Child Prodigy At DC Paper Bravely (Cautiously) Mentions Occupy Wall St.

 
 Middle-aged yuppie child Ezra Klein is exactly the sort of youth welcomed at the dyingWashington Post.Permanently cautious and nervously polite, quick to distance himself from ancient youthful indiscretion of a couple of years ago, inherently middle of the road and steeped in the meaningless bullshit policy/punditry circle jerk of the era, Klein can be counted on to write in that special waynobody really uses to communicate, because it's writing that is only written to please his elders at think tanks and in the Kaplan/WaPo board room. "Look at the little feller," you might hear Richard Cohen mumbling to a wastebasket. "Why, he's not so different from me, in the 1960s, when I was no doubt on the meekly impotent side of everything happening around me." And now Ezra Klein has bravely (cautiously) made it clear that he very vaguely supports theconceptof the masses being upset about something, even if they haven't FedExed their position papers and enclosures via the proper channels. The kids are all right!

It’s not the arrests that convinced me that “Occupy Wall Street” was worth covering seriously.

Wellwhatthen, what was it? What shuddering insight finally convinced the likes of EZRA KLEIN that something could finally be covered "seriously"?

Nor was it their press strategy, which largely consisted of tweeting journalists to cover a small protest that couldn’t say what, exactly, it hoped to achieve.

Channels and decorum, folks, it's all about the proper media contact strategy using the proper channels and decorum. Mess that up, and you've messed up the daily calendar of the very important people not yet laid off by theWashington Post.

It was a Tumblr called, “We Are The 99 Percent,” and all it’s doing is posting grainy pictures of people holding handwritten signs telling their stories, one after the other.

Tumblr? Is that how the youths are getting their porn now, on their Blackberry? Hhmmph, and such grainy pictures! Do they not have access to a top-notch photojournalism department like we do, here at the closed-downWashington Postsuburban bureau?

These are not rants against the system. They’re not anarchist manifestos. They’re not calls for a revolution.

Relax, managing editor of online news! I'm not going to Crazyland! Nothing about guillotines and lining up the motherfuckers against the wall inmycorporate blog! I also apologize for using an exclamation mark, in my mind.

Let’s be clear. This isn’t really the 99 percent. If you’re in the 85th percentile, for instance, your household is making more than $100,000, and you’re probably doing okay. If you’re in the 95th percentile, your household is making more than $150,000.

Translation: "I am paid very well to paste in these statistics from various professional liberal organizations staffed by lifers who compile statistics. Let's be quite clear that these Occupy Wall Street ruffians on the Tumblr do not have their statistics exactly correct."

Fuck this guy. [ Ezra Klein Washington Post blog ]