Via Robert David Graham (@ErrataRob):
I was unhappy with the poor journalistic coverage of the #OccupyWallStreet protests, so I went to Wall Street myself to see what’s going on, and report on it.
It’s the quality of the coverage, not the amount that's the problem. It’s been on the nightly news every night for the past week, but there has been little “serious” reporting.
By “serious” reporting, I mean such things as contacting the park’s owners asking for an official statement.
The protesters are occupying Zuccotti Park, owned by the same company (Brookfield Office Properties NYSE:BPO) that owns the adjacent skyscraper.
An obvious step would be to contact them asking for a statemen, but I could find no journalists that had yet done so.
Well, if “journalists” aren’t going to do this, I can do this myself.
I sent an email to their VP of Communications. I got a response, which I posted to my blog. When I posted it, I also Googled the sentences from the official statement, and found no results.
I was indeed the first one “reporting” on this. Since then, others have mentioned the official statement, probably by picking it up from the #OccupyWallStreet Twitter hashtag that links to my blog.
Brookfield's official statement expressed their frustration with how the protesters were breaking the rules of the park (my blog post shows a picture I took of the posted rules).
In particular, they haven’t been able to do their daily maintenance and cleaning of the park for the past three weeks.
For a reporter, that leads to the obvious question: is the park staying clean? and if so, how? The answer reporters would find is this: the protesters themselves are taking care of this.
They are exhorting people to not litter, they are making sure the trash cans have fresh bags and patrol the park picking up litter. They make sure the trash bags are set out in the right place to be picked up by the city’s garbage service.
If I were a reporter, I would then follow this thread: The protest started as a chaotic event put together haphazardly via Twitter and the Internet, with no actual leader.
How, then, were they able to organize a garbage detail? The answer is self-organization.
Protestors have developed a General Assembly of all the people that gives authority to the “Central Committee,” made up from the hard-core protesters who are sleeping in the park night after night.
The Central Committee has many subcommittees, like the “Media Team” responsible for recording the proceedings or the “Arts and Culture Committee”, responsible for making signs and running the drum circle, and the "Sanitation Committee" team keeping the park clean.
They have organized the park into specific areas, dedicated to different tasks.
Let’s follow this thread even further. The protesters aren’t allowed to have a bullhorn or loudspeaker.
How, then, can a person address the General Assembly, in the middle of a bustling city, reaching the hundreds of protesters spread throughout the park?
The answer is the “People’s Microphone”. A speaker speaks in short phrases. Those nearby then repeat the phrases, shouting so that those in back can hear.
The People’s Mic is powerfully emotional, driving home the point of solidarity. Although, it’s occasionally ironic when a speaker says things like “we are all individuals” or “we must think for ourselves”.
More than just the amplifying the voice, there is a system for selecting speakers.
There is a "Stack" of speakers expressing desire to speak, with their position on the stack dynamically adjusted so that all points of view get equal time, or so that shy women get pushed ahead in the stack to counterbalance loud males.
This organization is visible on the live streaming video and other efforts the Media Team has used to exploit social media to their cause.
Inspired by the New York occupation, other groups in most major cities have already started their own occupations, or plan to do so soon.
In my own Atlanta, they plan for this coming Friday. These new occupations share the same organization, e.g. the General Assembly, the People’s Microphone.
When somebody writes the definitive book on this, I’m sure this organization model will become a blueprint for protests years from now.
As time has gone on, established liberal/progressive organizations have lent their support to the occupiers.
The crude hand-made signs from the first couple weeks are giving way to slick printed placards.
The question is, as time goes on, will the movement be lead by the hard-core who slept night after night on the cold hard ground and who have worked to create their own organization, or will it cede control to established political operatives?
As we saw with the Tea Party, a grass roots effort was quickly hijacked by skilled politicos.
The point I’ve been trying to make with the last few paragraphs is that there is a “story” here.
I started with the obvious task of asking the owner of the park for an official statement about the occupiers of the last three weeks, and following those threads, I saw a story emerge that is different than the standard narrative of “just-another-protest”
There are many other aspects of this that go unreported. One I find especially important is the loving nature of the protest.
If you look at photographs in the news, you see the typical angry protester. This is the sort of action shot newsrooms prefer, i.e., showing the emotion of the scene.
But the protest isn’t angry. Quite the opposite, it is loving and accepting.
If you go up to protesters with the opposite political view and debate them, they will express their undying love for you and ask for you to join them to increase the diversity of viewpoints.
I did this myself, and watched this happen to others, including cops. This attitude pervades everything they do, and is frequently reinforced by the hard-core occupiers...
In many ways, the press treats this protest the way they treated the Tea Party, completely distorting the story.
Journalists ignored the mainstream of the Tea Party and instead focused on the fringe.
Instead of showing the hundreds of signs calling for smaller government, reporters instead focused on the one sign showing Obama as Hitler. In the end, this reporting became self-fulfilling.
The Republican fringe disaffected with the establishment were convinced by this reporting, believing that they, too, should join the Tea Party, thus derailing it....
0 comments:
Post a Comment