The fact that Time magazine named "The Protester" its Person of the Year was maybe a little surprising. Totally unsurprising, though, was the choice of a runners-up: Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, a hero to many in the corporate media for his bold calls to slash government spending on the poor.

It's hard to know where to start with reporter David Von Drehle's tribute. But let's try here:

Through a combination of hard work, good timing and possibly suicidal guts, the Wisconsin Republican managed to harness his party to a dramatic plan for dealing with America's rapidly rising public debt.

Dealing with the rising debt. Remember that idea.

He goes on:

The supply-sider from Janesville, Wis., tapped into a deep well of anxiety over trillion-dollar deficits at home and the threat of debt-fueled calamity in Europe. Did he deliver a perfect plan? Not even he claims that. But Ryan, 41, offered a budget that began to convey the scale of change necessary to defuse the American debt bomb: Sweeping tax reform. Unprecedented spending freezes. Most important, a thorough reinvention of federal entitlements.

Ryan's plan isn't perfect? And he admitted this?  What a guy! Ryan's heroic stance, readers learn, caused fury in both parties. Republicans were forced to make  difficult choices, while "Democrats howled at the sacrilege and Ryan's refusal to raise income tax rates on the wealthy."

Ryan's is a "tough budget"  that "brought President Obama down from his cloud of happy talk about windmills and high-speed trains to acknowledge that America has a plateful of peas to choke down after its binge at the dessert bar." That's right--massive cuts in social spending are good for you, just like eating your veggies.

The crux of the whole piece comes down to this:

Ryan's dramatic proposal would not have gained any traction if it did not address a widely acknowledged problem: Over the next two generations, the U.S. government is on track to spend many tens of trillions of dollars more than it plans to raise. Unless changes are made, that will force so much borrowing that interest payments alone will sink the federal budget.

Thankfully, Time tells us, Paul Ryan has "the courage to look the future in the eye. It is a seer's work to glimpse around the corner and sound an alarm."

The piece closes by noting that this brave bold plan "wouldn't balance the federal budget until 2040. The prophet of 2011 will be 70 years old."

Wait a second. I thought this was a bold deficit-reducing roadmap to deal with the debt?

The secret to the Ryan plan--the thing media don't talk about much--is that it doesn't do the thing they say they like about it-- namely, reduce the deficit. As Paul Krugman explained in the New York Times, the projected deficit in 2020 under the Ryan plan would be

about the same as the budget office's estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration's plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible--which you shouldn't--the Roadmap wouldn't reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.

Or as James Horney of the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities wrote of Ryan (4/8/11):

Despite proposing $4.3 trillion in what would be the most severe and wrenching budget cuts in U.S. history--two-thirds of which would come from programs for people of low or moderate incomes--the plan barely reduces deficits at all over the next decade. That's because his budget cuts are offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts that would go disproportionately to those at the top. In essence, at least for the next decade, this plan is far less a blueprint for addressing deficits and far more a proposal to redistribute large amounts of resources from those at the bottom to those at the top.

Dean Baker writes that "Representative Ryan's program would imply a massive upward redistribution to the one percent." Maybe that explains why he's a Time runner-up. If "The Protester" is the Person of the Year, journalistic "balance" requires saying nice things about the One Percent.

The Winter Garden is one of New York City's largest and most beautiful indoor public spaces. Graced by giant palm trees that would look impressive on Sunset Boulevard and a vast skylight that provides year-round balmy sunlight, this crossroads of Manhattan's Battery Park City became a symbol of Downtown's rebirth when it was reconstructed after being devastated in the September 11 attacks.

Yet this crucial community gathering space--which provides a much-needed public square that's hospitable throughout the year--is actually privately owned by Brookfield Office Properties, a multinational real-estate developer that owns the World Financial Center that the Winter Garden is a part of, and has received some recent media attention as the owner of Liberty Plaza, the initial site of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement. (Brookfield in recent years has rebranded Liberty Plaza as Zuccotti Park, after the chair of Brookfield's board, former New York City Planning Commission chair John Zuccotti. Incidentally, another of Brookfield's directors, Diana Taylor, also serves as girlfriend to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.)

The Winter Garden is not a favor that Brookfield is doing for the citizens of New York City out of the goodness of its corporate heart, any more than Liberty Plaza is; such amenities, as they're called, are promised by developers to the city in exchange for various exceptions and relaxations of zoning and other rules that make the developers' projects more profitable.

