Natalie Rothschild takes issue with a fellow journalist’s characterization of the Occupy movement:
A late October edition of the New Yorker carried a ‘postcard’ piece on Occupy Wall Street (OWS). On the third re-read it began to dawn on me that, perhaps, the writer was not being sarcastic, despite her grandiose opening line: ‘Visiting the site of Occupy Wall Street last week . . . was a bit like visiting civilisation at its peak: Paris in the Twenties, Rome in the second century, or, at the very least, Timbuktu in the fifteen hundreds.’
Really? I mean, really? I had recently visited the OWS Zuccotti Park encampment, too, and I’ve been there several more times. Over time, the camp has become better organised. There are now tents, clean-up teams, a set of portable toilets, a library and information points. But ‘the height of civilisation’? Come on.
[. . .]
None of this fawning has stopped occupiers and their supporters from decrying the mainstream media’s coverage — there’s not enough of it, apparently, and most of it is anyway shallow or negatively skewed. In truth, the OWS coverage has been dense and overwhelmingly positive.
The few critics of OWS have been slammed as contemptuous ignoramuses, as corrupt apologists for ‘the one per cent’. Or it is said that they simply ‘just don’t get it’ because they haven’t engaged with the new form of direct, participatory democracy practiced in Zuccotti Park. But, then, even those journalists who have reported directly from the Occupy headquarters and have taken note of the eccentricity and confusion that undoubtedly exist there have been said to be blinkered by prejudice or interested only in shallow, headline-grabbing snapshots. Any commentary that is less than praising is slammed as mocking or as right-wing mud-slinging.
