Dur­ing the Egyp­tian insur­rec­tion, the Mubarak régime tried to counter the mul­ti­tudes on Tahrir Square by avoid­ing men­tion­ing them on the state-​run TV. The so-​called lib­eral media in the United States high­lighted that this author­it­arian media black­out brought to light the free­dom of expres­sion we enjoy in “the West.” This is why the US media silen­cing of over a week of protests on Wall Street reminds us that New York City and Cairo, des­pite the dif­fer­ent scale and tone of the unrest, are not that dif­fer­ent from each other after all. Fur­ther, the power of the media in the United States to silence polit­ical events that may dis­rupt the status quo is com­par­at­ively vaster and prob­ably more wide­spread and effect­ive. And in the nation that defines itself as the land of the free, media black­outs are cre­ated not by the state but by that pecu­liar branch of cor­por­ate Amer­ica that, with the full sup­port of the state, profits from the cre­ation of what qual­i­fies as news.

For the past eight days, a remark­able grass­roots move­ment against the cap­it­al­ist loot­ing of the com­mons inspired by sim­ilar protests in Spain, Greece, and Egypt has dis­rup­ted Wall Street, the spa­tial core of the global fin­an­cial sys­tem. A crowd has camped out in pub­lic spaces, sta­ging protests, and organ­iz­ing assem­blies to debate the social dev­ast­a­tion cre­ated by the bankers based in the sur­round­ing build­ings. From day one, the black­out of the protests in the US media was eerie. Whereas a hand­ful of wacky Tea Party act­iv­ists always receives wide­spread cov­er­age, “occupy Wall Street” was treated by all major cor­por­ate media out­lets as a non-​event (with a few excep­tions that high­lighted the media black­out, like Keith Olber­mann). On Fri­day, Septem­ber 23, as the protests entered their first week, The New York Times con­firmed where its pri­or­it­ies are in the pro­duc­tion of what is (and what is not) news­worthy by run­ning on its front page an art­icle about the wor­ri­some rise in the theft of pigs in rural Illinois.

On Sat­urday, Septem­ber 24, The New York Time was finally forced to partly lift its Pravda-​esque silence. But this only happened because pro­test­ers became dan­ger­ously mobile and began march­ing uptown spread­ing their noisy anti-​capitalist mes­sage and were arres­ted by the dozens for no other reason than protest­ing. The art­icle trivi­al­izes the protest as a quasi-​hippie gath­er­ing led by “noble” but con­fused and mis­in­formed youths who “say” that the fin­an­cial sys­tem “favors the rich and power­ful over ordin­ary cit­izens.” The abrupt and unam­bigu­ously hos­tile cov­er­age reflects the shift from what Michel-​Ralph Trouil­lot called a for­mula of eras­ure to a for­mula of banal­iz­a­tion, which are both oper­a­tions of silen­cing. The silen­cing is the man­date by cor­por­ate Amer­ica to treat poten­tially threat­en­ing polit­ical move­ments as non-​events.

In other entries, I ana­lyzed how the spa­tial spread of the insur­rec­tions of North Africa and the Middle fol­lowed a pro­cess of res­on­ance expan­sion, through which thou­sands of people com­ing together on the streets cre­ated polit­ic­ally affect­ive mes­sages that res­on­ated with count­less other bod­ies else­where, often through altern­at­ive media that evaded state cen­sor­ship. This is why counter-​revolutionary efforts in those coun­tries sought to con­tain the expan­sion of those insur­gent res­on­ances by all pos­sible means, includ­ing viol­ence, cen­sor­ship, and the trans­form­a­tion of the offi­cial media into a machinery set out to pre­vent the spa­tial expan­sion of those res­on­ances. In the United States today, more so than in any other coun­try on the planet, the polit­ical machiner­ies that work tire­lessly to pre­vent anti-​corporate res­on­ances from expand­ing are owned by the same cor­por­ate forces that profit from the dev­ast­a­tion that is wreak­ing North Amer­ica and Europe. As Michael Par­enti force­fully put in the film The Panama Decep­tion, “The media is not asso­ci­ated with or allied with cor­por­ate Amer­ica. The media is cor­por­ate America.”

As in Egypt or Tunisia, the protests in New York are spread­ing and grow­ing through altern­at­ive media and the inter­net. But this expan­sion has so far been largely con­tained by the media black­out. Maybe it is time for the pro­test­ers in NY to fol­low the lead of pro­test­ers else­where in the world and chal­lenge the black­out not only by call­ing and email­ing news sta­tions (as many are doing) but also by protest­ing at the gates of those station’s build­ings. In Egypt, the mul­ti­tudes in Cairo eroded the cen­sor­ship of the state-​run TV by simply sur­round­ing its main build­ing and demand­ing to be heard. Hours before Mubarak fell, these mul­ti­tudes forced those inside the TV sta­tion to turn their cam­eras onto the streets and change the tone of the cov­er­age. The same happened in Cara­cas, Venezuela, on April 13, 2002, when mil­lions of people took to the streets to oppose the US-​sponsored coup against Hugo Chávez. As protests raged all over Venezuela, the private TV sta­tions that were involved in the coup and con­trolled all air­waves played movies and soap operas. This Orwellian eras­ure of the insur­rec­tion by the cor­por­ate media only came to an end when thou­sands of protest­ors sur­roun­ded the sta­tions demand­ing that their oppos­i­tion to the coup be shown on TV. Indeed, The Revolu­tion Will Not be Tele­vised, as Gill Scott-​Heron wrote in the 1970s. Except that we should prob­ably change the tense of the verb in this now fam­ous phrase, for this is not a silen­cing that will hap­pen some­time in a dis­tant and abstract future but is hap­pen­ing right now, in the year of the begin­ning of the glob­al­ized insur­rec­tions against the imper­ial order of things.

The pop­u­lar insur­rec­tions in Cairo and Cara­cas remind us that the seem­ingly deter­rit­ori­al­ized power of media con­glom­er­ates is ulti­mately groun­ded in the actual spaces where a select group of indi­vidu­als man­u­fac­ture and dis­sem­in­ate “news.” And those events reveal that under con­di­tions of media cen­sor­ship it is ulti­mately in those spaces that these act­ors are polit­ic­ally most vul­ner­able and, in the US, most sens­it­ive to their pub­lic image as sources of news. Any such protest at the gates of The New York Times will no doubt trig­ger, aside from aggress­ive tac­tics by the NYPD, pre­dict­able accus­a­tions that it involves “fas­cist thugs” try­ing to curb the media’s “free­dom of expres­sion.” But the past eight days in New York have made appar­ent that this is just the free­dom of cor­por­ate Amer­ica to shut down the grow­ing grass­roots oppos­i­tion to its ongo­ing loot­ing of pub­lic wealth.

From Space and Politics