So as paradoxical as it sounds, these privately owned public spaces truly do belong to the public; their corporate managers have invited us in in exchange for official concessions, and they can't revoke that invitation on a whim--or because they object to community members using that space to express political viewpoints, as people are wont to do in a public square.

But that's exactly what the city of New York, presumably acting on behalf of Brookfield, did on December 12, when it arrested 17 people who were either participating in or reporting on an Occupy Wall Street protest--directed against Brookfield as the landowner of Liberty Plaza and thus the beneficiary of New York City's eviction of OWS from the park. One of those arrested was FAIR intern John Knefel, a writer, comedian and co-producer (with his sister Molly) of an Internet radio show called Radio Dispatch.

The arrestees were charged with criminal trespass and in some cases with resisting arrest, but the actual offense was attempt to engage in political life--in attempting to persuade others, or in conveying via journalism those attempts to persuade--in what the police (at the orders of Bloomberg and/or Brookfield) had arbitrarily determined to be a politics-free zone. They would be held for some 37 hours before being taken before a judge to be arraigned and released.

In an article for Salon (12/13/11), Molly Knefel described what happened when people tried to exercise First Amendment rights in the Winter Garden:

The protesters--maybe 100 or so--had gathered in the center of the floor and were dancing and chanting, "Occupy Brookfield!"  A long line of police began to form in the periphery, and John and the other media people dispersed to take pictures.  As the police formed an outer circle to surround the large group, the crowd began to disperse.  Many of the protesters headed up the marble staircase away from the cops, and a small group bolted up a nearby escalator.

That was when everything escalated completely out of control.  The escalator was stopped.  Suddenly, the outer circle of cops was swarming in and violently pushing people away.  John had been standing near the crowd, taking video.  I was about 20 feet from him, and when I looked back in his direction, I saw his blue hood on the ground.  I ran toward him and slid to the ground, leaning in between people's knees to take pictures.  John was face down on the ground being handcuffed, his glasses flung across the floor and people screaming, "Stop, stop, he didn’t do anything!"

A cop pulled me up by my shoulders and told me to step back.  I said, "He's my brother."  Several cops pushed me away as I asked, "What is he being arrested for?  He was taking pictures."  A cop said, "He didn’t produce an official press pass, so that means he was resisting arrest."

On Twitter,  (12/13/11), Molly noted: "There were no instructions that I heard. They only told us to 'get out' after the violent arrests started." Which is patently unfair, but in a way more honest than going through the rigamarole about announcing that protesters and journalists are operating in a space where the First Amendment is suspended--the NYPD prefers the term "frozen zone." If the government is going to drive people out of public spaces for engaging in the most crucial forms of public participation, there's really no need to create the impression that the citizenry have any choice in the matter.

USA Today's Rick Hampson has a piece today (12/7/11) on Occupy Wall Street's Occupy Our Homes actions, which include efforts to move families into vacant housing. This coverage is a good sign if you think there is still something happening with this movement after the evictions in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

But why does the article include commentary from right-wing scam artist Andrew Breitbart? The paper reports:

Conservative online publisher and commentator Andrew Breitbart said the movement's new focus demonstrates that Occupy Wall Street is not "an authentic grassroots movement" but a political maneuver backed by organized labor and remnants of the ACORN community-organizing group aimed at boosting President Obama's re-election campaign.

"This is AstroTurf" rather than grassroots, he said. "This isn't about helping little old ladies.… This is about fomenting civil unrest, fomenting class warfare."

Breitbart's work is totally unreliable. He's been sounding the ACORN/SEIU alarms about Occupy Wall Street almost from the beginning--just like (at least) one Fox News host. The point is to try and link the movement to an array of progressive institutions and, apparently, the Obama campaign. It's nonsensical paranoia. Is he included for the sake of "balance"?

New York Times media reporter David Carr has written some interest pieces on Occupy Wall Street. His piece today tries to work out where things go from here, but one comment in the piece about how Occupy Wall Street compares with protests of the past caught my attention:

There were citizens screaming invective about the rich while being confronted by the police in riot gear, the kind of spontaneous uprising we have not seen in almost half a century.

Huh. This is used to explain why the mainstream media found OWS so newsworthy.

But I remember things like this happening, way back in 1999-2000.

One more thing about free speech hero Michael Bloomberg's shutdown of Occupy Wall Street.

During the early morning raid on the Occupy Wall Street camp journalists were blocked from covering much of what was happening. Josh Stearns from Free Press has a rundown--as he points out, "By dawn, 10 journalists, including reporters from NPR, the Associated Press and the New York Daily News, had been arrested."

