Occupy Wall Street isn’t just seizing city squares or the Brooklyn Bridge. The socialist/communist/anarchist revolutionary movement has also seized an incredible amount of coverage from the adoring media.
In the nation’s two most well-known liberal newspapers – The New York Times and Washington Post – the amount of space devoted to Occupy Wall Street has taken on epic proportions. In the nearly six weeks since the Sept. 17 launch of the left-wing movement, the two papers have written a book-load of stories mentioning OWS totalling more than 180,000 words. That comes to 224 stories and opinion pieces, not counting letters to the editor.
To put 180,000+ words in context, the U.S. Constitution has about 4,543 words. The Post and Times have already written more than 40 times that in just 40 days of coverage. The Bible’s Book of Genesis, which detailed how long it rained during Noah’s time on the ark of 40 days and 40 nights, contained only about 38,000 words.
For the numerically inclined, the Post and Times wrote more than three words per minute for 40 days. That’s in an in era where every newspaper complains about limited staff and space in the paper. Or, based on #OccupyArrests on Twitter, about 66 words for every one of the 2,750 arrestees.
But it’s not just how many words, it’s the fact that they are so positive. For example, the Oct. 23 Washington Post had at least five different news and feature stories highlighting Occupiers – including two stories that led the Arts section and a front page piece of propaganda pretending similarities between the Occupying revolutionaries and Tea Partiers. “Who knew? Tea partyers, Occupiers find kinship.”
Inside the paper, the Arts section led off with two front page stories under the huge headline “Revolutionaries.” A movie review of the flick “Margin Call” even invoked Occupy Wall Street.
Breaking it down, the Times published a remarkable near-90,000 words in the news sections on the revolutionary movement. It added about 24,000 in the opinion section. The Post had just 44,000 words in the news sections and another roughly 24,000 in opinion.
