Dozens of people have been camping outside City Hall in New York to protest budget cuts that could lead to thousands of jobs lost.
Meanwhile, the mainstream media is busy covering sex scandals and murder trials, and ignoring the voice of the people. Why?This summer the US media is buzzing with these burning-hot stories. The masterminds of big TV networks are knee-deep in this “historic” news coverage. Sexy tweets of a congressman are being stretched to the likes of the Lewinski scandal, and every detail is getting sucked out of a child’s murder case. Meanwhile, New York City has seen a small town of its own pop up a few blocks away from Wall Street in Mayor Bloomberg’s backyard.City Hall has seen countless protesters on its doorstep since the economic collapse of 2008, but in the last several days the anger of the people has been pushing them to camp out here. They are saying this is just the beginning and they will spend day and night here until their message is heard. A loud “no” to Bloomberg-proposed budget cuts that would throw more jobs out the window. “End the wars, tax the rich, how we fix the deficit," they chanted. “The banks are sitting on trillions of dollars of our money and we’re going to stay here till we get it,” said activist Tony Murphy. “We want to make sure we are all prepared, so here we actually have pillows,” one activist showed RT.This resistance is inspired by global outbursts of protests over the last year. “Not only the government here in our country, but the governments abroad don’t seem to want to see anybody to have some kind of subsistence of living,” said student Camille Lampel. Citizen journalists are here. The mainstream media is not.“Once you go outside the hoard and you start covering that unions and workers are fighting against cut-backs from a powerful mayor and they want Wall Street to pay higher taxes, well, those are likely your sponsors if you are a big commercial news operation,” explained journalism Professor Jeff Cohen. As the media treads carefully around the issues, the people’s anger is growing – so how many will be camping out here before the media is shaken out of its self-imposed oblivion to report what matters?