Wall Street Protests

[Kasz216]

badgenome said:

Kasz216 said:

badgenome said:

It's interesting to watch the same media that freaked out over the Tea Party and gratuitously painted them at every turn as being rife with "extremists" now characterizing Occupy Oakland as having been "peaceful" right up until last night's orgy of violence.

And by "interesting" I, of course, mean "nauseating".

Well i've read a few rogue reports about violence before then...

but it is pretty interesting how a larger, peaceful movement with more members is generally branded as extremists and racists, while the OWS which has had ACTUAL bouts of violence and anti-semitism isn't labeled as either.

It certaintly blows a whole in the "No Leftwing media bias" claims a lot of people tend to make.

I mean, I've seen a few, too, but they mostly drew a bunch of false lines of equivalence between the protesters (who actually initiated the violence) and the police (who responded to it). It's just striking to see how the two AP reports, both of which are pretty representative of the kind of coverage AP has given the Tea Party and OWS, read next to one another: the reporter jumping at the shadows of possible extremists vs. the reporter pretending all this shit is unprecedented within the Occupy movement.

Then again, it's quite old hat. The anti-war movement also had a ton of extreme language, violent imagery, antisemitism, etc., but the media made sure that whatever it reported was completely sanitized for public consumption. I guess it's attributable to the fact that journalists are overwhelmingly leftists themselves, so these protesters mean well, and anything they do that is violent or over the line is just an aberration and not at all representative of the movement as a whole. Meanwhile something like the Tea Party is inherently dangerous, and the fact that you have to dig (and dig, and dig, and dig) to come up with a shred of extremism... well, that just shows how insidious it all is. Because rednecks are as clever as they are retarded and evil, as everyone knows.

I would phrase it more politely, but yeah i'd say that was probably the case... it would be fun to see if people would claim media bias if someone took the stories and switched the names and charges.