Passive support for Occupy Wall Street
As a reminder, passive support for a movement is about how many people agree with a movement’s values and goals - but aren’t taking sustained action to help push the movement forward.
When we look for passive support, we are essentially trying to measure how a movement is changing public opinion – a complicated goal, so click through to learn more about how that can be done.
Not only do we want to figure out what individuals in the public audience think of a movement, we include media coverage (tone, frequency, frameworks used, etc.) in our consideration of how much passive support there is.
Here are some examples of measures of passive support for the Occupy Wall Street movement:
Polling on OWS
Public opinion polling over the time period of the Occupy Wall Street movement showed that American’s opinions of “Big Business,” wealth distribution, and other topics have been relatively stable over the past few decades / did not show immediate responsiveness to the Occupy movement. For example, in a table of poll results on whether upper-income people pay just enough, too little, or too much in taxes – numbers are relatively unchanged from 1992 to 2017.
Public opinion polling may not be the best metric to reflect on Occupy Wall St. There is polling that exists on the topic of the protests themselves, but successful movements often garner negative reactions to their actual tactics while contributing to shifting folks towards their side of the issue in the longer term. See Pew December 2011 poll:
Since Occupy had a range of messages and demands and since its core escalation only lasted around 3 months (September to November 2011 in Zuccotti Park), its impact on issues on a one-by-one basis may not be best captured in changes in responses to public opinion polling. However, note the following progression.
Despite the public’s disapproval for Occupy tactics, a combination of polls from different sources over the course of a few months shows that support for the issues raised was actually rising over the course of Occupy’s peak (sources for October and December):
This set of polls is a great example of how polarization works to move people across the spectrum of support. The main indicator of polarization is that the amount of people in the “neutral” category is steadily declining and people are forced by the attention on the movement to ‘choose a side.’ Hence, both the percentage of people who “agree” or “disagree” with Occupy’s aims grows – but since both the amount of growth is bigger on the “agree” side and since the end total of “agreement” is higher it’s relatively safe to call this “positive polarization” (attracting more people to supporting the issue).
Media coverage of OWS
Key facts:
OWS became the 4th biggest storyline in economic coverage of 2011 (PEJ)
Represented 5% of total economic coverage in 2011
Inspired by Arab Spring as well as Occupy, TIME named “The Protester” person of the year in 2011 (TIME)
Increase in coverage after arrests:
Several studies confirmed that media coverage of the Occupy Wall St encampment increased in the wake of police crackdowns – “A series of police crackdowns resulted in the biggest week of Occupy Wall Street media coverage since the protests began two months ago,” PEJ wrote in November 2011.
NPR wrote that the initial rise in Occupy coverage began after an escalation by police:
“Even early sympathetic columns in The New York Times _and the Boston Globe_ were largely dismissive. It was covered mostly as a local nuisance in the nation's financial center until Sept. 24, when New York City police forcibly penned in a small knot of protesters. There, a senior official sprayed several shouting but stationary women in the face with pepper spray. The attack was captured on video and forced the NYPD to backpedal. It drew the media's attention: Coverage spiked after that, and again after police arrested 700 demonstrators for attempting to march across the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Another study by DeLuca, Lawson, and Sun (2012): “There was not extensive television news coverage until 2 October, the day after 700 protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge.” (source - Occupy Wall Street on the Public Screens of Social Media: The Many Framings of the Birth of a Protest Movement)
FiveThirtyEight also tracked news coverage after police escalations [see article for methodology]:
538 commentary:
“There is no easy way to know how much coverage of the protests would have increased in the absence of these confrontations with the police. Nor, for that matter, is it possible to know how much they contributed to the size of the protests themselves, which seem to be growing.
Still, the volume of news coverage has tended to grow in a punctuated way rather than a smooth and linear fashion, having increased after each confrontation with the police. Equally noteworthy, though, is that coverage has remained at something of a new equilibrium after each of the incidents, rather than falling back to its previous levels, something which may speak to the persistence of the protesters.”
So, as described, the two main protest events that became trigger events (drastically increasing coverage) were these:
Trigger event #1 (left) – October 1 (2011): 700+ marchers arrested on Brooklyn Bridge
Trigger event #2 (right) –October 5 (2011): 10k march from Foley Square to Zuccotti. 200+ arrested after clash with police at night.
Media framing
Other research has shown that Occupy substantially impacted the media conversation by bringing “income inequality” as a topic onto the radar. The below graph from a report by Ruth Milkman, Stephanie Luce, and Penny Lewis shows news mentions of “income inequality” from January 2011 - November 2012:
The graph both shows that news mentions of “income inequality” spiked during the Occupy main encampment period from September to November 2011 but also receded to levels that were higher than the levels preceding the movement.
