Tynan's Anger

Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic

The Also Rans of the 2011 Retrospectives – Part One

Posted on | December 26, 2011 | No Comments

It’s safe to say that 2011 was a more event-heavy year than most in my lifetime. For me personally, it was the probably worst year of my life (beating out 2009, with some competition from 1996-1998), but for a variety of personal, familial and professional reasons that had very little to do with the news. Nonetheless, I’ve been keeping tabs on the news as much as ever (it’s in my wiring at this point), and throughout all the domestic and global upheaval, deaths, disasters, revolutions, crises, celebrations and landmark decisions, there have been some that have caused my feathers to get particularly ruffled, events to which I don’t think think many year-end retrospectives will give proper attention, for the sake of space and time. To that end, I will cover them all here, presented in news-style sections that resemble what you would see in something like the New York Times or the Wii News Channel.

Top Stories:

When America Stopped Being America – Arresting Journalists, Assaulting the Peacefully Assembled

After the raids in Zuccotti Park earlier this year I emailed David Nord, a former professor of mine at Indiana University School of Journalism and a historian of the American press. While he was sure to be academically judicious, he had no recollection of there ever, in the history of the United States, being precedent for arresting journalists without cause. There’s precedent for restricting freedom of speech and limiting the rights of the press, of course, from the Sedition Acts to the lack of a proper Shield Laws today. But for mayors across the country to simply say “arrest first, ask questions later,” and for journalists with police-credentials to be arrested for showing them the credentials that they were issued, suddenly America began to resemble the dictatorships they were simultaneously praising the Arab world of overturning.

The lack of a clear agenda (supposedly, more on that later), the class disparities that made Occupy Wall Street less sympathetic for a large part of the country, and the bipartisan hatred of hippies that seemingly transcends anyone who was actually alive to experience the effects of ’60s,  made the cause unable to gain universal support even among those who agreed with its purpose. The media hesitated to beyond rational levels to see if the protests would go too far or not far enough. As it turns out, mayors across the country organized to arrest, pepper spray, assault, and intimidate anyone who demonstrated their right to peacefully assembly, all of whom cited sanitation issues that somehow magically appeared on the same night. This group included journalists from just about every level.

What makes this story so infuriating is that no one in the media, even the watchdogs, thought the arrest of journalists was a priority. Some on the left were upset by Jon Stewart and NBC News mixed-at-best coverage of the protest, but the fact that David Carr, Ezra Klein, or the staff at On The Media, who rather than focus on the fundamental blight to freedom of press the raids signified, decided instead to focus on partisan tactics for the sake of neutrality (and in OTM’s case, perhaps, the fact that they were scared shitless by firings at NPR of anyone remotely associated with the movement).

I’m still not sure if the war of attrition tactics of Occupy Wall Street were the best approach to a clearly problematic set of issues, even if they did get people talking. But whether or not you agreed with OWS, whether or not you saw the point , the arrests and treatment of journalists and non-violent protesters was something that should be unifying Americans against those who ordered the raids.

When The American Left Lost Its Mind – The Internet’s Response To Gabrielle Giffords

I first heard about the assassination attempt of Gabrielle Giffords from the Facebook update of a friend of mine, who decided to phrase it as “The Tea Party has claimed its first victim.” This was within minutes of the news first hitting the wire, and before 30 minutes, friends across my predominantly leftist Facebook News Feed were railing against the right wing, blaming them for inciting violence, showing tangential links to GOP campaigns that they thought indicted the right wing for Giffords death. Soon, we were to learn that Giffords’ death was, in fact, exaggerated, and that the gunman who committed the crime was not so much responding to calls from Republican leaders as he was the grammar Nazi voices in his head.

If the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords has fallen in the backburner in a year of remarkable stories, it’s for noble purposes—her incredible recovery, respect for her right to privacy, and, ultimately, the unwillingness to fit a senseless act of violence into an ideological framework. What scared me about this story was that the people who were going to turn random acts of crazy into a partisan narrative were young, college educated and liberal, the same kids who were outraged when their parents tried to blame South Park and Marilyn Manson for Columbine. If Occupy Wall Street shows how new media’s scattered landscape can diminish the important takeaways on the macro level, Giffords showed how the same landscape can lead one point of view to its most knee-jerk extreme on the micro level.

Alabama Gets Hit Hard

Since most media outlets are based in NYC, Hurricane Irene got a lot of coverage for a little damage. The fact that there had been a few days before also amplified the media’s coverage. The net damage to my apartment, which was in the evacuation zone, was a cereal box that fell on its side during the earthquake (or which I called, national “Oh poor you day” in Japan.) But if you want to cite a textbook case of New York/east coast bias in the news, don’t look at anything political, look at the virtual ignorance that came after about a week or so of the most devastating tornado outbreak in American history. 322 deaths, 229 of which were in Alabama, over thousands of injuries, casuing over billions of dollars in damages to one of the poorest states in the Union (if the tornado of this magnitude hat hit NYC, there wouldn’t be an economy to complain about).

Given the circles I run in, the people who are most pro-secession are northern liberals with a de facto disgust towards the deep South (about as ignorant and hateful as the hateful ignorance they claim is the source of their disgust). The Alabama tornados, the worst natural disater in America since Katrina, has set Alabama back decades in development, something neither Nancy Pelosi nor Richard Shelby seems committed to addressing.

What Occupy Wall Street actually stood for.

Overturning Citizens United? Ending private perks for public employees? Universal healthcare? Student Loan relief? These reasonable, best case plans were all on the agenda that any journalist could find for Occupy Wall Street. Lacking any method of implementing those policies, pending, as one of my friend suggested, going Road Warrior on Congress and K Street, the motivations of Occupy Wall St remained, but the press, just as powerless to fix the problems as the protesters (and in some cases in the pockets of those who would actually be hurt by doing the right thing), did nothing to even report the demands, by the by perpetuating the myth of an unclear agenda. For the record, here it is: http://www.the99declaration.org/read-the-99-declaration/

Occupy Wall Street’s Agenda is big, impractical, and nearly impossible to implement. But it does exist.

occupy-wall-street-demands-cartoon

Part Two Tomorrow.

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