There was a good local TV news segment about the media clampdown, courtesy of the New York NBC affiliate. It's rare to see an image like this on your TV screen (click the image to watch the report):

All right, which newspaper posed this question about the Occupy protests today:

Is this an occupation or an infestation?

Has to be the New York Post, right? Nope--they wouldn't include a question mark.

That's the Washington Post, which went on to report that "recent news updates from Occupy protests read like a crime blotter."

And that Post's Eli Saslow and Colum Lynch explain that they're not the only ones who feel this way:

In the wake of so much controversy, the Occupy movement--which began as a populist uprising to represent all but the wealthiest 1 percent--has begun to lose some of its mainstream support. A Washington Post poll early this month showed that only 18 percent of responders "strongly supported" the Occupy Wall Street movement.

If you want to show a decline in support for the movement--or anything else--then you'd have to show that this number was down from a previous poll. But the Post doesn't appear to have ever asked a question before about whether people "strongly support" Occupy Wall Street. The Post's poll actually finds that 44 percent of Americans support Occupy Wall Street (when you combine those who  "strongly support" with "somewhat support" the movement).  One poll (not conducted by the Post) showed 36 percent support a few weeks ago--which was an increase from an earlier survey. And an AP poll conducted about a month ago registered 37 support.

Of course, news coverage that talks about the movement as a criminal "infestation" might change some minds.

The New York Times, writing about Bloomberg's crackdown on Occupy Wall Street, said this:

For the mayor, a champion of the First Amendment....

I am not sure what is required to deserve the title of "champion," but was it a different Michael Bloomberg who was mayor during the 2004 Republican convention, which saw mass arrests, preventive detention and surveillance/infiltration of protest groups?

What's next--Bloomberg the Fourth Amendment champion?

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (11/9/11) went to India in order to appreciate how the grassroots movement to stamp out political corruption there is superior to Occupy Wall Street.

Still, he sees a common thread:

The world's two biggest democracies, India and the United States, are going through remarkably similar bouts of introspection. Both countries are witnessing grassroots movements against corruption and excess. The difference is that Indians are protesting what is illegal--a system requiring bribes at every level of governance to get anything done. And Americans are protesting what is legal--a system of Supreme Court-sanctioned bribery in the form of campaign donations that have enabled the financial-services industry to effectively buy the U.S. Congress, and both political parties, and thereby resist curbs on risk-taking.

Hear, hear! Wall Street has bought the political process. But what can save us? A magical centrist internet-based third-party presidential candidate, that's who!

What has brought millions of Indians into the streets to support the India Against Corruption movement and what seems to have triggered not only the Occupy Wall Street movement but also initiatives like AmericansElect.org--a centrist group planning to use the Internet to nominate an independent presidential candidate--is a sense that both countries have democratically elected governments that are so beholden to special interests that they can no longer deliver reform. Therefore, they both need shock therapy from outside.

Huh?

Americans Elect is the brainchild of a group of hedge-fund investors--or, as a columnist named Tom Friedman once reported, it is "financed with some serious hedge-fund money."

These are the people who are going to deliver a outsider shock to the system that will curb the influence of the financial services industry. Wall Street will save us from Wall Street?

Bonus irony: Democratic pollster Doug Schoen is the chief strategist for Americans Elect--the same Doug Schoen who was very recently proclaiming that Democrats should distance themselves from the Occupy Wall Street protests. As Jedd Legum pointed out, Schoen misrepresented that polling in a column for (where else?) the Wall Street Journal.

Opponents of the Keystone tar sands pipeline project--10,000 of them, by some reports--surrounded the White House on Sunday to call on Barack Obama to reject the deal. That generated a short Metro section story in the Washington Post on Monday.

More revealing than that was the Post's preview story in Sunday's paper, which presented the issue as one where protesters are "noise" and proponents talk about facts. Here's how Juliet Eilperin's story begins:

Canadian ambassador Gary Doer has a straightforward analysis of whether TransCanada will win the Obama administration’s approval to build and operate an enormous pipeline to transport oil from Alberta to the Texas coast.

"If it's made on merit, we're confident," Doer said in an interview. "If it's made on noise, it's unpredictable."

Foes of the project--which has become a test of how President Obama balances environmental considerations against economic and energy supply concerns--will try to turn up the noise Sunday with a rally around the White House. Unemployed workers who support the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline are planning to counter with a blitz of media interviews over the weekend.

The article quotes six different sources from the company trying to build the pipeline, consultants working for the company and U.S. and Canadian government officials. Climate activist Bill McKibben is the lone environmentalist voice quoted, and in the final paragraph.

If the protests are creating "noise," the Post doesn't exactly seem eager to hear it.

UPDATE: Eilperin is back on the Keystone case today, with similar results:

Pipeline route may get another look from U.S.

Opposition mounts to plan for shipping Canada oil sands crude

Eilperin reports that opposition is coming from "environmentalists and an eclectic group of ranchers, farmers and other opponents." So who's quoted in the article? A State Department official, the president of the American Petroleum Institute and the spokesman for TransCanada (the company wanting to build the pipeline  come first. And the final paragraph is reserved for someone from the National Wildlife Federation. That's in a piece that is, judging by the subhead, about the mounting opposition to the pipeline.

Yesterday the New York Post--Rupert Murdoch's down-market tabloid, for those who are blessed to live beyond its circulation area--ran this front-page editorial demanding that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg shut down the Occupy Wall Street encampment to reclaim the city's "dignity":

Uhh.... that message would be coming from the paper that ran this dignified cover, waaay back in August:

And don't forget the Post's Iraq War weasels covers:

And why not this, while we're at it?

And let's not forget the paper's stellar work during the Anthony Weiner scandal: "Weiner Exposed," " Hide the Weiner," "Weiner: I'll Stick It Out" and "Obama Beats Weiner."

Today's Post cover, for the record:

Mr. Mayor, please return a sense of dignity to the proud city the New York Post calls home. At least until the next time the Phillies are coming to town.

On his Friday night show, Bill O'Reilly took his viewers to a magical place--one where the right-wing Koch brothers have no connection to the Tea Party movement, while Occupy Wall Street is a secret project directed and financed by the likes of Moveon.org, SEIU and  George Soros.

At the top of his broadcast, O'Reilly wondered if we are now in "phase two of the campaign to undermine America"--this would apparently be the phase where activists protest against police brutality, with an assist from "the radical MoveOn organization, which is funding some of the occupiers."

As he explained his conspiracy theory:

The Occupy Wall Street Movement is not a spontaneous protest against economic inequality. It is a well-thought-out campaign to bring down the infrastructure of this country, to turn us into a Western European-type entitlement state.

That's what George Soros, MoveOn, the SEIU and many far-left journalists want. And they are using the protests to that end.

Moments later, O'Reilly was "interviewing" Fox News contributor Leslie Marshall, who mentioned the right-wing billionaire Koch brothers. That left O'Reilly visibly upset:

O'REILLY: OK, well, you can believe anything you want, you're an American, but you made a statement that the Koch brothers were tied into the Tea Party financially. Can you prove that?

MARSHALL: Well, the Koch Brothers (INAUDIBLE) such as Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.

O'REILLY: Can you prove it. Wait. Wait, wait, wait, Leslie.

MARSHALL: Yes.

O'REILLY: Leslie, you're a Fox News contributor. You have a responsibility. Can you prove the Koch brothers are tied into the Tea Party financially? Can you?

MARSHALL: With a check in hand, no.

O'REILLY: OK. Thank you.

While it's certainly the responsibility of a guest to be able to document such facts, it's rather unlikely that O'Reilly would have accepted any such facts anyway.

Do the Koch brothers have anything to do with the Tea Party? Well, yes. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation was founded by Charles Koch, and has served to train Tea Party activists. As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker (8/30/10):

Americans for Prosperity has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement's inception. In the weeks before the first Tax Day protests, in April, 2009, Americans for Prosperity hosted a website offering supporters "Tea Party Talking Points." The Arizona branch urged people to send tea bags to Obama; the Missouri branch urged members to sign up for "Taxpayer Tea Party Registration" and provided directions to nine protests. The group continues to stoke the rebellion. The North Carolina branch recently launched a "Tea Party Finder" website, advertised as "a hub for all the Tea Parties in North Carolina."

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to "educate," fund and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement.

Or as one source rather colorfully put it:

A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party: "The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It's like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud--and they're our candidates!"

And Dick Armey's FreedomWorks group, which has very publicly helped organize Tea Party activists, is the product of a merger between Empower America and Citizens for a Sound Economy--the latter heavily backed by the Koch brothers.

So other than founding and funding the groups that have been key organizers and trainers of the Tea Party movement, the Kochs have little to do with it.

Don't tell that to Bill O'Reilly, though. He can only connect certain dots:

This isn't a spontaneous demonstration against crony capitalism. If it were, they would be in front of the White House. This is organized by the unions backed up by George Soros and the MoveOn people.

