Wall Street protests

The Washington Post proved on Tuesday that it will promote “Occupy DC” protests as real “news events” no matter how poor the turnout. “About 50 protesters took to the streets waving signs, chanting and singing,” wrote the Post’s Annie Gowen. “They were trailed by a large cadre of D.C. police, in vans, on foot and on Segways, who obligingly shut down streets for them.” And the Post obligingly…

Gosh, those were the good old days. Or so Meghan Barr at the Associated Press apparently believes. As what's left of the Occupy Wall Street mobs from last year staged a pathetic anniversary protest in New York on Monday, Barr, in one of the most embarrassing reports I've seen emanate from the self-described "essential global news network," described them as "celebrating" and "giddy." At the…

The New York Times celebrated the one year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in a fashion that vindicates former Public Editor Arthur Brisbane's concern that the paper celebrates left-wing movements like Occupy "more like causes than news subjects." First was Sunday's "Dear Bankers: Thanks for Wrecking Our Lives..." by Mark Greif, the founding…

On Thursday’s All Things Considered, NPR anchor Melissa Block announced it was time to mark the anniversary of Occupy Wall Street protests. “One year later, the tent camps are gone. So what's happened to the movement and the people who joined it?” Question: If it failed utterly, why celebrate the anniversary? For "reflections" on the state of this amorphous radical movement, Block…

Reuters has noted the one year anniversary coming this Monday of the Coffee Party, oops, I mean Occupy Wall Street. I can be forgiven for the error since both proved to be as big a flop as Joe Scarborough's No Labels. All of these failed movements had one other thing in common: they were given a boost at birth with extreme media hype. However, first the anniversary/obituary from Reuters: (…

The Weekend Pass section of the Washington Post’s Express free tabloid on Thursday promoted a photography exhibit glorifying Occupy Wall Street. Over a full-page photo of Occupiers climbing the statue in McPherson Square was the headline “Picturing Protest: The Occupy movement’s early days come into focus with an exhibit of photos at American University.” The Post’s Katie Auerbach explained…

CNN's Soledad O'Brien just isn't comfortable with anyone criticizing Barack Obama. On Monday's Starting Point, the host seriously challenged her Tea Party guest, former Republican senatorial candidate Christine O'Donnell, when she had the nerve to say the President's policies were Marxist (video follows with transcript and commentary):

A Tuesday story from London-based New York Times reporter Alan Cowell on London's successful staging of the 2012 Olympics had this aside blaming last year's riots on societal "greed." The Games took place almost exactly a year after riots and looting spread from London to other British cities, shocking the country with a vision of a society whose greed had produced an underclass fueled by…

The upcoming documentary "Occupy Unmasked" is getting the kind of promotional push too rarely received by right-of-center films. The movie, directed by Steve Bannon and featuring the late Andrew Breitbart, tells the story of the chaotic, destructive Occupy Wall Street movement. The message hardly fits the standard theatrical template, which routinely sides with or sympathizes with the…

On May 2, Matt Sheffield at NewsBusters ran down a list of national media outlets which failed to report the Occupy movement connections of the five men arrested by the FBI for plotting to blow up a suburban Cleveland bridge, despite the fact that the Cleveland Plain Dealer began noting those relationships from the get-go. Matt wrote that the Associated Press recognized the connections, but…

It was all Occupy Wall Street all the time in Sunday's New York Times, with no less than four favorable references to the left-wing sit-in scattered throughout the paper. The Tea Party movement certainly hasn't permeated the pages of the Times in such friendly fashion. Meanwhile, the paper continues to downplay or ignore violence committed by the Occupy movement. The Times did not cover the…

Occupy violence erupted in Los Angeles on Thursday with protesters using slogans such as "Kill the cops." NBC skipped the story on Friday's Today. CBS This Morning and ABC's Good Morning America offered a combined 31 seconds. GMA news reader Amy Robach explained that police had to break up a crowd of "200 angry protesters." She briefly added, "It started when Occupy L.A. activists joined a…

New York Times reporters are eager to see the influence of the left-wing sit-in Occupy Wall Street around every corner. On Sunday's front page, Tanzina Vega even credited Occupy Wall Street for a new batch of class-warfare themed television ads from McDonald's and others, inspiring overworked employees to actually take their lunch breaks and vacation days: "In Ads, the Workers Rise Up...and Go…

Environmentalist groups have adopted the language of the failed Occupy movement in order to complain about UN inaction over what they say is an impending environmental catastrophe. Protesters even went so far as to tear up the approved text in a special ceremony. The Vatican blocked language in the UN preliminary text for the Rio+20 environmental summit, titled “The Future We Want,” which…