Well Spoken — an Occupy Wall Streeter Synopsizes the Core Message that Slipped by the Economic Elite, Self-Interested Politicians, and Our Witless Mainstream Media

© 2011 Peter Free

 

27 October 2011

 

 

Clarity’s not hard, if we actually make the effort to achieve it

 

Dahlia Lithwick gets it:

 

We are the most media-saturated 24-hour-cable-soaked culture in the world, and yet around the country . . . people are holding up cardboard signs, the way protesters in ancient Sumeria might have done when demonstrating against a rise in the price of figs.

 

And why is that?

 

Because they very wisely don’t trust television cameras and microphones to get it right anymore. Because a media constructed around the illusion of false equivalencies, screaming pundits, and manufactured crises fails to capture who we are and what we value.

 

For the past several years, while the mainstream media was dutifully reporting on all things Kardashian or (more recently) a wholly manufactured debt-ceiling crisis, ordinary people were losing their health care, their homes, their jobs, and their savings.

 

They are holding up signs that are perfectly and intrinsically clear:

 

They want accountability for the banks that took their money, they want to end corporate control of government. They want their jobs back. They would like to feed their children.

 

The mainstream media thrives on simple solutions. It has no idea whatsoever of how to report on a story that isn’t about easy fixes so much as it is about anguished human frustration and fear.

 

Luckily for us, OWS doesn’t seem to care.

 

© 2011 Dahlia Lithwick, Occupy the No-Spin Zone, Slate (26 October 2011) (paragraphs split, emphasis added)

 

 

Notice Lithwick’s emphasis on Media’s failure to perform its democratically necessary role as the Fourth Estate

 

Our democratic institutions are failing because they, and the media, have been subverted by the unopposed influence of money.

 

Despite the corruption that has overwhelmed our political system, the media, arguably, still has the social and professional duty to find facts, explain complexity, and re-direct our national attention to what is important.

 

With the Mainstream Media’s current failure to do any of these, people may increasingly resort to the streets to make necessary points.

 

 

The moral? — detect lies, oppose stupidity, disempower wrong-doers

 

We cannot continue to permit greed-mongers and lying deceivers to submerge ordinary Americans’ goals.

 

If we do, the American Democracy will have failed.