The piece begins:

When members of the loose protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street began a march from the financial district to Union Square on Saturday, the participants seemed relatively harmless, even as they were breaking the law by marching in the street without a permit.

But to the New York Police Department, the protesters represented something else: a visible example of lawlessness akin to that which had resulted in destruction and violence at other anticapitalist demonstrations, like the Group of 20 economic summit meeting in London in 2009 and the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999.

Well, that's just silly, for any number of reasons. (Times reporters in particular might want to be sensitive about these issues, since the paper was roundly criticized for printing erroneous articles about Seattle violence--one of which the Times corrected.)

But it gets worse:

The Police Department’s concerns came up against a perhaps milder reality on Saturday, when their efforts to maintain crowd control suddenly escalated: Protesters were corralled by police officers who put up orange mesh netting; the police forcibly arrested some participants; and a deputy inspector used pepper spray on four women who were on the sidewalk, behind the orange netting.

So a controversial, well-documented act of police violence was a "milder reality" of a concerned police force whose "efforts to maintain crowd control suddenly escalated." Note the nobody's-responsible phrasing--whoops, efforts at crowd control just suddenly escalated!

The Times says that the "police's actions suggested the flip side of a force trained to fight terrorism." If assaulting peaceful protesters is the "flip side" of anti-terrorism, what does that look like?

Goldstein adds:

So even as the members of Occupy Wall Street seem unorganized and, at times, uninformed, their continued presence creates a vexing problem for the Police Department.

At this point I think most readers aren't wondering about the protesters seeming uninformed. But yes, attacking protesters is indeed a "vexing problem."

The piece's framing of the demonstrations is so curious that a reader might almost miss this bit of actual news:

Since August, investigators with the Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have monitored the online efforts of activists to bring demonstrations to Wall Street, people briefed on the matter said.

That sounds vexing too!

One of the most disturbing things about corporate media's disdain for (non-Tea Party) protests is the fact that this is fundamentally a serious attack on the speech rights of citizens. One would think that journalists, so quick to celebrate First Amendment rights, might consider this kind of police action something to treat critically--instead of covering for the cops.

The White House threatened Thursday to exclude the San Francisco Chronicle from pooled coverage of its events in the Bay Area after the paper posted a video of a protest at a San Francisco fundraiser for President Obama last week, Chronicle editor Ward Bushee said. White House guidelines governing press coverage of such events are too restrictive, Bushee said, and the newspaper was within its rights to film the protest and post the video.

Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci was the designated "pool" reporter at an Obama fundraiser--meaning that her write-up would be shared with other reporters who were not allowed into the event.

But something truly newsworthy happened--and she reported it:

At the St. Regis event, a group of protesters who paid collectively $76,000 to attend the fundraiser interrupted Obama with a song complaining about the administration's treatment of PFC Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly leaked U.S. classified documents to the WikiLeaks website.

As part of a "print-only pool," Marinucci was limited by White House guidelines to provide a print-only report, but Marinucci also took a video of the protest, which she posted in her written story on the online edition of the Chronicle at SFGate.com and on its politics blog after she sent her written pool report.

The Chronicle's story closes with this ironic point about the White House's view of technology and information-sharing:

At Facebook the day before the San Francisco fundraiser, Obama said, "The main reason we wanted to do this is, first of all, because more and more people, especially young people, are getting their information through different media. And obviously, what all of you have built together is helping to revolutionize how people get information, how they process information, how they're connecting with each other."

Apparently Marinucci posting a video was a little too much revolutionizing.

Compare and contrast.

And just so there's no doubt in people's mind, the blanket coverage the mini-mobs are lapping up (i.e., the mobs are hugely important!) stands in stark contrast to the way the press often did its best to ignore liberal protesters who spoke out against the war in Iraq.

For instance, in October 2002, when more than 100,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C., to oppose the war, the Washington Post put the story not on the front page, but in the Metro section with, as the paper's ombudsman later lamented, "a couple of ho-hum photographs that captured the protest's fringe elements."

Not that crowd size is the be-all, end-all of an event's significance, but it's worth remembering that no credible count of yesterday's right-wing protest puts it in the 100,000 range. (And the anti-war protesters didn't have the advantage of a highly-rated cable network promoting their event every day for months.)...

But I still think it gets back to the fact that D.C. is just "wired" for Republicans. Anti-war protesters, the thinking goes, were liberal hippies out of step with the mainstream. After all, there was a Republican president and Republican House in 2002, and polls showed reasonably strong support for the war in Iraq. Why pretend the liberal protesters are important?

In contrast, seven years later, Tea Baggers have to be considered a major political movement. There's a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress in 2009, and polls show reasonably strong support for the administration's economic agenda, but the right-wing cries can't be relegated to a few throw-away paragraphs in the Metro section.

Benen further quotes Barack Obama's 60 Minutes statement that "in the era of 24-hour cable news cycles, the loudest shrillest voices get the attention," but explains "that's only partially true--it depends on what the shrill voices are saying and from what perspective." See the FAIR Action Alert: "Fox Hunting Trumps Peace Activism at Washington Post & NYT" (9/30/02).