Photo: David Shankbone (CC)
Peeved by the mainstream media “blackout” of the Occupy Wall Street protest? Worse than those who have ignored it is the New York Times, which ran a steaming turd of an article (titled “Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim”). The takeaway is more or less that the protesters have no legitimate grievances, and the piece concludes with a wise middle-aged Wall Street trader lampooning the activists for owning Apple laptops. (The protesters favor higher taxation of the super-rich, yet they also own computers! What hypocrites!) Their coverage:
By late morning on Wednesday, Occupy Wall Street, a noble but fractured and airy movement of rightly frustrated young people, had a default ambassador in a half-naked woman who called herself Zuni Tikka. A blonde with a marked likeness to Joni Mitchell and a seemingly even stronger wish to burrow through the space-time continuum and hunker down in 1968, Ms. Tikka had taken off all but her cotton underwear and was dancing on the north side of Zuccotti Park, facing Liberty Street, just west of Broadway. Tourists stopped to take pictures; cops smiled, and the insidiously favorable tax treatment of private equity and hedge-fund managers was looking as though it would endure.
“I’ve been waiting for this my whole life,” Ms. Tikka, 37, told me.
“This,” presumably was the opportunity to air societal grievances as carnival. Occupy Wall Street, a diffuse and leaderless convocation of activists against greed, corporate influence, gross social inequality and other nasty byproducts of wayward capitalism not easily extinguishable by street theater, had hoped to see many thousands join its protest and encampment, which began Sept. 17. According to the group, 2,000 marched on the first day; news outlets estimated that the number was closer to several hundred…
More at the New York Times
