The Occupy Wall Street protests arrive at the tail end of a year in which we've witnessed a groundswell of direct democratic action across the globe. The corporate media strains to capture its energy and its meaning. For most of us the media's effort registers both as flimsy and mocking: flimsy to the extent that the tepid coverage is not commensurate with the magnitude of the action; mocking in that its flimsiness is a result of what little seriousness the media devotes to considering the protests and its actors. In response to their effort, or what appears their lack thereof, many of us accuse the corporate media of an intentional, tactical "blackout" of the ongoing events in lower Manhattan and around the rest of the country. It would be a difficult argument indeed to suggest that a blackout has not, is not, occurring. My contention is that this "blackout" is in fact something else, a symptom of the corporate media's disconnect to the working American's world, and therefore a glaring indication that the corporate media in particular and the corporate world in general are as irrelevant to the common person as s/he is to corporate culture and plutocratic, oligarchic governance.
As we've all seen and read, one item that justifies the media's lukewarm response to the largest sociopolitical event since the days leading up to the invasion of Iraq is what they refer to as the movement's lack of a coherent message and the absence of central demands. Of course, we know that such expectations were not placed on the Tea Party during their summer of Town Hall discontent a couple of years back. Was it because the Tea Party was itself a united movement with a coherent message and a catalogue of central and secondary demands, or did the social, class, and racial complexion of the Tea Party render assumptions about their purpose a significantly easier task?
Embedded in the name and location of the OWS is a clue as to the political makeup of the Wall Street protestors. The verb "Occupy" and its corollary noun "Occupation" are terms that progressives hold dear to our political discourse. The connotations are replete with historical examples, at the forefront of which are the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. By employing this term in the very phrase that has come to identify the burgeoning movement, the question of purpose becomes easier for those unfamiliar with it to understand. This movement vociferously opposes occupations that threaten the sanctity of segments of human life and their national and cultural autonomy. On another level, the movement opposes the occupation of our financial system by plutocratic/oligarchic behemoths who play according to their own rules at the expense of the majority's economic and political, and mental and physical health. So why, then, in light of the very terminology in the title itself, is it so difficult for the corporate media to find purpose in the movement? Is it straight obstinacy, a tactical propagandist decision, or an inability on their part to begin to understand the movement's past and present grievances and its future aspirations?
For the media to pick up on the connotations embedded in the title Occupy Wall Street would require a few preset conditions, but I'll focus on what I consider to be the most important one: in order to see how loaded with meaning the term "Occupy" is, in order to infer from it meaning as to the OWS movement's purposes and demands, would require of them the intellectual space needed to even imagine the occupation of Palestine, for example, as an occupation at all. The corporate media, as well as the majority of our political class in the United States, takes for granted Israel's right to occupy all the lands it labels its own. They recognize no injustice, whether ethically or in terms of international law, that may come of Israel's past and present relentless and brutal expansion of settlements. The Palestinian Question for our media and politicians begins and ends with how to mitigate Palestinian backlash to Israel's countless violations of its human rights. It's a question that begins and ends with Hamas.
Likewise, the corporate media takes for granted Wall Street's role in operating our economy as it sees fit and with absolute impunity. Whether or not its practices are always savory, its "right" to run amuck like a wild pig through endless fields of shit is beyond its scope to question. To question bad practices is to question the capitalist economic system itself, and to question capitalism is tantamount to casting doubt and turning one's back on the fundamental tenets of representative government and the American "way of life." By extension, market regulations are synonymous with direct interrogations of the merits of capitalism.
While the media recognizes some roots of the public's outrage with Wall Street, it cannot fathom the movement's genuine belief that it can do something about it, at the very least put their bodies on the line to physically express displeasure. The media's general incomprehension disconcerts them. They cannot frame the OWS too cynically without risking coming across to the American public as Wall Street apologists. At the same time, providing the coverage the OWS deserves endangers their own prominence in the hierarchy of American information production and distribution. Because the media is as inextricably fettered to the expansive core of our collective grief as the titans of finance at Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, and they know it. Loyd Blankfein does "God's work" only insofar as somebody convinces us that he does.
Conversely, covering the Tea Party was a boon for the corporate media. The entertainment value alone, which aggravated the us versus them post-9/11 narrative in the arch of American political and social life yielded remarkable network ratings and further fortified the new standard for partisan-driven network news channels; and the fact that the Tea Party has been demonstrably underwritten by corporate cash safeguarded those responsible for the corruption of our politics, the demolition of our economy, and the misinformation of our media from their fantastically ignorant though genuinely disaffected members. Furthermore, the Tea Party was from the very beginning a force that ran counter to social and political progress, reifying in the public imagination the steady presence of the white, patriarchal, anti-intellectual, religiously minded and culturally intolerant pre-Vietnam status quo.
We are at an impasse with our media (and our political class) in its ability to articulate and understand the events and experiences in our country and the conditions by which they take place. The OWS doesn't speak the corporate media's language, and where it can it subverts its recognizable signs (think The Occupied Wall Street Journal). The OWS (so far, anyway) doesn't value the top-down vertical structure of leadership that the media traditionally looks for as a prerequisite germane to any legitimate movement. Whereas the Tea Party's another term for aging white conservatives beleaguered by the 21st century, the OWS is a cross-section of America that doesn't sport the same jerseys. The OWS doesn't promote American values as much as universal values that apply to everyone, men, women, children, homo and hetero and transsexuals, blacks and whites and yellows and reds, the poor and the working poor and the diminishing middle class, the conscientious rich, the privileged and underprivileged, etc. etc. As long as we are on the streets, such an impasse will matter less and less, because we will no longer have to rely on whether the media characterizes us in a favorable light … because we have the voices and the technology to amplify our voices … because we can tell our own story and through direct action characterize to the entire world ourselves.
The corporate media is quickly becoming irrelevant.
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