Dahlia Lithwick says that the media’s bafflement toward the Occupy Wall Street movement is the result of its obsession with simple storylines that can be explained in 60 seconds or less:
Mark your calendars: The corporate media died when it announced it was too sophisticated to understand simple declarative sentences. While the mainstream media expresses puzzlement and fear at these incomprehensible “protesters” with their oddly well-worded “signs,” the rest of us see our own concerns reflected back at us and understand perfectly. Turning off mindless programming might be the best thing that ever happens to this polity. Hey, occupiers: You’re the new news. And even better, by refusing to explain yourselves, you’re actually changing what’s reported as news. Because it takes a tremendous mental effort to refuse to see that the rich are getting richer in America while the rest of us are struggling. Maybe the days of explaining the patently obvious to the transparently compromised are finally behind us.
By refusing to take a ragtag, complicated, and leaderless movement seriously, the mainstream media has succeeded only in ensuring its own irrelevance. The rest of America has little trouble understanding that these are ragtag,
complicated, and leaderless times. This may not make for great television, but any movement that acknowledges that fact deserves enormous credit.
I’d like to think this is true. Unfortunately, my instincts tell me that the corporate media is stronger than Lithwick gives it credit for. As weeks drift into months, and the OWS movement continues to shun the very idea of alliance building, political action, or stronger messaging, it looks more and more as if it’s going to drift into irrelevance without accomplishing anything. Heavy-handed police action could change that, of course, but at this point it sort of looks to me as if its most promising destiny is to be v1.0 of whatever springs up in its wake. If things go well, OWS will inspire someone else to create a similar group that’s better at mobilizing public outrage, but OWS itself won’t be part of it. That’s no bad thing if it happens that way, but not what OWS’s creators were hoping for.
