All the complaining by pundits and the media about the Occupy Wall Street (and the rest of America while we're at it) movement’s failure to articulate a list of demands has had me in a bit of a quandary, too. It does seem that a nascent political movement needs to have a focal point to rally around, you can’t marshal a popular movement toward a thousand points of light.
But the list of grievances that OWS is in the process of collating, and the list seems long and diffuse if you read the protesters' signage, can perhaps be best seen as a list of all the stories the media has failed to report adequately for a decade or more now. So while Wall Street provides a plenty big target and rallying point, to a certain extent the task of the protests in this phase is to challenge the media version of events, not just in the case of the Great Wall Street Swindle, but all major events of the past decades, 9/11, tax policy and government, politics, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we’ve seen the media coalesce into larger and more profit-driven entities, with the focus of reporting drifting away from human interest and the public need to know toward the corporate interest.
To be fair, it must be said that the media are not entirely at fault in the demise of journalism as an arbiter of truth and recorder of history. Certainly much of what people have been decrying at OWS rallies has been reported on, in some cases extensively and fairly, by various media outlets and individual reporters. But the media as a whole have succumbed to a number of conveniences that have made journalism more about what people say about events and less about the events themselves. It's so much simpler to report what "important" people are saying about events than to explain what has actually happened. And the public is complicit in allowing this drift away from fact. We have come to prefer fungible facts and glamorous gossip, which the stripped down profit-minded media are only too happy to provide. A diligent public would demand a lot more of its media, and would respond with outrage to a story as potent and so blatantly offensive as the story of Wall Street megalomaniacs plundering the world economy.
These protests can be seen as an effort to wrest our recent history from the grasp of corporate journalism, an effort to establish a clear fact-oriented, human-based version of what has happened and to give the public a chance to respond to the real story. With outrage. Not just for the financial delinquencies of the Wall Street banksters, as if that weren’t enough, but for a long list of misdemeanors that have weakened this country and corrupted the institutions, including the media, that once helped keep us focused on what is true and what is important.
This first phase of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement can be seen as an attempt to rewrite history, to demonstrate by a show of hands (and feet in the street) that the corporate media version of recent American history is wrong. Once a new history, which includes the human costs of the corporate takeover of the American (and global) soul, has been written, then a list of demands and an action plan can be expected.