Author Ruth Milkman noted an understanding of this change in her report through interviews with activists:
“Many of the activists we interviewed marveled at the extent to which inequality became increasingly central in national political discourse thanks to Occupy. As Jonathan Smucker put it, ‘Its success to me is in changing the national narrative, naming the huge elephant in the room: economic inequality and a political system that’s rigged to serve the few at the cost of the many. In a very short time this became the new common sense. The character of news stories and the national conversation just changed. It’s not that the conservative narrative went away, but it lost a lot of credibility and stopped being the driving force.’”
In a later update in 2014, Milkman wrote:
“Joining most observers,we noted that Occupy's impact was most easily traced in the extent to which it had shifted the discourse in the United States."Income inequality" was suddenly in the headlines. We included a graph that showed how frequently the phrase was invoked by the media pre-, during, and post-Occupy. We found that news mentions of "income inequality" rose dramatically with the outset of Occupy, and in the aftermath remained substantially higher through the end of 2012(up about a third from pre-Occupy levels).
I ran the numbers again this week, and I have to admit I was surprised by the results.
As we'd seen before, in the year after Occupy's peak, the numbers stayed higher: 30-50 percent of the pre-Occupy discussion. But beginning in the fall of 2013, the numbers reached Occupy levels again, and this time rising to over 2,000 mentions of the phrase "income inequality" in December 2013 - over 50 percent more than Occupy's peak.
Of course, I shouldn't have been surprised to see this rise. The occupations have gone away, but neither the crisis nor the resistance has disappeared. Low-wage and precarious workers are at the forefront of the fights today, and they are keeping inequality in the spotlight.”
Another study confirms with headlines from prominent news outlets that this perception that Occupy was elevating income inequality specifically was shared:
“Politico’s Ben Smith declared that ‘‘Occupy Wall Street is Winning’’ (Smith, 2011). Nobel laureate andNew York Timescolumnist Paul Krugman noted after the first weeks of OWS, ‘‘Inequality is back in the news, thanks largely to Occupy Wall Street’’ (Krugman, 2011).Businessweekacknowledged, ‘‘The protest against income inequality that has taken over a park near Wall Street and public squares around the world is also occupying the U.S. political debate’’ (Deprez & Dodge, 2011). Even Matthew Continetti, opinion editor of the conservativeWeekly Standard, admitted, ‘‘Over the last few weeks the ground of American politics has shifted to the left . . . . The Congressional Budget Office then released a report highlighting increased income inequality and seeming to prove Occupy Wall Street’s claim that the top 1 percent of Americans might as well live in a different country (Continetti, 2011).”
A 2014 study by the FiveThirtyEight team found that mentions of “inequality” (not specifically “income inequality”) rose starting around the Occupy protests, on both MSNBC and Fox (not so much CNN):
Context for the change:
“In 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president and the global economy teetered near collapse, the word “inequality” was used just 14 times on the liberal-leaning cable network MSNBC. So far in 2014, which is barely more than a third over, the word has been said 647 times on the network.
These results are based on a LexisNexis search of transcripts of MSNBC’s original news programming (in other words, not the prison dramas shown on weekends). Each instance of the term “inequality” is counted separately — so, if it is used 29 times on the same program (as it was on one episode of Melissa Harris-Perry’s show), it counts 29 times.
How substantial is 647 mentions of “inequality” in the context of MSNBC’s programming budget? LexisNexis records about 250,000 words’ worth of MSNBC transcripts each week, and there are about 6,000 words spoken per hour of programming (I calculated this as 150 words per minute times 40 minutes of noncommercial time per hour). That implies that “inequality” is said 0.87 times per hour of original programming on MSNBC. By comparison, it was used only 0.006 times per hour in 2008.
A good amount of the increase came in2011, the year of the Occupy Wall Street protests, when MSNBC used “inequality” about five times more often than it did in 2010.But the term’s frequency has continued to increase since then. This year, as the economist Thomas Piketty’s treatise on inequality has topped best-seller lists, the word is on pace to be used more than twice as often on MSNBC as it was in 2013.”
Jonathan Matthew Smucker on the framing impacts of Occupy:
“Its success to me is in changing the national narrative, naming the huge elephant in the room: economic inequality and a political system that’s rigged to serve the few at the cost of the many.
In a very short time, this became the new common sense. The character of news stories and the national conversation just changed. It’s not that the conservative narrative went away, but it lost a lot of credibility and stopped being the driving force."