Mainstream Media and the 99%

24 Jan 2012

Over the last month now, thousands people have been protesting on the streets of New York against pay inequality and corporate greed, corporate influence over the government (particularly over public services) among other issues, We are the 99% refers to income inequality in the United States between the top 1%, who control about 40% of the wealth, and the rest of the population.

The original protest began on September 17, 2011, and soon after, similar demonstrations were either ongoing or had been held in 70 major cities. Internationally, other similar protests have modelled themselves after Occupy Wall Street, in over 900 cities worldwide.

These set of protests are still going on at time of writing, over a month since I’ve even heard about them. This could quite possibly one of the biggest non-violent protest in the history of the world, and yet I see very little news coverage on this. Of course the reasoning for this is simple. The people who own and profit from the mass-media don’t want this protest to gather momentum.

However this is not the only case of where the media and failing to do their job effectively. I’ve seen a fair number of reports where they take something technical, usually something to do with the internet or social media and explain it to people getting so much of it wrong. This is mostly likely for the people involved with the report itself not fully understanding what it is they’re trying to explain. You can usually see where they’ve taken a technical online term or kid’s slang and see where they’ve looked it up on wikipedia to find out it’s origins.

Where this concerns me is that mass media today has huge influence on the way people for their political opinions, and if they’re failing to report the facts to us as they actually are, we can only speculate as to other world events which are not being accurately reported or even reported at all.