What if the Tea Party Occupied Wall Street?

FAIR.org, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting asks that question while pointing out that the Corporate media skips anti-corporate protests. While diminished, the protests are continuing and the demonstrators are camping out on the Financial District's Liberty Street in support of U.S. democratization and against corporate domination of politics.

The media preference for Tea Party gatherings over progressive activism is well-documented. A September 2009 Tea Party rally in Washington, D.C., garnered far more coverage than a similar gay rights rally the following month (Extra!, 12/09). Thousands of activists at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit in June 2010 did not merit anywhere near the coverage accorded to 600 attendees at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville (Extra!, 9/10). The One Nation Working Together rally (10/2/10) brought thousands to Washington-- but little media attention (FAIR Media Advisory, 10/6/10).

At the top of his Current TV show (9/21/11), Keith Olberman said:

So five days of clogging downtown Manhattan, protesting corporate control of the economy, and you haven't heard a word about it on the news?

He later remarked, "If that's a Tea Party protest in front of Wall Street about Ben Bernanke...it's the lead story on every network newscast." And the size of a given Tea Party gathering does not seem to much matter when it comes down to the willingness of the US Media to report the event. When about 200 Tea Partiers gathered in Washington earlier this year (FAIR Blog, 4/1/11), an account in Slate (3/31/11) noted, "There was at least one reporter for every three or four activists."

Of course, the US media is happy to talk about deomcracy and popular movements, but when it comes down to truly popular movements in the US are strangely silent.