“I think there’s always a nervousness that we’re going to miss a story,” Zernike continued. “If this thing happening in Lower Manhattan is going to become a big deal, we don’t want to be accused of missing it.”
What about Brisbane’s accusation that Occupy became a “cause” among Times journalists? Zernike disagreed, saying, without elaborating, “I think people were a little more careful than he’s giving them credit for.”
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Fewer journo arrests at latest OWS push
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The Times ran a story about whether protest/folk music (the hold of the never-never 1960s on the journalistic mind) was going to undergo a revival. The Washington Post's architecture critic praised the 'vibrant urbanism' of Occupy encampments. The Tea Party coverage was informed by the obvious distance between its members and urban journalists; the Occupy movement was misinformed by the romantic political fantasies lavished upon it by journalists who are suckers for the standard 'liberal' (i.e., urban bourgeois) narrative of American politics.
Current polling suggests the Republican Party will hold on to control of the House of Representatives, where the Tea Party made its mark in the 2010 elections, in spite of the efforts at marginalization of that tendency by the NY Times and the rest of the mainstream media. The Occupy movement appears to have withered away - as one could have expected of a movement of students who grow up eventually. If the NY Times' reporters knew then what they know now - really, does anyone doubt that the coverage of Occupy would have been lighter, and that of the Tea Party more comprehensive, regardless of the politics of the editorial staff?
#1 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 2 Oct 2012 at 04:58 PM
“We were late covering the Tea Party.” I.e., we tried to ignore and stifle the Tea Party for as long as possible.
#2 Posted by Tom T., CJR on Wed 3 Oct 2012 at 08:57 PM
The problem with your otherwise good theory as it applies to these 2 movements is: what would you find? I higly suspect that if you dug deep into the Tea Party you'd find: "Lower my personal taxes!". In other words, there's probably more on the surface of the tea party - no matter how little - than there is underneath. I think you'd find more if you dug down into Occupy, as Gitlin likely did, but perhaps not enough that they could even come up with a coherent strategy against the corrupt system they so rightly condemn. Or maybe you'd find too much. Maybe they couldn't come up with any solutions because their heads were so filled with pipe dreams that they crowded out anything else.
What you journalists really need to do is to dig into why today's journalists are so cowtowed and spineless that they hear and see lies every day by the train load, and don't challenge them. And also fail to challenge "media" organizations that are nothing more than propaganda organizations for billionaires. All because they afraid of offending fringe groups or losing "gets". Delve deep into that in a column, why don't you? When I was a very low level jouranlist, I never worried about offending any politician, though I never tried to be confrontational for it's own sake. But what I would have told them if they vowed never to talk to me again is, "Fine, don't talk to me. Your enemies will." And that's why you see the same folks all the time on the Sunday morning talks shows. They know they need you more than you need them, whether you realize it or not.
#3 Posted by mediaman13, CJR on Sun 7 Oct 2012 at 10:42 AM