Media Coverage of the Wall Street Protests...and the Erin Burnett Clip

We talked about the Occupy Wall Street movement in class and how the media has kind of struggled to cover it. After class, I found this blog post in The New Yorker called "Wall Street Protests: Who Are the 99% and What Do They Want?" It talks about someone who didn't just analyze the people who are doing the actual protesting on Wall Street, but the profiles people posted on a website that has been associated with the protests, We Are the 99 Percent.

"In order to figure out what is driving the movement, Konczal wrote some computer code that extracted the words used most frequently in the profiles, where people tell their own stories. The ten most popular words were: “job,” “debt,” “work,” “college,” “pay,” “student,” “loan(s),” “afford,” “school,” “insurance.” On the face of it, these results suggest the primary issue for the protesters is excessive student loans. Together with the median age being twenty-six, this lends credence to the theory that the protest movement represents a “lost generation” of unemployed or under-employed college graduates."

After reading that, it made me go back to the articles we had to read and how McChesney was talking about the fact the commercial media systems tend to under represent the political message of movements. That's exactly what's happening here. Yeah, the reporters are going to go interview the people on the street who are interesting and will draw viewers and keep people interested. I feel like that's always going to happen with every protest. For every knowledgeable person that is interviewed, there has to be one person dressed up in a ridiculous outfit for everyone to make fun of later. It's the nature of today's news, trying to keep people interested when they're competing against a disinterested market, or one that already has set mechanisms for obtaining their news.

I looked for the clip from Erin Burnett that we were talking about in class, and underneath it I found this video talking about the media's coverage of the event (and making fun of Erin Burnett). It's really interesting and you should definitely check it out. But in regards to Erin Burnett, she has a new show coming out, and what better way to generate buzz than create a mock-worthy segment called "Seriously!?" about these protests that may have brought a few additional viewers to her show...or at least more hits on YouTube.