Big Journalism has learned that the Occupy Washington DC movement is working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement. Someone has made the emails from the Occupy D.C. email distro public and searchable. The names in the list are a veritable who’s who in media.
Journolist 2.0 includes well known names such as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi who both are actively participating; involvement from other listers such as Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald plus well-known radicals like Noam Chomsky, remains unclear. The list also includes a number of Occupy organizers, such as one of the Occupy Wall Street main organizers Kevin Zeese.
In these emails we see MSNBC’s Ratigan, hawking his book in the footnotes, instructing occupiers on how properly to present their demands and messages while simultaneously appearing on television reporting “objectively” on the story (when he’s not taking part in the protests himself as content.)
The full searchable Occupy DC list is available here. We’ve only begun to discover the full scope of MSM’s involvement and are still combing through the archives after the list was brought to our attention late last night. (If you find something interesting that we have missed, please leave us a note in the comments.)
So how long are we going to pretend that this is a “grassroots” uprising?
And how can the media continue to report on the occupy movement objectively when it’s part of it?
