Saturday 15 October 2011

Occupy Norwich!





Today I went into the city to witness, and be a small part of, the Occupy Norwich campaign. It is a part of the movement that started with the #occupywallstreet campaign which today went global with people gathering in cities large and small to protest what they feel is a system that is skewed towards big business and banks at the expense of ordinary people.

It was a modest turnout in Norwich, but at least there was a turnout. They had signs and everything. People played guitars and sang old protest songs and a few people spoke. It was interesting see democratic discourse in the streets, with some impassioned people demanding that the protest be relocated to City Hall, where they reckoned the enemy cold be found, while others made the argument it was better to be in the city centre, where more people would see the protest.

I was taking photos, of course. I was asked by one protester whether I was from the media. I told him I wasn't, but that I am a writer, and I'd blog about it. He shrugged. Better than nothing, he supposed. But where, he wondered, were the media?

Good question.

We have a daily evening newspaper in Norwich, and this fine city is the where the BBC for the region is based. The BBC building is about a forty second walk from the location of the protest (Haymarket, if you're passing), and the Evening News offices are no more than ten minutes away by leisurely dawdle. I just looked at the Evening News website and their Twitter feed. Their last tweet was yesterday, and there is nothing about the protest on the website. From a news gathering point of view, it's pitiful. But is it worse than that? One of the issues much discussed around the occupy Wall Street Campaign is how little media coverage it has been garnering. You have to go to Twitter or Facebook or YouTube to see it. But if you want to know what's going on in, say, a tea-time television programme about singing and dancing, everything you need to know is there.

Now, I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but one of the functions of the media is salience transfer - the process by which the media set out to influence the public and political agenda with their own agenda. The more a topic is reported in the media, the more important it is perceived to be by people. And the less they report a topic… you get the idea. Is this is what is happening, even here in sleepy Norwich?

The protesters report on Twitter that there will be people in Haymarket all night, and that there will be a get-together tomorrow to discuss where they go from here. If you want to know about it, follow them on https://twitter.com/#!/OccupyNorwich. But don't bother with traditional media,


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