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America's Media War on OWS - Stephen Lendman
Efforts to marginalize OWS.
Early reporting was scant, dismissive, and offensive. Much still belittles, denigrates and marginalizes a significant movement.
Fox News claims protesters don't pay taxes or know what they want, are supported by Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei and Hugo Chavez, and represent the lunatic left wing.
Bill O'Reilly quipped, "Do we have all kinds of crackheads down there." He added that Zuccotti Park is "dirty and filthy. There's rats running all over. There's dope all over the place. They're having sex outside at night and all of this stuff."Fox News reporter Charles Gasparino accused protesters of embracing "communism and there is no doubt about it."
New York Times former executive editor Bill Keller ignored global activism in a column about "good news," asking, "Bored by the soggy sleep-ins and warmed-over anarchism of Occupy Wall Street?"
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer called protesters "indignant indolents saddled with their $50,000 student loans and English degrees (wanting to) "eat the rich."
Despite occasional better reporting, much resembles Telegraph writer Nile Gardiner's article about "the decline and fall of Occupy Wall Street," saying:
It's "been an act of desperation by the liberal Left, which now represents a small minority of Americans in terms of ideology. (It's) descended into anarchy. (It's) an anachronism, a wannabe 1960s-style protest movement in an America that has moved on.""And it is above all a symbol of a Left in decline amidst an increasingly conservative nation that has had enough of the kind of big government, anti-free market policies the liberal protesters crave."
Gardiner's right about one thing. Protesters want big government for the rich ended. They rage against privatizing profits, socializing losses, and trashing their rights for Wall Street and other corporate favorites. Other than that, he pathetically inverted truth. So do many others like him.
On November 15, Washington Post writers Eli Saslow and Colum Lynch headlined, "The Occupy movement: More trouble than change?" saying:
"The movement began as a protest of major economic and political issues, but lately the most divisive issue has become the protests themselves." Nationwide "encampments....have become rife with problems of their own. There are sanitation hazards and drug overdoses, even occasional deaths and sexual assaults."
