Revenge of the Gekkos

By David Simmons

The 1980s Charlie Sheen film Wall Street opens with a panorama shot of Manhattan, dominated by the twin towers of the World Trade Center, symbols of the might of the US financial industry. Fourteen years after the film's release, the towers lay in ruins, but Wall Street itself was more powerful than ever, its excesses abetted by deregulation; Charlie Sheen was establishing his reputation as a premier comedy actor on Spin City, a TV show about New York City government.

Another 10 years have passed, and Ground Zero is still basically a hole in the ground; Charlie Sheen is ... well, let's not go there. Much more interesting is what's going on in Wall Street itself: protests against a system that has systematically shifted America's wealth to the top while ordinary working people lose their jobs and homes. Interesting, that is, to everyone but the US "mainstream media".

Or so goes the story. But who exactly are the "mainstream media"? Do they even exist any more? Can such an entity exist in today's interconnected world?

The growing crowds of protesters in Wall Street see the lack of coverage as a conspiracy – after all, the major media are all owned by the same corporations whose survival depends on the same system the protesters want to bring down, nostalgic for an alternative system that, they believe, once existed in the dim past and worked for the majority, not just a tiny elite.

In fact, however, news-coverage decisions are still made in newsrooms by editors and to some extent reporters; direct interference by corporate owners is extremely rare, and is heavily resisted when it is attempted. Corporations control the news indirectly, by appointing senior editors who agree with them, and paying them lots of money not to stray too far. Even so, there remains a lot of autonomy in news organizations that are not openly partisan such as Fox News.

So why aren't CNN, The New York Times etc covering the Wall Street "occupation"? For the same reason they aren't covering the bake sale at the senior citizens' centre down the road from your place: They don't consider it news.

"News judgment" is a difficult concept to define, and even more difficult to explain. Sometimes a story gets covered simply because it affects a reporter's family or friends. Homelessness and unemployment are under-reported largely because they are uninteresting to reporters, who themselves have homes (for the time being) and jobs. After they lose their jobs (and their homes), they of course are no longer reporters, and couldn't cover the story if they wanted to – except, of course, via the Internet, which has replaced the traditional newspapers and to some extent TV news departments as the real "mainstream". But Internet coverage is scattergun, undisciplined and unreliable, and its influence minimal.

The fact is, the Wall Street "occupation" is not a big story, at least not yet. Protests happen all the time in the US, and only become "news" when there is some interesting event attached to them, such as police brutality. Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna of the New York Police Department obligingly added that element with his liberal use of pepper spray on non-violent protesters, but as usual the real story of police involvement is either not reported at all or obfuscated by spin on both sides. There have been reports that the cop rank and file quietly support the protesters, as they too have been victimized by the looting of their pension plans and the bursting of the Wall Street–fuelled housing bubble that was at the root of the US economic meltdown.

Inside the plush offices of Wall Street itself (or actually Midtown Manhattan, where I understand most of the big banks moved their headquarters to some time ago), nothing has changed. As he did in 1987, Gordon Gekko still rules with his mantra "greed is good". Americans continue to tolerate the status quo even as their pensions are ravaged, their kids can't afford higher education, and decent jobs are shipped overseas. This has been going on for decades, death by a thousand cuts. But they're not marching in the streets in droves; on the contrary, they're voting for the Tea Party.

Meanwhile on the opposite shores of the two oceans America straddles, the real news stories are unfolding. Europe is in a much faster meltdown than the US. The euro experiment has failed, with Greece in near-anarchy as its government flails around with "austerity" measures that will benefit no one but the French banks that financed the largesse that bankrupted Athens. The people won't wear it, and there is talk of revolution or, probably more likely, another military coup. However the Greek tragedy plays out, the fears of "contagion" are real, with the far larger economy of Italy next in line, and the trembling not only in the European central banks but the International Monetary Fund itself is palpable.

Meanwhile, the bemused Chinese bide their time. Sitting on vast international reserves, the Communist government stands ready to rescue the foundering capitalist system. The result will be an even more dramatic shift of power than we have already seen from West to East.

It will be the first time in history that a system that makes no pretence about the fact that it is a dictatorship takes over the global economy from a system that pretends to be democratic. Way back in 1987, Gordon Gekko saw democracy as a sham, a system of tossing out a few scraps to the great unwashed so they would keep the wealth engines churning. But like all kleptocracies, Wall Street and its European clones found greed a little too good, and began to kill the goose that laid their golden eggs.

At least one thing will be certain after China rules the world: There will be no "mainstream media" to fret about.