Occupy Wall Street The Media is the Message

The Invisible 99%: Sunday Morning Talk Shows Ignore Occupy Wall Street

PoliticsUSA October 2, 2011

By Jason Easley

The five Sunday morning talk shows on CBS, Fox, CNN, NBC, and ABC devoted zero segments with zero guests to Occupy Wall Street today. To the media inside the Beltway, the 99% do not exist.

A day after over 700 protesters were arrested during a march over the Brooklyn Bridge, the five network Sunday morning news shows virtually ignored the story. The only program that the arrests were even mentioned on was ABC’s This Week, “More than 700 demonstrators protesting corporate greed, among other issues, were arrested last night on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. The grassroots movement has swamped Wall Street for more than two weeks now.”

What was more important than thousands of Americans taking to the street to protest greed and corruption?

CNN’s State of the Union spent their time allowing Dick and Liz Cheney to rewrite the history of both 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. Fox News and This Week were hyping up the latest corporate media creation, the revived presidential candidacy of Herman Cain. The media created the rebirth of Cain story after the candidate won a non-binding Florida straw poll, which became a story after the corporate media decided that the meaningless poll did in fact, mean something.

The other media generated story is the speculation over a potential Chris Christie 2012 presidential campaign. All the talk shows spent some time talking about Christie even though he isn’t even running. CBS’ Face The Nation trotted out John McCain to talk about Chris Christie, Libya, and DADT, and Meet The Press gave us a couple of governors and a roundtable discussing the 2012 election.

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