post about the Wall Street protests that have been going on now for four days, with hundreds of disenchanted and disaffected youth camping out nightly in a lower Manhattan park, marching on the financial district by day, getting arrested and provoking a large police presence including a phalanx of NYPD cops guarding the notorious Merrill Lynch bronze idol of greed.
Call me crazy, but as a journalist marking his 30th anniversary in the news business this year, I would think that an ongoing protest like that in my hometown would at least make the local newspaper. Not necessarily on Page 1, and not even every day necessarily. But at least wedged somewhere between the various ads for Tiffany and Saks, etc.
Maybe that explains why I've never gotten a job at the New York Times.
Apparently for editors in their plush 8th Avenue skyscraper, the Wall Street Day of Rage is among the news that the New York Times considers just barely fit to print, with just one blog item reverse-published in an inside paghe, and only in the editions for New York City residents, in the early days of the protest. Meanwhile, ince as many as 2,000 demonstrators against Wall Street and government corruption first crowded into Manhattan's Zuccotti Park on Saturday (the numbers have dwindled since then), the metro section of the Times has gone wild with the imminent closing of the orginal Ray's Pizza as well as the looming disappearance of parking meters(maybe the Gray Lady is just selling nostalgic to newspapers' graying audience?)
The Times isn't unique, though. There don't seem to have been any print articles in the Washington Post at all, and my sense is that television news coverage -- even on "liberal" MSNBC -- has been non-existent or less-than-minimal at best.
That's not to say there hasn't been some level of news coverage. The Times has published three blog posts about the protests, although they were not easy to find on the web site (here and here-- you had to navigate well below the layer of Ray's Pizza) and the Washington Post has also published blog posts (here and here) and even photo essays, which is good way of saying "look at these crazy and colorful kids" without addressing the actual issues. I've noticed that a lot of the American coverage that I found through Google News was in the form of online photo essays. Look, I'm somebody with one foot in the blogging world and the other foot still planted in the mentality of the old-fashioned newsroom, and I can tell you that sometimes buried blog posts and photo essays are a way to say you "covered" something without, you know, actually covering it, not in a way that counts.
Go back to the Tahrir Square analogy for a minute. Remember that as soon as the Egyptian protests heated up, though they may have not gotten much ink in state-kowtowing local media, they got a lot of coverage from news outlets in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere around the world. Wouldn't it be really ironic if the Wall Street protest -- while largely ignored here at home -- was getting more in-depth coverage in foreign news organizations like the Guardian, the Daily Mail, and the International Business Times?
Heh.
You could make the argument that the American media just doesn't like covering protests. But then you'd be only half-right. News organizations haven't spared many resources in tracking conservative Tea Party protests across America -- even though the numbers of people attending those rallies have fallen off sharply in the last year. It's just left-leaning protests that the media gets really queasy about covering, as evidenced by this bizarre case right here in Philadelphia involving the Inquirer's reluctance to pay attention to protests at the home of Cigna's CEO.
Here's a perfect example collected in March by Think Progress:
While the tea party demonstrations — which were estimated to have been attended by 1,500 – 2,000 people according to Capitol Hill police officers — received an enormous amount of press coverage, a larger demonstration took place. A crowd estimated to be 2,500-strongby Capitol Hill police officers marched through the streets of Washington to mark the seventh anniversary of the war in Iraq and to call on Obama to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and focus all of his efforts on domestic priorities like health care and education.
The news media did not find the second, larger march to be as newsworthy as the tea party demonstration. Using the media data-mining tool Critical Mention, a search by ThinkProgress of the keyword “protest” of the three major cable news networks — CNN, MSNBC, and Fox — found that the tea party protests were covered 31 times between March 19th and March 21st, and the antiwar demonstration was only covered twice.
So what gives? Are the Koch Brothers or Lloyd Blankfein of Goildman Sachs using their secret red phones to call top editors and order a news blackout (or more appropriately in this case, a brownout)? Uh, not exactly. That said, if you don't think a pervasive pro-Establishment, don't-rock-the-boat bias exists in the modern American newsroom, then apparently you took a very, very long nap during the Iraq War and the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis. But there's also other more subtle forces at work.
As we've discussed frankly here before, many reporters are somewhat liberal in their personal leanings -- not leftist, not hardly, but somewhere on the center-left on matters like the environment or abortion. And since professional journalists are often obsessed with proving their "balance" above all else, and weak-kneed om reacting to right-wing criticism dating back to Spiro Agnew, that means bending over backwards to show they're not ignoring something conservative like the Tea Party, even if they think actual Tea Partiers reside on some other planet. Meanwhile, as journalism reform guru Jay Rosen of NYU has discussed on many occasions, the other ultimate goal of the modern journalist is to appear "savvy." And what could possibly be more embarrassingly unsavvy than taking seriously the ambitions of a band of granola-eating missed-the-60s dirty bleeping hippie wannabes -- crazy enough to think that they can change the world.
