Yesterday a friend asked me what I thought about the Occupy Wall Street movement. She must have known my general propensities about demonstrations. My first demo was in 1959. I recall it being led by a banjo-playing Pete Seeger, but when I asked Pete about it a few years ago, he said he didn’t think he was there. The topic of variable geezer recollections will make an interesting post another day.
Anyway this posting is about two subjects and will be two posts if not more, so I don’t exhaust you – or me.
Before we get to OWS itself, I want to ask, what do I know? I’ve driven by the Occupy encampment in Portland (the real Portland, not the upstart on the West Coast). I’ve heard a bit from my youngest son Sam who has been involved outside of his horrendous schedule of work and poetry. But basically – I’m media dependent on this one.
It’s fashionable to bash the media. The media overall might deserve some criticizing for its deep conflicts of interest, laziness, and bad reporting and writing. I switched from reading the Portland Press Herald to the Bangor Daily News largely because the latter is better written and reported, it’s just a more pleasant read.
In the old days, we worried a lot about media concentration. Now the concentration is seemingly shattered by the internet, and we face new problems that Clay Shirkey and many others have written about: how we only listen to the songs we like – I read the NYT and Huffington every day but never ever do I darken Fox’s door. A friend who works for Glenn Beck has urged me to try him and so I will and report on it. Keeping an open mind will not be easy. Some will say an open mind is impossible and others might say, irrelevant.
In general, the media of whatever stripe are run by people of a certain social class and sense of privilege or entitlement. I used the word “encampment” above. It appears to be an innocent enough term, but it's not a word I usually use: it has become the media-generated term of art to denote the OWS sites, which in fact I suspect are more diverse than “encampment” denotes. You can unpack the word “encampment” and find a point of view and some politics, even there.
Our frame for understanding something outside of our immediate experience is influenced by the overall life framework of the people who do the reporting. It’s therefore fair to examine the stance of those who tell us about what they have experienced. I’ve read Talking Points Memo for years. That places a burden on me to know something about Josh Marshall. I think I know something about the New York Times as a media company, so I believe I can make judgments about their reporting. In the case of a newer source, Talking Points Memo, I look to the person who dreamed it up and as far as I can tell, runs it.
So let’s wrap this section up. Without falling into the sophomoric abyss of asserting that we can’t know anything outside of our immediate experience – if that – I want to be very cautious in what I say about the OWS because I’m writing from a salt marsh that is occupied mostly by snails and gulls. All of us need to find out more directly what’s happening, any way we can.
Sitting back with our laptops on our laps, the deepest danger isn’t that the media will misreport OWS - someone is bound to get it mostly right eventually. The greater danger is that the movement will become sealed off, a media phenomenon instead of a budding social movement. The revolution will be televised. Both we as citizens (and the OWS folks, who run the risk of talking only to themselves), will suffer significantly. Finding out about OWS is not like finding out who won the game last night. If this group really is challenging ideas of power or crossing lines of social class or challenging economic and social stability – we may want to pay a special type of attention to what is happening.
That is where the next posting on this topic will begin.
