THE PRESENT-DAY MEDIA BLOWHARD REFUSES TO DIE

Dahlia Lithwick's message is a bit muddled here, but I have to say I disagree with the main thrust of what she's saying (even though I wish she were right):

I confess to being driven insane this past month by the spectacle of television pundits professing to be baffled by the meaning of Occupy Wall Street. Good grief. Isn’t the ability to read still a job requirement for a career in journalism? ... I feel it's time to explain something: Occupy Wall Street may not have laid out all of its demands in a perfectly cogent one-sentence bumper sticker for you, Mr. Pundit, but it knows precisely what it doesn't want. It doesn't want you....

Occupy Wall Street is not a movement without a message. It's a movement that has wisely shunned the one-note, pre-chewed, simple-minded messaging required for cable television as it now exists. It's a movement that feels no need to explain anything to the powers that be....

The mainstream media thrives on simple solutions. It has no idea whatsoever of how to report on a story that isn't about easy fixes so much as it is about anguished human frustration and fear....

It must be painful for the pundits at Fox News. The more they demand that OWS explain itself in simple, Fox-like terms, the more cheerfully they are ignored by the occupiers around the country....

Mark your calendars: The corporate media died when it announced it was too sophisticated to understand simple declarative sentences. While the mainstream media expresses puzzlement and fear at these incomprehensible "protesters" with their oddly well-worded "signs," the rest of us see our own concerns reflected back at us and understand perfectly....

By refusing to take a ragtag, complicated, and leaderless movement seriously, the mainstream media has succeeded only in ensuring its own irrelevance....

Something's going on and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

Well, It's exhilarating to imagine that Mr. Jones is doomed. It's exhilarating to imagine that the media as we know it becoming irrelevant. But we're about to have elections pitting an unabashedly corporatist, pro-Wall Street party against a party that's only slightly less so. The presidential and congressional winners in these elections will, if they choose, actually be able to do something about the issues the Occupy movement talks about -- and, so far, little or nothing Occupy has done has affected how those elections are going to proceed. Oh, sure, President Obama is making Occupy-esque noises (though he did the same in '08), and Elizabeth Warren is expressing her support. But that's about it. Meanwhile, we're having budget negotiations that are proceeding as if the Occupy movement doesn't exist. The press isn't irrelevant, or in danger of becoming so. The press is still focused on what existed before Occupy, and what existed before Occupy still rules our lives.

Yes, Occupy has changed the subject for a lot of people in Main Street America, and has become nettlesome in D.C. Occupy has begun the work of changing things in America.

But the representatives of the status quo are still strong. Occupy has only slightly bruised them so far. And to the extent that it's gotten its message out, it's gotten the message out through the media. (Most Americans have never been to an Occupy encampment.) And polls showing continued confusion about Occupy's message on the part of a large percentage of America suggest either that Occupy isn't communicating well or the obtuseness and obfuscation in the press is working.

The kids are all right. But they haven't upended the system yet. And whether or not they're really acting as if the mainstream press is irrelevant (I don't agree that they are), they may have to come to terms with the press, because it really isn't going away.