CHAPTER 1

Insight from Confusion: The Mediaand Occupy

"These protests began almost two weeks ago now under thisname 'Occupy Wall Street' and during that time a clear goal, aclear message has yet to really surface from these myriaddemonstrators leaving many to ask 'what does Occupy WallStreet want?'"

—CNN Newsroom anchor Brooke Baldwin

Why was the media so confused about Occupy Wall Street? Whatwas so difficult to grasp about an anti-Wall Street protest in thewake the most catastrophic financial fraud in our lifetimes? Mostof the organizers I knew were baffled. Our national approvalrating was 43%, Congress's national approval rating was an all-timelow of 9%, and we had to do a better job expressing ourmessage to the public? During the first week of the occupation ofLiberty Square, there was very little media coverage of OccupyWall Street. Some claimed this was a deliberate media blackout,but the same can be said for most demonstrations. We get inanesegments like NBC Nightly News' "Making a Difference" whichfeatures individual tales of do-goodery rather than stories aboutcommunity organizations or immigrant workers' centers that areactually making a difference. But after the pepper-spraying ofChelsea Elliot and Jeanne Mansfield on September 24, 2011 andthe arrests of over 700 marchers on the Brooklyn Bridge onOctober 1st, the media frenzy was in full swing and there wasactually much more positive coverage than any of us could haveexpected. However, as I've argued elsewhere, the sympatheticcoverage we received from seemingly liberal journalists didn'temerge from a shared understanding of the underlying natureand purpose of OWS.

As conservative CNN contributor Will Cain astutely noted inearly October, "this Occupy Wall Street movement right now isjust a Rorschach test, it's an inkblot test. People see in it whatthey want to see. It's a projection of what they already feel." Andso, many liberal journalists saw the liberal Tea Party that theywanted to see, but, as the days passed, their confusion didn'tabate. If anything, it increased because OWS was not sittingdown to join them at their tea party. Some of the confusionstemmed from the movement's resistance to electoral politics,but the confusion of mainstream journalists went much deeperthan that.

Activist explanations for this lingering bewildermentgenerally focused on political bias or journalistic incompetence.A common opinion was that many mainstream journalists didn'twant to understand our message because, no matter how liberalthey may have been, they were our enemies. They willfullymisrepresented it. Corporate news outlets would neveraccurately report on grassroots social movements because theywere part of the same machinery that we were working todismantle. We could do our best to nudge the coverage in ourfavor here and there, but ultimately we couldn't trust thecorporate media to cover an anti-corporate movement.

Another perspective was that some mainstream reporterswere too incompetent to understand Occupy Wall Street. Evenwhen some journalists wanted to write accurate, un-biasedarticles, it was often clear that they knew nothing about non-electoralpolitics or social movements, and were completelyunqualified for the task before them. Some reporters really didn'tunderstand what we were doing, and no amount of talkingpoints about how 'education is a human right' or comparisons tothe anti-nuclear movement were going to change that. Activists,of course, recognized this incompetence as a banal byproduct ofthe politics of the corporate media, which wouldn't promoteaccurate coverage of social movements.

In contrast, liberal and conservative mainstream critics offereda much more straightforward explanation for the media'sconfusion: the message of Occupy Wall Street was actuallyconfusing. Of course much of the confusion came from theunconventional nature of the idea of occupying a park, themovement's countercultural elements, and its emphasis on directdemocracy. But if you take this confusion more seriously andmake the effort to dig beneath the superficial pundit chatterabout smelly hippies and muddled messaging, it becomesevident that there are some startling paradoxes at the heart of therhetoric of Occupy Wall Street.

Unlike most, I think that both the activists and the mainstreamcritics were correct in their explanations of the media confusion.The activists were correct because there were some journalistswho were willfully confused because they opposed our politics,and even more reporters, I would argue, who wanted to understandus but lacked the information and motivation to thinkbeyond the confines of the dominant political culture. However,I would also argue that there was a profound insight at the heartof the media's confusion. Mainstream journalists may have beenthe products of news corporations and larger social structuresthat work to systematically delegitimize non-electoral politics,but in their befuddlement they were actually on to something.They realized that there was a missing piece at the center of theOccupy puzzle, but made the mistake of assuming that it simplydidn't exist. In truth, they didn't know what we wanted becausewe didn't tell them.

Journalism: The Narrative Form of Capitalism

To get to the insights of the mainstream critics it's important totake some time to explore why journalists were confused andwhat they were confused about because, paradoxically, theirinsights stemmed from their confusion. Journalists who deliberatelysought to misrepresent the rhetoric of OWS out of aconscious political bias reveal much less about the dominantpolitical culture than those whose confusion followed from anunconscious tendency to fall into familiar patterns of thought.For that reason, I will ask why so many mainstream journalistswho had some desire to understand Occupy Wall Street simplycouldn't, and what that reveals about the strategic gaps in ourself-presentation.

One of the most apparent reasons for the confusion of manyreporters was that they knew very little if anything about whereour strategies of organizing or methods of action came from.They had no context. Although a minor incident, the followinganecdote exemplified this phenomenon for me. On November30, 2011, we demonstrated against the war profiteers who met atthe "Aerospace & Defense Finance Conference" near MadisonSquare Park. There was a picket line scheduled that morning, soI showed up early...