Less than a year from its inception, the far-left Occupy Wall Street movement is already sputtering. Many liberal big-city mayors have ejected protestors from their campsites and their donations have dried up. To top it off, a big event touted to "Occupy Congress" fizzled big-time Tuesday in Washington, D.C. That didn't stop the Associated Press from trying to spin away the march's failure.
Instead of headlining its report from the event with the big news that a march expected to bring in up to 10,000 protestors ended up drawing in far less than that, the wire service headlined it with the matter-of-fact headline "Several hundred Occupy protestors rally at Capitol." While reporter Ben Nuckols did mention the failure to meet expectations, his story didn't mention the other big news that OWS is almost out of money:
Several hundred protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement converged on the West Lawn of the Capitol Tuesday to decry the influence of corporate money in politics and voice myriad other grievances.
Organizers had touted the rally, known as Occupy Congress, as the largest national gathering of Occupy protesters to date and secured a permit that would have allowed up to 10,000 people to participate. By mid-afternoon, the protest appeared to have fallen far short of those goals.
Still, participants said they were optimistic about the strength of the Occupy movement, which began in September when protesters pitched tents in a lower Manhattan park. The movement has since spread to dozens of cities, including Washington. While many cities have moved to evict the protesters, the National Park Service has allowed encampments to remain in two public squares near the White House.
"I'm encouraged," said Jon Wynn, 63, of Snow Camp, N.C., who traveled to Washington to attend the protest and visit friends. "There's energy here, even if there's not a whole lot of people."
The protest comes amid numerous polls that show 84 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, near an all-time low.
In fairness to Nuckols, his report does mention several negative facts for the Occupiers, including that their encampment in the McPherson Square park in DC has reportedly become infested with rats, however, as is often the case with negative facts for liberals and Democrats, this information was buried in the story, a practice that is all too common for America's self-styled objective media. A quick glance of our regular "name that party" feature provides ample evidence of this.
Now that the Occupy Wall Street is seriously beginning to run out of steam, expect even more of these stories where reporters and editors try to downplay the bad news for the lefties, a stark contrast to how many "Tea Party is dead" stories we've seen in the past few years.