"Media Get Bored With Occupy—and Inequality"---(FAIR Watchdog Group Report)

[KoKo]

Published on Thursday, May 3, 2012 by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
Media Get Bored With Occupy—and Inequality
Class issues fade along with protest coverage
by John Knefel

Occupy Wall Street is rightly credited with helping to shift the economic debate in America from a fixation on deficits to issues of income inequality, corporate greed and the centralization of wealth among the richest 1 percent. The movement has chalked up other victories as well, from altering New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s tax plan (New York Times, 12/5/11) to re-energizing activists and unions, but bringing some discussion of class into the mainstream dialogue has been one of its crowning achievements.

As

As mentions of “Occupy Wall Street” or “Occupy movement” waned in early 2012, so too have mentions of “income inequality” and, to an even greater extent, “corporate greed.” The trend is true for four leading papers (New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, L.A. Times), news programs on the major networks (ABC, CBS, NBC), cable (MSNBC, CNN, Fox News) and NPR, according to searches of the Nexis news media database. Google Trends data also indicates that from January to March, the phrases “income inequality” and “corporate greed” declined in volume of both news stories and searches.

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That’s not to say that there have been no important, lasting rhetorical shifts. Occupy’s most prominent slogan—“We are the 99 Percent”—and the other side of the equation, “the 1 Percent,” have created new ways of talking about centralized wealth in America. Even as media focus turned away from Occupy, the phrase “the 1 Percent” continues to appear in news stories worldwide. Whether it’s used to describe recent lottery winners (Washington Post, 3/31/12), consumers of expensive new gadgets (PC Mag, 3/26/12) or beneficiaries of Paul Ryan’s recently released budget (Chicago Tribune, 3/26/12), the phrase seems to have staying power: From January to March, 109 articles in the four papers mentioned “the 1 Percent” and “wealth.”

The danger, of course, is that “the 1 Percent” simply becomes a buzzword and ceases to have any connection to the way American capitalism produces and reproduces economic and social inequality.

What these data show is that “changing the conversation” isn’t a one-time thing. Corporate media and their owners have every incentive to ignore not only protest movements, but also the underlying causes of those protest movements. Hurricane Katrina showed that even the most powerful and dramatic events exposing the inequalities and poverty in this country have had only very short-term impact on media coverage of those issues (Extra!, 7­–8/06).

Occupy Wall Street reminded the country of the deep economic divisions running through our society, but it appears the only way to keep the issue in the media discussion is to keep OWS—or some other form of large-scale protest—in the news.


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Thought this was an interesting comment from "ROCKETBALZ" on the COMMENTS PAGE


---------Rocketbalz

Corporate media is "bored" with Occupy mainly because it implictes THEM as much as Wall Street. They can't afford to pay much attention, unless there is violence involved (good for advertisers), because much of Occupy is precisely about the supporting role corporate media plays in enforcing inequality.

Wall Street and the political elites couldn't keep income disparities at record levels without the full cooperation of corporate media. I knew months ago the MSM would try to ignore OWS out of existence. Out of sight, out of mind. If you pay any attention to MSNBC, that endless fountain of support for Obama and the Dems, you wouldn't even know OWS exists any longer. It is NEVER mentioned. And it's supposed to be the liberal cable network, owned of course by GE, so Schultz, Maddow and company know what they can and cannot get away with talking about.

Mainly, all they cover are the daily soaring stupidities of the Republicans and how vastly superior Obama is to all of them. They never mention the drone bombings, the illegality of Obama's war on Afghanistan, the national surveillance state, continued torture as state policy, the stagnant economy, persistently high unemployment, Obama's protection racket for Wall Street thieves, and certainly never anything about OWS. And that's as far "left" as it gets on cable. NPR is, if anything, worse.

Corporate media will remain bored with Occupy, unless they find news ways to denigrate and trivialize it. Taking it seriously would mean confessing to its own complicity in everything OWS is trying to bring to public attention.

More with charts and interesting statistics about coverage from FAIR at:..........

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/03-3

[No Elephants]

1. I guess media is bored with our troops dying because the only reports I see of that on TV

is the weekly body count given on George Steph's show.

If you watched TV news every day for a solid month, you would aggregate maybe fifteen minutes of reporting on the war.

Eliminating the draft got most of American to disengage from feeling invested in wars. And media makes sure we don't get re-invested.

I just read somewhere--forgot where--that media have become nothing more than overpaid stenographers. And I agree.

They are fed "news" by interested parties via press conferences and via press releases and then they regurgitate it to us.

In between, they make big fucking deals over NOTHING, like whether Warren is really part Cherokee and what Scott Brown has to say about it and what Warren has to say about what Scott Brown said about it.

Nothing but shiny things--and God help us, we let them distract us or lull us, whatever the game is at the moment.

To top it all off, we have traded journalists, whose job it is to give us facts, for "commentators," whose job it is to feed us spin.

When was the last time we saw real investigative reporting? Or, for that matter, really objective reporting?

Shame on them and shame on us.