The links between those groups and OWS prompted the other guest, Caroline Heldman,  to turn the tables on O'Reilly:

HELDMAN: Bill, do you have evidence to back up those links? Do you have evidence?

O'REILLY: Yes, absolutely, we have reporters down there all the time and the reporters ask people who they are, where they are going. The spontaneous people are back to their jobs; 85 percent of them, Dr. Heldman, have jobs. You can't stay off the job for a month. I can back what I say up.

Now THAT is evidence--Fox-style.

With the bad news we've been talking about on the public broadcasting front, it's worth pointing out a bright spot: On Monday (10/24/11), Charlie Rose featured a discussion of Occupy Wall Street with Chris Hedges and Amy Goodman.

Goodman made an important point about media coverage of the protests:

CHARLIE ROSE: Does it have anything in common with the Tea Party?

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it's interesting you ask that. When the people gathered on September 16 and 17--what, 2000 people--hardly any coverage they got. If it was 2000 Tea Party activists who gathered on Wall Street, I would dare said there would have been 2,000 reporters there, if not more.

Watch the segment on the Charlie Rose website. And you can leave a comment there--as others already have--noting that it's refreshing to see these voices on a show that doesn't usually feature such guests.

Last night by many reports the police crackdown on the Occupy Oakland encampment was severe: Tear gas and flash-bang grenades were used to disperse a crowd trying to retake the park.

Reading about the events in the nation's capital, though, and you got a different impression. The Washington Post--no stranger to minimizing the Occupy protests--ran a short AP dispatch under the headline "Protesters Wearing Out Their Welcome Nationwide."

As if that weren't dismissive enough, take a look at the photo the Post ran:

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/11), tipped off by at least one of his Post colleagues, decided to pay a visit to Liberty Plaza to see the festival of anti-Semitism firsthand. Lo and behold, he found none:

Reckless Jew that I am, I muscled my way into the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan despite multiple reports of virulent and conceivably lethal anti-Semitism. Projecting an unvarnished Semitism, I circled the place, encountering nothing and no one to suggest bigotry--not a sign, not a book and not even the guy who some weeks ago held up a placard with the instruction to google the phrase "Zionists control Wall St."  Google "nut case" instead.

Before you send your note of thanks to Cohen, wait until he gets to his real point:

This right-wing attempt to discredit both the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Democratic Party's hesitant embrace of it is reprehensible. It's made possible, however, because no one this side of the Moon knows precisely what the Occupy Wall Street movement is trying to do. On a daily basis it marches off to some location to highlight what we all know--that Wall Street guys are rich--and their slogans suggest a tired socialism that is as repugnant to me as the felonious capitalism that produced the mortgage bubble and the impoverishment of millions of Americans.

Cohen goes on to call Occupy Wall Street "a destination for the aimless...a tourist attraction with the usual vendors, the usual zaftig young women doing the usual arrhythmic dance, somehow missing the beat of many drums." It is also

a media event that has captured the flea-thoughts of many Americans...an incoherent articulation of anger at the institutions that have failed us, including--by way of both self-pity and self-flagellation--the media. It seems, above all, a conspiracy to have left-leaning writers make jackasses of themselves by imparting grave and grand meaning to what is little more than a vast sleepover.

For good measure, Cohen makes the argument that the right-wing smears of OWS are derived from the left:

The imputation of anti-Semitism, however, adds gravitas to this lighthearted event. The smear is in deadly earnest, a reminder that the devious tactics of the Old Left have been adopted by the New Right. (No accident, maybe, that the practitioners are the descendants of lefties.)

Well, he was on the right track with that first paragraph.

The New York Times has an interesting profile today (10/18/11) of a retired Wall Street trader named Robert Halper who, it turns out, made an early donation to Adbusters to help with the Occupy Wall Street movement:

Mr. Halper, who lives on the Upper West Side, had long been a supporter of the magazine, donating by his estimate $50,000 to $75,000 over the last 20 years since he was first attracted by the magazine's spoofs on corporate logos and advertisements. So he wrote a check for $20,000 and returned to his life in New York.

Interesting. But the Times clearly buried the lead here:

He recently gave $2,500 to Mitt Romney's campaign for president, after meeting him at a neighbor's fund-raiser.

Based on my understanding of conspiratorial chalkboard flowcharts, this must mean that Mitt Romney is funding Occupy Wall Street.

Someone tell Bill O'Reilly!