In 2003, as the invasion of Iraq became increasingly certain, hundreds of thousands of people around the world, if not millions, marched in protest. It seemed pretty clear what the message was, didn't it? Or did it? If I were to show you a sampling of the signs I saw as I also marched, you would definitely rethink the idea that the message was clear. "No Blood for Oil". "Impeach Bush". "Fire Rumsfeld" (hey, that one actually did eventually happen!). Some were kind of clever "Weapons of Mass Distraction".
I would suggest then, that it was more the temporal association of the protests with the invasion than anything else that seemed to distill the message, muddy and jumbled as it was in reality. The marches were also limited in time - they happened one day and then they were over (at least the big ones). This made it very easy for the media to gloss them over and in fact the actual coverage of what were some of the largest protest marches in many decades was essentially non-existent. Things akin to Britney Spear's latest escapade received much greater attention.
If you took the invasion away somehow (God bless you), a real objective assessment of the marchers might have been closer to "these are for the most part just a bunch of unorganized kooks".
This is exactly what has the mainstream media currently so discombobulated about the OWS movement. They can't make heads nor tails of it because the movement isn't giving them the story, they actually have to dig for it. And they can't dismiss it in time, because it isn't going away in time, this is not a one day event; it continues to grow instead of wane. The media needs a story to latch onto so they don't have to think too much. But what's the story? They're all unemployed layabouts? Fail. They're actually funded by rich liberals? Fail. The movement is growing? OK now somebody quick please tell us why!
Has anyone actually, for example, polled the participants? I have only heard of one anecdotal poll by a reporter who then proceeded to dismiss his own results because he went in with a preconceived notion of what the results would be and he apparently didn't like it so he just reported his preconceived notion, damn the evidence! And how many actual participants have you seen on the news shows talking about it at any length? I've seen exactly one, and not really at any length, and, most likely because he was pretty articulate and clear, I haven't seen him since. The other problem for the mass media is of course that they appear to be a focus of the "area of concern" which, and I base this on my own observations, can be best described as the "moneyed concerns".
It doesn't take a particularly observant person to notice that our country is in pretty bad shape, that we have truly lost our way. You can take almost any metric - from access to healthcare to wealth disparity to health indicators to the state of our infrastructure to military spending to foreign aid spending. You name it, there isn't a single major indicator that I can think of that really throws a favorable light on our country at the moment. If you're wealthy, of course, you're most likely doing fine, perhaps better than ever, actually.
Now one person might blame it on this, and the other that, but I suspect that when you strip all of the blame away (such as blaming things on wealthy people) and get your most craven rantings out, whatever they are, the conversation will naturally gravitate towards some structural problems that very arguably are the true cause of our distress. I can't, nor do I want to, lay out what those structural issues are. I would much rather that we just have the conversation about it right now. We may not produce immediate results, but that is not a failure. If the conversation doesn't happen, of course, there will never be any results.
And this is exactly what this movement is right now. It is the beginning of a conversation. Sorry Mr. Media Person, there is no real message yet and there may never be one, but for your benefit I'm going to suggest an interim message:
Wake up. Hello. Have some coffee. Come join the conversation. After all, you're part of it.