Visual source: Newseum
Paul Krugman gives the bird's eye view on the growing protests:
There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popular movement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.
When the Occupy Wall Street protests began three weeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention the events at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radio had provided no coverage whatsoever.
It is, therefore, a testament to the passion of those involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventually becoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats now expressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street is starting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen as a turning point.
Jim Acosta, like Vice President Biden, sees tactical similarities between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party:
Both Occupy and tea party movements are angry. They just see different remedies.
When tea party rallies flared up across the country more than two years ago, conservative activists were mad about bailouts and their impact on the national debt. To them, government was part of the problem.
Occupy demonstrators are also upset about the financial crisis and the economy. But they see government as part of the solution.
Brian Montopoli on why the protests are resonating with average Americans:
NEW YORK - Shortly before the massive "Occupy Wall Street" protest kicked off in lower Manhattan Wednesday afternoon, CBS News caught up with Transport Workers Union President John Samuelsen, whose union was among those that had decided to join the cause. Samuelsen, who can be seen in the video at left, was adamant that there wasn't a culture clash between union members and the mostly younger, more culturally liberal demonstrators who initiated the movement.
"The media might want to portray it as a different culture but it's not a different culture, we're all working people, and we're all not the wealthiest people in this country that are really getting a break right now," he said, adding: "There's a pervasive sense of abandonment of working families and working people in this country, these protests are all about that, that's why organized labor has joined in, because that voice is our voice."
Ann-Marie Slaughter looks at the protests through the prism of the Arab Spring:
THE American mainstream media is gradually beginning to pay attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement and its spinoffs springing up in Atlanta, Chicago, Boston and Seattle. But from the very beginning the movement has attracted extensive coverage from Al Jazeera and other Middle Eastern news outlets and Twitter users — probably because they recognize the forces that are reshaping politics across their region.
Indeed, the twin drivers of America’s nascent protest movement against the financial sector are injustice and invisibility, the very grievances that drove the Arab Spring.
Go on the Web site “We are the 99 percent” and you will see the Mohamed Bouazizis of the United States, page after page of testimonials from members of the middle class who took out loans to pay for education, took out mortgages to buy their houses and a piece of the American dream, worked hard at the jobs they could find, and ended up unemployed or radically underemployed and on the precipice of financial and social ruin.
Erik Wemple argues that the lack of media coverage at the outset of the protests was justified:
What’s the downside if your reporters and camera crews are a couple of days late to the OWS movement? Will the protesters have forgotten their talking points? Will you miss the arrests, the arrests that are all over YouTube as filmed by the protesters themselves?
The OWS protests started small (or at least smaller) and have grown in density and geography. The media coverage has mirrored that expansion, an indication that things are proceeding in a healthy and responsible fashion. A protest movement needs to show that it can generate its own heat and light; then the cameras can swarm in.
There’s no intrinsic obligation incumbent on the media to cover any particular movement. Protestations by Olbermann and others appear based on the notion that there’s something noble about these demonstrations, that their content and motivations per se deserve lots of attention. And depending on your worldview, they may well. Yet there are too many great protest causes out there. Waiting to see which ones snowball is unimpeachable mediaing.
Also, check out MSNBC's photo gallery of Occupy Wall Street protesters here.