Occupy Wall Street protests have been growing exponentially since the first demonstrators began filling Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan on September 17.
The reasons are pretty obvious:
* The overreaction of the NYPD to demonstrations marching onto the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1 got the attention of the mainstream news media, which had largely ignored the protests. There’s nothing like some indiscriminately used pepper spray to get the attention of reporters and photographers.
* News coverage grew as the protests spread to Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and other major cities. The New York Times reports that only 2 percent of the media outlets monitored by Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism were covering the protests in the last week of September but that jumped to 7 percent during the first week of October.
* The protests are a reflection of the hopelessness most of us feel about reforming let alone fighting back against the financial institutions that are a de facto shadow government responsible for the ongoing economic downturn and are beginning to show up in polling data. In a Pew poll conducted from October 6 to 9, 17 percent of respondents said they were following news coverage of the protests very closely and an additional 25 percent said they followed the coverage fairly closely.
As cooler weather approaches in the Northeast and Midwest the question becomes whether the protests will have legs.
At this point that hardly matters. Protester organizers, such as they are, have attracted demonstrators and coverage beyond their wildest dreams. And as if on cue, Republican leaders have lip locked with their Wall Street cronies to decry the protesters as “a mob” and accused them of waging class warfare. That makes for good headlines.