Photo: Gilad LotanThe summons to “Occupy Wall Street” first issued from a little magazine called Adbusters that specializes in “culture jamming” and Situationist prankery. So you could say the movement started as a media phenomenon.
But you’d be wrong. The people who have taken the phrase from Adbusters and run with it, such that there are now Occupy offspring across the U.S. and around the world, aren’t playing media games. They’re expressing profound dissent from a global financial system that has failed humanity, and they’re trying to kindle hope in the possibility of peaceful change.
No, Occupy Wall Street didn’t start as a media phenomenon — but it has certainly become one. Where once it was ignored by the press, today it’s being amplified by the media and processed by our manic news cycle. Hey, look — the backlash has already begun!
Here at Grist, we don’t want to pile on and duplicate what you can already find out there in media-land. We want to acknowledge the energy and potential of this movement without hyping it. Where connections exist between these still-evolving protests and the green issues that have always animated Grist, we aim to chronicle them. If conflicts emerge, we’ll explore them too.
We’ve already got coverage in the works that you’ll be seeing. Before we get much deeper into it, though, we could really use your input. One of my goals as editor is to open Grist up to more of a conversation with you. There are bigger changes we can and will make to enable that — but in the meantime, the comments still work just fine.
So take a minute and tell us how you’d like to see us cover Occupy Wall Street. What do you want to know about it and what can we find out for you? What questions are the rest of the media not asking that you want to see us pursue?
Nobody knows yet whether Occupy Wall Street will turn out to be the Big Movement of our era, or just one more small step toward a saner, smarter future. Either way, we’ll be there with you to help make sense of it.
