U.F.R LANGUES ET CIVILISATIONS Pays anglophones Année Universitaire 2011- 2012

3eme année de Licence d’Anglais Devoir N° 1 UE : L6IAU8

Date de remise du devoir : 26 mars 2012

Nature du devoir :

commentaire

Nom du correcteur :

Mme Veroni-Paccher Lisa

4 à 6 pages maximum. 1 interligne ½, police 12 06-Occupy Wall Street In your presentation, you shall focus on how the media is said to cover the Occupy Wall Street Movement. Pay special attention to the words and expressions used by the authors of the following documents to set specific news frames. A. Tracking the media’s eye on Occupy Wall Street, by David Folkenflik, All Things Considered, October 13, 2011. NPR [Audio Document] B. For a Movement, a Question: What Now? By David Carr, November 20, 2011. The New York Times. C. Share the Wealth, by Glenn McCoy, November 19, 2011. Los Angeles Times. [Cartoon] D. UC Davis Police Officer Lieutenant John Pike and Occupy Wall Street Protesters, UC Davis, November 11, 2011 [picture]

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Tracking the Media’s Eye on Occupy Wall Street –by David Folkenflik. All Things Considered, NPR, October 13, 2011. http://www.npr.org/2011/10/13/141320149/tracking-the-medias-eye-on-occupywall-street 4’25’’ B. For a Movement, a Question: What Now? For a Movement, a Question: What Now? By David Carr, November 20, 2011. The New York Times After last week’s dead-of-night operation in New York to break up the protest site in Zuccotti Park, and similar actions in other cities, it is inevitable that Occupy Wall Street will eventually become more of an idea than a place. So will it continue to keep its hold on the collective media imagination? Probably not, but that does not mean it was much ado about not much. Occupy Wall Street was not a media phenomenon; it was and is a grass-roots combustion that happened to have a lot of cameras pointed at it. Reporters live for spectacle, and for more than two months Occupy Wall Street has provided one at a fixed address. There was the tableau of people living in tents in urban encampments — a powerful symbol in the American historical narrative. There were citizens screaming invective about the rich while being confronted by the police in riot gear, the kind of spontaneous uprising we have not seen in almost half a century. The video footage of their clashes gave the story an urgency that policy-laden discussions of income distribution generally lack. It made for good television and print coverage. But the media are professional Kilroys: I was there, I saw the thing, I reported it. The Occupy Wall Street movement rendered a simmering conflict visible in a vivid way, but when the spectacle disappears reporters often fold up their tents as well. Historically, civil disobedience has strong symbolic value, but it has to be paired with a well-understood objective. Think of that march over the bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965. The media images are driven by the specificity of that place, and in tandem with a tangible goal — civil rights for all Americans — they created an event that lives in collective memory and altered the cultural landscape. Occupy Wall Street is animated by a central, galvanizing idea — that the distribution of wealth is unfair. That struck a very live nerve, grabbing something that was in the air and turning it into simple math: 1 percent should not live at the expense of the other 99 percent. Still, Occupy Wall Street left many all revved up with no place to go. In addition to the 5 W’s — who, what, when, where and why — the media are obsessed with a sixth: what’s next? Occupy Wall Street, for all its appeal as a story, is very hard to roll forward. But if Occupy Wall Street seems inchoate and short on answers, it has plenty of company. The president has primed the pump over and over with borrowed federal largess and still jobs refuse to flow. The myriad Republican debates have become a kind of random gaffe generator with little in the way of serious public proposals. And by the way, there’s another term for a gathering of

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politically committed people who make a lot of speeches and argue endlessly over process without producing much in the way of solutions: Congress […] Occupy Wall Street may not have the answers, but we all are coming to realize that no one else does either. Part of the reason that Occupy made a dent in media consciousness is that many in the press learned the hard way that supposedly fringe political movements can play big for their size at a time of maximum anxiety. Remember when the Tea Party was just a few people rallying in various American cities? But then it went to work electing people to Congress and pushing a specific legislative agenda, gathering force and influence. Reporters do not like being run over by something we did not see coming […] Occupy Wall Street has its reasons to avoid the trap of the media pigeonhole: conservative-leaning outlets like Fox News and The New York Post have sought to pathologize the movement, treating hangers-on who committed crimes as representative of the larger group of protesters. The Occupiers also got a dismissive wave of the hand from Wall Street. Again and again you saw people in finance condescending to the protesters. The collective response seemed to be, “They have no idea how important what we do is,” with a suggestion that the ignorance extends to the ins and outs of high finance […] The people who make up Occupy Wall Street know enough to sense that a tipping point is at hand. Regardless of how the movement proceeds now that it is not gathered around campfires, its impact on the debate could be lasting and significant. If the coming election ends up being framed in terms of “fairness,” the people who took to the streets, battled the police and sat through those endless general assembly meetings will know that even though their tents are gone, their footprint remains.

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UFR Langues et Civilisations Pays anglophones Année Universitaire 2011 - 2012 C. Share the Wealth Share the Wealth, by Glenn McCoy, November 19, 2011. Los Angeles Times

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UFR Langues et Civilisations Pays anglophones Année Universitaire 2011 - 2012 D. UC Davis Police Officer Lieutenant John Pike and Occupy Wall Street Protesters, UC Davis, November 11, 2011

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