And so actually changing the world is something that only happens halfway around the world, in places like Cairo.
It can't happen here.
Maybe some editors somewhere can put down their slice of Ray's Pizza for a minute and think about the news brownout in lower Manhattan in the context of Tahrir Square, and what are the big-picture things that are really important in America in 2011. Like deep unrest over the wrong track this nation is headed down. Maybe one or two of those newsroom chiefs will be ashamed at how it's played out so far, but I kind of doubt it.
Fixed it for ya....Shameless brownouts on Fast and Furious, Solyndra, and Lightsquared scandals.— rudytbone
Thank you, Will. I have a lot of friends up there, and we've had to rely on them getting in touch with us when they can, Seeing this really helps.— HandNik- Will Bunch a journalist..... don't make me laugh. You are a blogger Will. You are not a journalist. Your point of view is skewed to meet your personal agenda. Why would I put any faith into what you have to say?— RufusG
Comment removed.- Why do you hate America and Working Americans are you being paid by Koch Brothers to write your hateful comments?
See, the liberal media does not no longer exist, if 100 people wearing tea bags riled up by Glen Beck showed up there would be all the networks there but 10,000 Regular Americans, nothing. It is a disgrace.
It is a bigger disgrace that two former Republican Governors cannot get a place in any of the Republican Debates because they will not tow the radical right wing rants but want to talk about bring the country forward into the new millenium.— DavidAG - Why do you hate working Americans DavidAg? why do you want to enslave them in e chains of excess government and corrupt unionism? Why do you want to place more power in the hands of that entity that is responsible for more death and destruction than other in government? Why do you hate that which permits workers to make money? — quattro4
- I agree with RufusG. Wall Street is good. Unions are bad. If we would just give rich people, oil companies and corporations more tax breaks and greater authority to destroy the environment, endanger workers and offer wages barely above the poverty level we would all be happier and this recession would magically end.— mick-of-the-moment
- Comment removed.
- "Bunch of B.S."- where have you been, you really are out of touch in your own business. The Lib media never covered the crazy nut job anti-war protesters who called for Bush to be killed and compared him to Hitler on a daily basis. "not ignoring the Tea Party"???..WHAT!! they use that to build a picture of the the Tea Party that fits how the wish to portray them and even lie about what actually happens at their rallies, name calling, spitting, etc. Do you really think the Libby media wants to expose the crazies that represent the Left. All you have to do is look at some of the photos of those anti-Bush freaks and it will tell you all you need to know, Lib media doesn't want to deliver that to the world. They ignor it just like they do all the major issues that show their folks for what they really are. People even look up their foes high school courses and try to make them look weird in an effort to divert focus. All the while their crazies are roaming the streets with idiotic hate filled messages that the Lib media will not even give 5 seconds to while they spend their time going after non factors like Palin and making her rich in the process...LOL!!!
Besides if they ever really had to cover the truth about the "deep unrest" in the country it is not going to be represented by a few hundred clueless idiots lying on the streets on NYC. It would all be aimed at the one person they want to protect, our President, so don't count on it ever happening.— sarah89 - "People even look up their foes high school courses and try to make them look weird in an effort to divert focus."
hahaha..thanks for that sarah, but now I have to clean up the mess I made from laughing so hard while eating my lunch and reading your post!— Les Ismore - look I know you Libby animals eat with your claws but dude...get a bib!! It's clear you hate conservative women but why is it you can never argue the facts and always attack with senseless BS?? I will admit I did make one small error, it isn't high school courses the Libby media go after, although I wouldn't doubt they probably have,it's college courses they use to attack people they disagree with and use to divert attention from real issues but the point is the same. That should be obvious but since it's dinner time I know you have more cleaning up to do so I won't challenge your limited thought process any further. hahahahaha!!!! — sarah89
- Sarah hookup with Bill Atkins, the both of you could shout all your crazy rants while pleasuring each other! — DavidAG
- David, you are on to something there. Can you just imagine that love-child? ugh, I shudder at the thought of it. — Les Ismore
- Just think Joe Biden!!!!Shutter away!!!! — sarah89
- Good job sarah89--Yes it's all Obama's fault.— mick-of-the-moment
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