I think people are genuinely surprised by the corporate media's shift on Occupy Wall Street: Things went from apathy, scorn and derision to front-page news rather quickly. USA Today's editorial today (10/12/11) is headlined "Five Good Reasons Why Wall Street Breeds Protesters." It has the usual caveats–"The protesters' rhetoric against capitalism and 'corporate greed' is over the top, and they seem devoid of remedies," the paper notes–but on balance, the message is that there's plenty to protest. What's galling is the sense that USA Today's been outraged all along. As when they explain: Through lobbyists and campaign contributions, the banking [...]
Oct
11
2011
David Gregory: Demonizing Banks Is Dangerous
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NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory, interviewing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Sunday (10/10/11): GREGORY: What's going on in the streets of Occupy Wall Street? EMANUEL: Yeah. GREGORY: Complaining about the unfairness, railing against Wall Street. The president has sympathized with those protesters in the street. Is demonizing Wall Street the way to create an environment… EMANUEL: Well… GREGORY: …to get the banks to hire? EMANUEL: The–it's not… GREGORY: Is this not a reverse tea party tactic?
Oct
11
2011
ABC Interviews OWS Activist–and Media Critic
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ABC's This Week (10/10/11) had a normally tilted panel on Sunday talking about, among other things, Occupy Wall Street. The show had three different types of conservatives (former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd, fixture George Will and columnist Peggy Noonan) along with Democratic pundit Donna Brazile. But then host Christiane Amanpour actually interviewed someone involved with Occupy Wall Street–DailyKos blogger Jesse LaGreca. He is perhaps best know as the guy who was interviewed by Fox News Channel at the protest–and took the chance to bash Fox News Channel. And he did media criticism on This Week too: LAGRECA: I mean, the [...]
Oct
11
2011
David Brooks Gets Occupy Wall Street and Al-Qaeda in Same Sentence
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New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a tedious column today (10/11/11) about how the real radicals are the centrists, not the Wall Street occupiers. (Read Dean Baker to see what Brooks is getting wrong.) But this jumped out at me: A third believe the U.S. is no better than Al-Qaeda, according to a New York magazine survey. How would someone "survey" a leaderless, ever-shifting mass of protesters? I am not sure, and it's not really what New York did. They asked a series of questions–some of them obviously cheeky–to 100 activists at Liberty Plaza. As you can see: Rank [...]
Oct
07
2011
Is Glenn Beck Back at Fox News Channel?
By 15 Comments
It sounded like it, but it was just Bill O'Reilly channeling Beck's Soros/MoveOn/Big Labor paranoia, minus the chalkboard: On Wednesday in New York City, there was another far-left demonstration as a bunch of people marched on Wall Street. Why? We aren't exactly sure. What we do know is that these folks are zealots who are being organized by some very interesting people. Does the name MoveOn.org mean anything to you? How about George Soros? Well, for the first time, MoveOn, funded in part by Soros, has openly allied itself with the protesters. In addition, we have some unions in the [...]
Oct
05
2011
Erin Burnett Hears the Critics–But Still Misses the Point
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Last night (10/4/11) CNN host Erin Burnett noted that her fact check of the Occupy Wall Street protests had drawn some criticism. But she still doesn't seem to get it. "Well, our story got noted documentarian Michael Moore, who watched the show last night," she reported before playing a video response from Moore: I just don't understand that piece, you know, that new show. These companies, these banks, Goldman Sachs up here, they took billions and billions of dollars of citizens' money, and they ask us to pay for their crime and we're supposed to be OK because some of [...]
Oct
04
2011
NYT Biz Writer Checks Out Occupy Wall Street–Based on CEO's Worries
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New York Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin has been criticized for being too chummy with the Wall Street tycoons he's supposed to be covering. Today he has a piece in the Times (10/4/11) about Occupy Wall Street–which he's decided to check out because it's beginning to make some CEOs nervous: I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge. 'Is this Occupy Wall Street thing [...]
Oct
04
2011
Action Alert: Factchecking CNN's Occupy Wall Street Factcheck
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CNN's newest show–OutFront, featuring Erin Burnett–did a "factcheck" of the protest in Lower Manhattan that was long on attitude and short on accuracy. If you'd like the network to take another look, see FAIR's latest Action Alert. Please leave copies of your messages to CNN, or responses to the alert, in the comment thread below.
Mar
31
2009
S.F. Columnist Protests Protesters
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Writing under the pen name Jami Tarn (CounterPunch, 3/27/09), one San Francisco lawyer is rallying against "a hate-filled column in the San Francisco Chronicle." Chronicle commentator Debra J. Saunders "insinuated that Tristan Anderson, still lingering in a coma in Tel Aviv after taking an Israeli tear gas canister to the face, costing him part of his frontal lobe and possibly his right eye, deserves this comeuppance for daring to join Palestinians in protest against Israel's illegal Apartheid wall." Saunders, Tarn wrote, reduced such suffering to the snarky "love-it-or-leave-it Amer'kuh" line that Anderson now has "found out in the worst way [...]
