General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Karen Beck of MoveOn says she will call the police on #Occupy if their actions upset her [View all]starroute
(12,977 posts)The article talks about "Occupy movements ... coming in two sharply divided forms." It describes one "faction" as "open to violence" and says that the other is pledged to nonviolence and "resents what it sees as dilution of the Occupy message."
And then it quotes Beck as saying "if anyone wants to fight or get really aggressive or start breaking things, they are not part of us," and describes her as "an organizer for Occupy demonstrators from the Livermore-San Ramon area - who prefer to call themselves 99 Percenters to distance themselves from factions open to violence."
And again a bit further down, "Demonstrators such as Beck say images of clashes with police undercut the central Occupy message of pointing out economic inequities and could be avoided."
The remainder of the article recapitulates the ongoing arguments among Occupiers about the black bloc. But by using the Beck material as the introduction, it makes it seem that the 99% Spring people are the true Occupiers and Occupy Oakland are those nasty violent types who want to spoil things for everyone else.
So there are certainly distortions here -- but the question is whether those distortions were created entirely by the reporters, with Beck's statements being taken out of context to make it seem as if she was speaking for a "faction" of Occupy, or whether Beck herself helped create that impression.
My own guess is that if whatever misunderstanding there was on the part of the reporters, Beck helped create it -- that she presented her group as representing the "central Occupy message" and everyone else as "diluting" or "undercutting" it. Because those sentences in the article are not direct quotes, it's impossible to tell for sure. But I very much doubt that the reporters could have written "demonstrators such as Beck say..." if Beck herself had not made those statements.