Everything The Media Told You About Occupy Wall Street Is Wrong

By the time Occupy Wall Street's encampment at Zuccotti Park was cleared by New York City police in November 2011, the media narrative about the movement had calcified into a set of impressions that were, at best, incomplete and, at worst, deliberately misleading.

The most persistent characterization was that the movement lacked demands. "What do they want?" became the dismissive refrain of cable news panels, often posed by people who clearly hadn't read the extensive documentation of concerns about income inequality, campaign finance reform, student debt, and financial sector accountability that Occupy participants produced continuously. The absence of a single legislative demand was treated as incoherence rather than as a deliberate critique of the transactional nature of conventional politics.

The coverage of the demographics was similarly distorted. The stereotype of the Occupy protester as a young, unemployed, college dropout with nothing better to do was a caricature. Surveys of participants found a population that skewed more educated, more employed, and more ideologically diverse than the media shorthand suggested.

The question of effectiveness also deserves revision. The conventional verdict — that Occupy failed because it didn't produce legislation — applies a narrow standard that excludes most forms of political change. What Occupy demonstrably did was shift the language of American political discourse. Before Occupy, mainstream political conversation in the United States centered almost entirely on deficits and government spending. After Occupy, inequality became a central topic in ways it simply hadn't been. The "1 percent/99 percent" framing entered the political bloodstream and hasn't left.

That's not nothing. It may, in fact, be the most durable kind of political achievement: changing what can be said.