See other Resistance Articles
Title: Occupy the No-Spin Zone One of the best things about Occupy Wall Street is the way it confuses and ignores the shrill pundit class.
Source:
[None]
URL Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_ ... ews_and_the_pundit_class_.html
Published: Oct 29, 2011
Author: By Dahlia Lithwick|
Post Date: 2011-10-29 09:18:36 by tom007
Keywords: None
Views: 161
Comments: 8
Occupy the No-Spin Zone One of the best things about Occupy Wall Street is the way it confuses and ignores the shrill pundit class. By Dahlia Lithwick|Posted Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2011, at 5:57 PM ET Occupy Wall Street. Is the media missing the point by expecting Occupy Wall Street to simplify its message? Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images. I confess to being driven insane this past month by the spectacle of television pundits professing to be baffled by the meaning of Occupy Wall Street. Good grief. Isn’t the ability to read still a job requirement for a career in journalism? And as last week’s inane “What Do They Want?” meme morphs into this week’s craven “They Want Your Stuff” meme, I feel it’s time to explain something: Occupy Wall Street may not have laid out all of its demands in a perfectly cogent one-sentence bumper sticker for you, Mr. Pundit, but it knows precisely what it doesn’t want. It doesn’t want you. What the movement clearly doesn’t want is to have to explain itself through corporate television. To which I answer, Hallelujah. You can’t talk down to a movement that won’t talk back to you. Advertisement I don’t purport to speak for anyone but myself here, although I spent time this weekend at Occupy Wall Street and my husband spent much of last week adding his voice to the protesters there. I saw an incredible array of people that defy any simple demographic characterization and a broad range of signs that made—imagine!—more than a single point. But if I may hazard an opinion, it would be this: One of the most fatuous themes of mainstream OWS coverage is the endless loop of media bafflement at this movement that doesn’t have a message. Here’s CNN’s Erin Burnett in a classic put-down of the OWS’ refusal to tailor its message to her. It takes a walloping amount of willful cluelessness to look at a mass of people holding up signs and claim that they have no message. Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message. It’s a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists. It’s a movement that feels no need to explain anything to the powers that be, although it is deftly changing the way we explain ourselves to one another. Think, for just a moment, about the irony. We are the most media-saturated 24-hour-cable-soaked culture in the world, and yet around the country, on Facebook and at protests, people are holding up cardboard signs, the way protesters in ancient Sumeria might have done when demonstrating against a rise in the price of figs. And why is that? Because they very wisely don’t trust television cameras and microphones to get it right anymore. Because a media constructed around the illusion of false equivalencies, screaming pundits, and manufactured crises fails to capture who we are and what we value. For the past several years, while the mainstream media was dutifully reporting on all things Kardashian or (more recently) a wholly manufactured debt-ceiling crisis, ordinary people were losing their health care, their homes, their jobs, and their savings. Those people have taken that narrative to Facebook and Twitter—just as citizens took to those alternative forms of media throughout the Middle East as part of the Arab Spring. And just to be clear: They aren’t holding up signs that say “I want Bill O’Reilly’s stuff.” They aren’t holding up signs that say “I am animated by toxic levels of envy and entitlement.” They are holding up signs that are perfectly and intrinsically clear: They want accountability for the banks that took their money, they want to end corporate control of government. They want their jobs back. They would like to feed their children. They want—wait, no, we want—to be heard by a media that has devoted four mind-numbing years to channeling and interpreting every word uttered by a member of the Palin family while ignoring the voices of everyone else. And there’s this. The mainstream media thrives on simple solutions. It has no idea whatsoever of how to report on a story that isn’t about easy fixes so much as it is about anguished human frustration and fear. The media prides itself on its ability to tell you how to clear your clutter, regrout your shower, or purge your closet of anything that makes you look fat—in 24 minutes or less. It is bound to be flummoxed by a protest that offers up no happy endings. Luckily for us, #OWS doesn’t seem to care. It must be painful for the pundits at Fox News. The more they demand that OWS explain itself in simple, Fox-like terms, the more cheerfully they are ignored by the occupiers around the country. As efforts to ridicule the protesters fail, attempts to repurpose the good old days of enemies lists falter; and efforts to demonize the occupiers backfire, polls continue to show that Americans support the protesters and share their goals. The rest of us quickly cottoned on to the fact that the only people who are scared of the “violent mobs” at Occupy Wall Street are the people being paid to call them violent mobs. Mark your calendars: The corporate media died when it announced it was too sophisticated to understand simple declarative sentences. While the mainstream media expresses puzzlement and fear at these incomprehensible “protesters” with their oddly well-worded “signs,” the rest of us see our own concerns reflected back at us and understand perfectly. Turning off mindless programming might be the best thing that ever happens to this polity. Hey, occupiers: You’re the new news. And even better, by refusing to explain yourselves, you’re actually changing what’s reported as news. Because it takes a tremendous mental effort to refuse to see that the rich are getting richer in America while the rest of us are struggling. Maybe the days of explaining the patently obvious to the transparently compromised are finally behind us. By refusing to take a ragtag, complicated, and leaderless movement seriously, the mainstream media has succeeded only in ensuring its own irrelevance. The rest of America has little trouble understanding that these are ragtag, complicated, and leaderless times. This may not make for great television, but any movement that acknowledges that fact deserves enormous credit.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: All (#0)
Friggin commies and Markists. Tom, the establishment has sent our jobs overseas to obtain slave labor yet they want to be protected in their trade and even militarily, which has been orchestrated through the UN and NATO. The real reason for NAFTA and GATT was to keep us down after they destroy the economy. Looking back on the previous depression for answers makes me think our ability to produce goods made restoration possible. Our kids are educated by socialists (communists) at every level so I think it's actually a miracle that any see through the propaganda. And, the real irony is that these young people are paying an exorbitant amount to get their education only to find that jobs are scarce as hens teeth. "the man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, “Limit yourself”; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian." Murray Rothbard
Yes, I think they may be the lit fuse for the coming explosion. And our friends at Goldman Sachs are holding large amounts of these students loans they trapped students in by their bogus fraudulent private colleges. The Obama administration is allegedly addressing this student loan problem ... maybe they feel the heat !
"the man who puts all the guns and all the decision-making power into the hands of the central government and then says, “Limit yourself”; it is he who is truly the impractical utopian." Murray Rothbard
Obama's Student-Loan Order Saves the Average Grad Less Than $10 a Month - Daniel Indiviglio - Business - The Atlantic The monthly impact of the president's new effort for most Americans paying off college debt will be between $4 and $8
The author must mean the "neo-cons". They are the ones who are regularly "shrill". "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
Everett Dirksen, the now deceased Senator from Illinois said, "When you feel the heat, you see the light." ;) "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
Yeah, and another reason to keep the cops away from our kids is the project known as "D.A.R.E." It is pure propaganda. "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
They would like to feed their children. They want—wait, no, we want—to be heard by a media that has devoted four mind-numbing years to channeling and interpreting every word uttered by a member of the Palin family while ignoring the voices of everyone else.
"Satan / Cheney in "08" 
#2. To: tom007 (#0)
#3. To: noone222 (#2)
And, the real irony is that these young people are paying an exorbitant amount to get their education only to find that jobs are scarce as hens teeth.
"Satan / Cheney in "08"
#4. To: tom007 (#3)
#5. To: noone222, tom007 (#4)
#6. To: tom007 (#0)
the shrill pundit class.
#7. To: noone222 (#4)
maybe they feel the heat
#8. To: noone222 (#2)
Our kids are educated by socialists (communists) at every level so I think it's actually a miracle that any see through the propaganda.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest