Why Did NYT Financial Columnist Finally Write About #OccupyWallStreet? The Answer is the Problem!
by The Troubadour, Daily Kos, Oct. 4, 2011
Andrew Ross Sorkin, the Times’ financial columnist who covers Wall Street, didn’t even think to hide why he decided to give #OccupyWallStreet a look. No, he comes right out and shockingly reveals what prompted him:
I had gone down to Zuccotti Park to see the activist movement firsthand after getting a call from the chief executive of a major bank last week, before nearly 700 people were arrested over the weekend during a demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge.“Is this Occupy Wall Street thing a big deal?” the C.E.O. asked me. I didn’t have an answer. “We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this,” he continued, clearly concerned. “Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”
As Glenn Greenwald notes:How interesting that when a CEO “of a major bank” wants to know how threatening these protests are, he doesn’t seek out corporate advisers or dispatch the bank’s investigators, but instead gets the NYT‘s notoriously banker-friendly Wall Street reporter on the phone and assigns him to report back. How equally interesting that if this NYT financial columnist can’t address the concerns and questions of a CEO “of a major bank”, he hops to it to find out what was demanded of him. Sorkin did what he was told, cautiously reporting:
As I wandered around the park, it was clear to me that most bankers probably don’t have to worry about being in imminent personal danger. This didn’t seem like a brutal group — at least not yet.
Nevermind Sorkin’s patronizing column and pseudo-anthropological look at the crazies down in Zuccotti Park.
The problem here is precisely why this protest movement is necessary: our power structures are corrupt, and those power structures include the corporate media that perpetuate what is wrong with this country in the name of access.
That the C.E.O. of a bank partially responsible for the economic enslavement of 99 percent of Americans is able to editorially direct and skew the coverage of #occupywallstreet for one of the nation’s largest (and “liberal” ahem) newspapers says all that needs to be said. No more editorializing needs to be presented. No more explication needs to be offered.
It is simple: much of our mainstream media is complicit in maintaining the devastating stranglehold our country’s most powerful have on everyone else. And the media is complicit so that it can be a part of that power structure, so that journalists can sip chardonnay with and have journalistic access to those who have ruined our country.
We are the 99 percent.
This struggle is necessary.
This struggle must continue.
Martin Huffman
October 19, 2011
“We’re trying to figure out how much we should be worried about all of this,” he continued, clearly concerned. “Is this going to turn into a personal safety problem?”
Why do you fear if you have been above board with the people? You should only be scared if you have been corrupt in your banking practices. I believe with the question that you ask, you are doing nothing more than telling the people you are guilty of corruption.