Events

The 8:52 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. national headlines page at the Associated Press's main site this morning teased a story about how twenty -- wow, a whole twenty -- Occupy Wall Street protesters spent the night at Zuccotti Park after barricades which had been up for almost two months were removed. Not only that, but the related brief story (saved here as a graphic for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes), has an accompanying series of four photos (most stories usually have just one).

Here's the story as of 8:57 a.m.:

The cold weather may have really cut into the crowds "occupying" two public spaces in the nation's capital, but The Washington Post doesn't care about crowd size. It's still publicizing some sort of protest juggernaut, like a ski resort manufactures snow when none has fallen. The Post's Sunday front page was dominated by the headline "LOVE AMID THE TENTS." The biggest "news" of the day was casual sex, hippie-style.

Post reporter Annie Gowen proclaimed that "As the Occupy movement enters its fourth month locally, it has spawned two full-service camps, more than 100 arrests and an ongoing constitutional debate over the right to free speech on federal land. But a combustible combination of youthful energy, enthusiasm for shared ideals and tight living quarters has given rise to something else: Romance. Lots and lots of romance." The bolded part was italicized and sprawled above a four-column picture taken inside a tent looking out.

A month ago, Aya Batrawy at the Associated Press's Egyptian bureau described those who ransacked the Israeli embassy in Cairo as "protesters," and absurdly asserted in the face of contrary evidence I was able to find in about five minutes that "the historic 1979 peace treaty with Israel ... has never had the support of ordinary Egyptians."

Last week, in the wake of the burning -- more like the gutting -- of the Institut d’Egypte in Cairo and the destruction of and serious damage to thousands of priceless books, manuscripts, documents, and artifacts, Batrawy attempted to deflect blame to the military (which did have a role, as will be seen later) for not sufficiently protecting the building instead of placing it on the arsonists who did the damage. And of course, you'll search in vain for any references to the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafi radicals, or Islam. I guess Batraway didn't want anyone to get any kind of crazy idea that this "Arab Spring" enterprise which Western news outlets so gullibly embraced earlier this year isn't exactly working out. Here are several paragraphs from the AP repoter's dispatch (bolds are mine throughout this post):

Uncle Sam's Monthly Treasury Statement for November came out yesterday. The results: Tax collections through two months of the fiscal year are up 4.4% over fiscal 2010; spending is down 5.5%, but only because about $31 billion in checks which would ordinarily have gone out on October 1 (a Saturday) were sent on September 30; and the deficit of $235 billion is $55 billion less than last year.

The headline in the report by Martin Crutsinger of the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press ("Gov't on pace to run budget deficit below $1T"), celebrated the totally untenable claim, only two months into the year, that the deficit might come in below $1 trillion for the first time in four years. Crutsinger's coverage was otherwise adequate, except near the end, when he threw in the following obviously gratuitous and recklessly false and misleading statement: "A decade ago, the government was running surpluses and trillion-dollar deficits seemed unimaginable."

Faux-Republican David Frum took a shot at Fox News viewers on Sunday when he told CNN's Howard Kurtz that "people who watch a lot of Fox come away knowing a lot less about important world events." Frum's interview aired during the bottom half of the 11 a.m. hour of Reliable Sources.

Even Kurtz, who has worked for the liberal media for three decades, challenged Frum's hard-line criticism of the right-wing media. "You're tarring with an awfully broad brush there" he told Frum, who in a recent New York Magazine column accused the conservative media of running an "alternative knowledge system" of "pseudo-facts and pretend information." [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

Last week, CNN's Steve Kastenbaum (podcast is also at link) visited what he characterized as Occupy Wall Street's "nerve center" (but don't call it a "headquarters," Occupiers insisted) in space provided by an anonymous donor. No, it wasn't at Zuccotti Park or any other open-air location. It was, and presumably still is, in Lower Manhattan, one block south of the New York Stock Exchange.

Along the way, Kastenbaum interviewed several people who portrayed themselves as "volunteer staff" for a supposedly leaderless movement, but as is par for the course in the establishment press when leftists are involved, didn't reveal anyone's previous background. At Heritage, Lachlan Markay reports at Robert Bluey's blog that the prior affiliations and involvements of at least a few of those interviewed belies their starry-eyed self-portrayal:

Washington Post Style section editors gave freelance writer Mark Jenkins space for a 9-paragraph, 9-illustration feature item today entitled "Nothing shy in the art of Occupy."

"The occupiers don't have a single agenda, so there's no way any of the posters can be off-message," Jenkins gushed. "They might slaughter Wall Street's bull or show the takedown of the Monopoly icon, or they can send a bold and colorful message to authority," reads a caption underneath four post images on page C1 of the December 6 paper.

