The Washington Post commissions a piece on pre-Iraq media failures, kills it, runs one about how the media did great.Via @mlcalderone
Fans of diversity, this chart on media coverage of election topics isn’t for you. (ht The Daily What)
An analysis by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism indicates that the movement occupied 10 percent of its sample of national news coverage in the week beginning Oct. 9, then steadily represented about 5 percent through early November.
Coverage dipped markedly, to just 1 percent of the national news hole, in the week beginning Nov. 6, supporting Ms. Shepard’s assertion that it had “died down” before the early morning eviction in New York last Tuesday. It has since rebounded strongly.
But really, the key line of the story is this one: “Newspapers and television networks have been rebuked by media critics for treating the movement as if it were a political campaign or a sideshow — by many liberals for treating the protesters dismissively, and by conservatives, conversely, for taking the protesters too seriously. The protesters themselves have also criticized the media — first for ostensibly ignoring the movement and then for marginalizing it.” The lesson from this? You can’t please everyone, but you can annoy everyone all at once.
As a follow-up to our post last night, we’d just like to point out that Fox News, which didn’t even have anything up about the protests last night, now has it as its lead item.
andurrs says: Funny. I would have thought good journalists could find their hook. Silly me.
» SFB says: That’s not our point at all. Journalists can find a good hook to create an individual story. But a story like this needs more than that. This is an attempt to create a large-scale movement. The standards are higher. To outsiders looking at this passively, this story doesn’t have any clear objective other than creating a dialogue about populist anger around Wall Street. Which is necessary, but not necessarily a “hook.” Think of every notable populist movement in the past couple of years: The Tea Party had Rick Santelli making an audacious speech on a trading floor. The Arab Spring had a Tunisian who set himself on fire out of anger. Egypt had Wael Ghonim and massive crowds at Tahrir Square that stuck around for weeks. And so on. Occupy Wall Street does not need a hook like this to get coverage (and media outlets should cover it whether or not it has a “hook” — something they might actually find in the process of covering it, by the way). But it’d be a stronger movement if it had something like this to coalesce around. — Ernie @ SFB
beautyofapple says: And still we hear nothing on main stream media. (Edit: After this post, they corrected.)
» SFB says: Here are 900 news articles from the past 24 hours, from news sources as diverse and mainstream as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post and ABC News. Enjoy. (Note: This is not to say the media isn’t underplaying it, but let’s get our facts straight, friends.) — Ernie @ SFB
(Source: danpatterson)
Lots of media - guys w expensive cameras and women in suits with notebooks - at #occupywallstreet (Taken with instagram)
Reblogging with emphasis.
Brilliant.
Great editorial cartoon, or the greatest editorial cartoon ever?
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