Little bit of politics

It’s a measure of how long I’ve been over here that this clip had me quite shocked - not for the violence but for the criticism.

For the last week protestors have been holding a permanent encampment a few blocks down from Wall Street to protest about, amongst other things, the lack of financial regulation and the bailouts bankers have received. But you wouldn’t know it to watch the news.

There’s been a quiet media blackout over the story. I covered day two of the protest after it appeared Yahoo was blocking emails about it (turned out to be a dodgy spam filter) and noted in it that there had been four times the covered of Charlie Sheen’s latest shenanigans than of the protest. The police attack the clip shows garnered a whole four mentions on Fox (Faux) News that day – imagine what that figure would be if a Tea partier had ben maced on a peaceful demo.

For MSNBC to come out with criticism quite this strong is encouraging and I can only hope some of the other stations break their silence. The protestors may not be very organized (the daily camp policy meetings sound like hell on earth, and it already has set up a social committee) but they raise points which should be heard. This self-censorship over anything left wing in the media has got to stop.