On December 2, the Associated Press carried a story by Terry Collins with the following headline: "Murder charge filed in Occupy Oakland slaying."

What? I thought that the related November attack, despite a statement from an actual eyewitness, "was unrelated to the ongoing protest of U.S. financial institutions" -- i.e., that it was unrelated to Occupy Oakland. After all, the San Francisco Chronicle and the AP both carried statements to that effect several weeks ago. Surprise, surprise (not):

Zbigniew Brzezinki's indictment of the United States was so harsh—calling America "one of the most socially unjust societies in the world"—that even his own daughter Mika was taken aback, asking her father to explain himself.

But that didn't stop Andrea Mitchell from emphatically agreeing with Zbigniew Brzezinki's condemnation of the USA.  In the course of doing so, Mitchell called the Tea Party  and opposition to ObamaCare "exaggerated forms" of protest, while praising Occupy Wall Street as "a real movement." Video after the jump.
 

It appears that cleanup crews around the country aren't the only ones engaging in sanitation exercises in the wake of the largely disbanded Occupy encampments around the country.

At the Associated Press, which made the goings-on in the waning days of Occupy LA national news, the aftermath is apparently just a local or regional story. Here's a list of results at the AP's national site of a search on "occupy Los Angeles" (not in quotes):

If you don't hear much about the Iranian mob which stormed the British embassy earlier today in future news reports, you can probably at least partially blame the Associated Press, which considers the event so unimportant that it's not even part of its main U.S. site's top ten world stories as of 10:25 p.m. (saved here at host for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes).

For those who are curious as to the identification of the ten stories considered more important, here they are:

While USA Today editors shunted to page 5A a 15-paragraph article on how the Occupy movement has worn out its welcome in many major cities, today's front page featured a 47-paragraph puffy profile on how "'Occupiers' [are] not cut from the same cloth."

"Occupy's membership is a coat of many colors" that "includes the foreclosed, the uninsured and the homeless" as well as "college students with poor job prospects and college graduates with no way to pay off their student loans," noted USA Today's Rick Hampson.

At the Associated Press this afternoon, reporter Ben Nuckols opened his report on the completion of Occupy Wall Street's "Occupy the HIghway" march thusly: "Drenched, blistered and weary, a few dozen Occupy Wall Street protesters arrived Tuesday in the nation's capital after a two-week, 240-mile march from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan."

Anyone reading Nuckols's opening statement would believe that at least 24 marchers completed the entire journey (I'd say 36, but the dictionary defines a "few" as "not many but more than one"). Actually, that's not the case, as readers who somehow endure the intervening insipidness learn when they get to the report's seventh and eighth paragraphs:

On Monday, Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters noted how former New York Times op-ed writer (and before that, theater critic) Frank Rich, who now plies whatever his trade is at New York Magazine, criticized MSNBC's Chris Matthews for writing a "man-crush of a biography" about John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated 48 years ago today.

Monday evening, Allahpundit at Hot Air identified a particularly egregious contention in that same very poor Rich piece, namely that "the hate that ended his (JFK's) presidency" which inspired avowed communist and Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to commit his heinous crimes (Oswald also shot Texas Governor John Connally in JFK's motorcade and killed Dallas police officer J.D. Tippit later that day) came from the right. Really. What follows are selections from Rich's risible self-righteousness:

GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich has been roundly excoriated in the media for the "toxic" suggestion that Occupy Wall Street protesters need to stop freeloading, take a bath, and get a job. Yet in a sympathetic Style section photo essay today entitled "The March: Occupy protesters trek 231 miles from New York to the White House," Washington Post editors highlighted as the march's poster boy one "Dylan Bozlee of Hilo, Hawaii."

Bozlee is a self-described anarchist and University of Hawaii dropout who, the Post notes, "said he'd rather travel across American than get a job." "Do I want to work? Only if I wanted a home, wife, kids and a dog. If not, I think you're ruining your life," Bozlee told the Post.

Give John Nolte a gold star. In a Friday post at BigJournalism.com entitled "Panicked AP Attempts to Memory-Hole Democrats’ #Occupy Endorsements," Nolte latched onto the beginnings of the establishment press's desperate attempt to distance President Obama and the Democratic Party from the rapidly devolving Occupy movement.

The disingenously headlined item Nolte caught, apparently from an earlier report ("Democrats see minefield in Occupy protests") appeared via Beth Fouhy on Thursday at the Associated Press, which yours truly has often taken to naming the Administration's Press. Later, as seen here, a revised version came in with this howler of a headline: "Wary Democrats keep distance from Occupy protests," while the calculated attempt to create separation in the article's text got even worse. First, excerpts from Nolte's post (bolds are mine; links were in original):

You can't make this up: The ever-careful Essential Global News Network known as the Associated Press actually believed that a guy who has been on a DC sports show for several football seasons impersonating Christopher Walken was actually Christopher Walken.

