A couple of weeks ago I and judging from Twitter almost everybody I knew read Quinn Norton’s Eulogy for #Occupy. Her coverage for Wired and her twitter stream had already broadcast an almost minute to minute beat of events in the movement. That account finally culminated in this retelling of the camps and the evictions crowned with a tally of the movements hopes and achievements. It is one of the journalistic highlights of 2012.
Oddly such a comprehensive account has not been available for Europe. We have had camps near the financial districts too, not to mention a massive amount of political conflict in the Mediterranean countries. All these things are tied up in the monstrous Union we have wrought to hold each other in a technocratic stranglehold. We are interrelated, however difficult it may be to tell from the national coverage alone.
Our working theory was that most European journalists don’t have the stones to endure what Norton has gone through, to really be ‘in, but not of, Occupy’, to cover something beyond the confines of the nine-to-five job. To be sure I checked with her:
@alper mainly the guardian. i never found anything for the continent. 🙁
— Quinn Norton (@quinnnorton) January 3, 2013
This means that not one journalist conversant in English/German/French/Spanish on this continent figured out that there may have been a story here worth pursuing? That not one newsroom freed up the resources necessary for somebody to cover this? If that is the case, then may all our newspapers shrivel up and turn to dust because there is nothing worth saving here.
Update: The Times shows their most popular articles of 2012 and journalism isn’t anywhere to be found.