Here’s a bit more fact checking, this time from fullfact.org. Guardian journalists have been disputing the Telegraph’s claim that only one in ten Occupy London protesters at St. Paul's actually occupied in their tents overnight. In this case, it looks as if nobody has definitively proved or disproved the original assertion. There are clearly a few facts to be nailed down here, to do with the sensitivity of the equipment, the time when it was used, whether tents been occupied for long enough to grow warm and show up on the equipment being used, (depending on how sensitively it was calibrated), etc, etc. Those facts are simply facts, regardless of your point of view.
What interests me here, though, is the way the disputed facts are framed, and how sections of the media feel free to dismiss and marginalise the protesters for doing one thing and for doing the opposite.
I don’t know what the real occupancy rates are in the encampment, but there are two ends of the possibility spectrum.
At one end of the spectrum, if there’s any truth to the Telegraph’s story, people aren’t camped out 24/7, but coming and going, presumably because they’ve got other pressing things in their lives to attend to, such as jobs, study, family, etc. At the other end, maybe there are protesters there all the time, people without such constraints who could conceivably be more-or-less full-time protesters; students with some flexibility to their schedule, perhaps skipping the odd lecture, the jobless, spoiled trustafarians and other family-supported well-off kids who don’t have a job to go to and so on.
It seems to me that some sections of the media have framed the debate so that the protesters can’t win. If they’re not full-time, hard-core protesters, sleeping out night after night, they’re dismissed as lightweights who don’t have the courage of their convictions and their protest is rubbished as a hypocritical publicity stunt without any real commitment behind it. If they are on the street night after night, then they’re dismissed as members of a jobless work-shy rent-a-mob with too much time on their hands, who can only afford to spend their lives protesting because they don’t have anything more productive to do.
Catch-22 lives.*
*If this sounds familiar, just think about all the anti-immigrant stories you've read in the papers over the years. Bloody foreigners, coming over here and stealing our benefits. What, they're working? Bloody foreigners coming over here, stealing our jobs....
What interests me here, though, is the way the disputed facts are framed, and how sections of the media feel free to dismiss and marginalise the protesters for doing one thing and for doing the opposite.
I don’t know what the real occupancy rates are in the encampment, but there are two ends of the possibility spectrum.
At one end of the spectrum, if there’s any truth to the Telegraph’s story, people aren’t camped out 24/7, but coming and going, presumably because they’ve got other pressing things in their lives to attend to, such as jobs, study, family, etc. At the other end, maybe there are protesters there all the time, people without such constraints who could conceivably be more-or-less full-time protesters; students with some flexibility to their schedule, perhaps skipping the odd lecture, the jobless, spoiled trustafarians and other family-supported well-off kids who don’t have a job to go to and so on.
It seems to me that some sections of the media have framed the debate so that the protesters can’t win. If they’re not full-time, hard-core protesters, sleeping out night after night, they’re dismissed as lightweights who don’t have the courage of their convictions and their protest is rubbished as a hypocritical publicity stunt without any real commitment behind it. If they are on the street night after night, then they’re dismissed as members of a jobless work-shy rent-a-mob with too much time on their hands, who can only afford to spend their lives protesting because they don’t have anything more productive to do.
Catch-22 lives.*
*If this sounds familiar, just think about all the anti-immigrant stories you've read in the papers over the years. Bloody foreigners, coming over here and stealing our benefits. What, they're working? Bloody foreigners coming over here, stealing our jobs....
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