After excerpting several paragraphs from AP's unbylined (naturally) mea culpa (saved here at host for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes), I'll explain why this snafu really isn't particularly surprising:

Feminist author Naomi Wolf insisted on today's Now with Alex Wagner that New Yorkers were not really all that inconvenienced by the Occupy Wall Street movement.

"Yesterday, commuters and small business owners couldn't get to work the Occupiers were blocking subway entrances, you [also] had the Brooklyn Bridge" pedestrian walkway crammed with Occupiers, conservative columnist S.E. Cupp complained in a panel segment on Occupy Wall Street's political objectives, if any.

"I didn't see any of that. There's no reporting about that, I follow the reporting very carefully," Wolf retorted (see video below page break).

This one's utterly predictable, but still needs to be noted.

As Edwin Mora at CNS News reported on Wednesday, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters, after a Congressional Progressive Caucus-sponsored event at the Capitol, “when asked to comment ... about the deaths and crimes that have occurred around Occupy protests being held across the country, … said 'that’s life and it happens.'" What's also happened, or actually not happened, is that the Associated Press and the New York Times have failed to note what Waters said, as shown in the following search results on her first name at AP and on her full name (not in quotes) at the Times:

During the height of the Tea Party protests, the liberal media sought to hype any hint that the movement may turn violent against Democrats in general and President Obama in particular.

For example, Hardball's Chris Matthews famously blew up in August 2009 at a libertarian protester who legally carried a gun to a presidential townhall meeting in New Hampshire, suggesting it was wildly inappropriate "given the violent history of this country with regard to presidents and assassinations."

So it should be interesting to see what attention, if any, the mainstream media pays to Occupy San Diego honoring suspected White House shooter and likely Occupy DC participant Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez (see video below the page break):

"[A]s Occupy Wall Street embarks on a day of action across New York City that's being echoed by protests around the U.S. and the world, Bloomberg may yet question whether he should have let Zuccotti be," Time magazine's Ishaan Tharoor noted in a November 17 "Global Spin" blog post at the magazine's website.

Tharoor has previously romanticized the OWS movement, and today's post, "The Whole World Watches Again: Occupy Wall Street Fights Back," was no deviation from that pattern, with Tharoor acting more as a press agent -- or at least an apologist -- for the Zuccotti Park squatters than as an objective journalist (emphases mine):

Five weeks ago, Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center's Culture & Media Institute thoroughly documented (at NewsBusters; at MRC) how "two separate news unions, including the newspaper guild, the recognized union for many print and online journalists, and the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) are fully behind the radical message of Occupy Wall Street."

Now that the Occupy encampments are largely being put out of their disease-infested, crime-plagued misery by big-city mayors finally recovering a tiny bit of their sanity, a visit to the home page of The Newspaper Guild, which, as Dan noted, is part of the CWA (Communications Workers of America) and represents workers at the Associated Press and many individual publications, indicates that they are fully behind what the Occupiers hope is the next stage of their disorderly incoherence. The graphic currently at the top of the guild's home page, which is the same as the one currently found in an entry at OWS's main site, follows the jump:

At the Associated Press this afternoon, White House Correspondent Ben Feller relayed the essence of a statement by Obama administration spokesman Jay Carney about how the President believes that, in Feller's words, "it's up to New York and other municipalities to decide how much force to use in dealing with Occupy Wall Street demonstrations." Feller failed to mention both the President's previous endorsement of the goals of the Occupy protesters, and his inexcusable silence as the encampments have devolved into disease-infested swamps of criminal and antisocial behavior. How convenient.

Most of Feller's brief report follows:

CNN's White House correspondent Dan Lothian made headlines with his ridiculous softball question to President Obama on Sunday. However, as NewsBusters has documented, Lothian has posed such a soft question to Obama before, and has shown some liberal bias in his past reporting.

Lothian asked the President at Sunday's press conference in Hawaii if he thought the Republican candidates, who supported the practice of waterboarding, were "uninformed, out of touch, or irresponsible." Fox News analyst Bernie Goldberg later called it "the most ridiculous question I have ever heard by a regular reporter from a so-called mainstream news outfit. Ever." [Video of the question below the break. Click here for audio.]

Blogger John at Verum Serum has unmasked yet another instance where initial claims by "leaders" at an Occupy site claiming non-involvement with crime fell apart after a short while. Even worse, after his post went up, a subsequent report on the same incident a few hours later scrubbed the truth to again make Occupiers appear not culpable .

After the jump, readers will see the initial and then revised stories about what happened at Occupy Orlando on Monday, each via Local TV station "News 13."