From Truthout: More Abysmal coverage from the New York Times This Time On The Wall Street Protests. Maybe they are just looking for the weapons of mass destruction.

Correcting the Abysmal New York Times Coverage of Occupy Wall Street

Monday 26 September 2011

by: Allison Kilkenny, The Nation | News Analysis

Over the weekend, my inbox exploded with angry messages from people who had just read this New York Times article(though it reads more like an op-ed) about the Occupy Wall Street protest. Ginia Bellafante gives a devastating account of the event’s attendees, depicting them as scatterbrained, sometimes borderline psychotic transients.

Bellafante, who is not a reporter but a critic for the Times, offered a representation of the protesters that is as muddled as the amalgam of activists' motives she presents in the span of the article. She first claims a Joni Mitchell lookalike named Zuni Tikka is a “default ambassador” of the movement. In one of the following paragraphs, she then describes the protest as “leaderless.” Either the people at Zuccotti Park have official leadership or they don’t (they don’t, by the way). So either Tikka is an official spokesperson who warrants first-paragraph favorability, or Bellafante’s own biases persuaded her to put the kooky girl dancing around in her underwear in the spotlight.

... Bellafante reaches a far, far larger readership, and the ones who dismiss protesters always do because their corporate overlords love depicting protesters as flower-waving, stoned-out-of-their-gourds hippies. If you think those are the only people on your side, why get off the couch at all?

... These are the kinds of massive oppositional forces activists find themselves facing these days: an incredibly oppressive police state and a corporate cash monster bearing down on them from the right. Meanwhile, their union support army is either in retreat or preoccupied fighting other battles on other fronts in Wisconsin or Ohio, or one of the other 48 states where anti-union legislation was introduced this year courtesy of ALEC, a front group that serves as proxy for corporate interests.

Instead of bemoaning the fact that protesters haven’t arrived in matching uniforms with a coherent Powerpoint presentation, these are the issues we should be addressing. Of course the majority of Zuccotti Park occupiers are young, brash, and lost. They’d have to be to do something like this, and risk getting hypothermia for the chance to be ignored and belittled by the media. Young people are always the first ones willing to risk comfort and security for the romantic vision of a better tomorrow.

The more serious aspect of the protest—the “scores of arrests” that occurred over the weekend including the arrests of more than 80 people, several of whom the police first penned and then maced—is offered as an aside in Bellafante’s article (she doesn’t mention the macing at all). By the way, none of the young women in the following video are in their underwear.

Complete Story here:  http://www.thenation.com/

For awhile I was a little intimidated going up against the large news gathering divisions of the Ny times, newscorp, GE, Time Warner ... but then I realized they aren't in the news gathering business, they just repeat what they're told, so we really aren't in competition.