'Occupy Wall Street': Why this revolution isn't made for TV

As the “Occupy Wall Street” movement catches fire, spreading copycat protests to towns and regions all over the globe, organizers and supporters say the mainstream media are not keeping pace.

Current TV’s Keith Olbermann lashed out at what he called a “media blackout” more than a week ago, and activist Michael Moore joined him two days later to rail against traditional media’s scant spotlight on the nascent protest movement.

But, polemics aside, is it really true that this revolution is not being televised? It turns out there are objective reasons the decentralized movement, which is protesting what it says is the undue political influence of major financial firms, has not generated more and better coverage.

According to the New York Observer, which has been keeping tabs on the media coverage of the Occupy actions, both broadcast and print media have been present from the inception, with ABC posting a blog and the local CBS affiliate airing a short clip on Sept. 17, the first day the group encamped around New York’s financial center.

Fox News, too, aired a bit about the anti-Wall Street activists on Day 1.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of The Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) at the Pew Research Center, notes that coverage of the events involving the Occupy protests represented 12 percent of the economic stories, or about 2 percent of all the news studied in PEJ’s News Coverage Index last week.

“It is complicated and probably fraught to compare different news events that occur years apart,” he says via e-mail, “but that is more than the tea party received initially when it held its first rallies in February 2009.”

However, the Observer points out, coverage is missing the bigger picture in favor of the simple narrative, noting, “when the shows started interviewing protesters, they were more focused on the actions of the police than what the protesters were fighting about.” This includes the YouTube video of a New York policeman pepper-spraying young women and the mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge over this past weekend.

No surprises there, says Mark Naison, a history professor at Fordham University in New York, who argues that broadcast media favor simple visual narratives. If the imagery does not lend itself to a quick explanation, and the subjects themselves intentionally represent many points of view, as is the case with the Occupy movements, then the journalist’s task becomes complicated.

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