The Occupy Wall Street protester's inarticulate angst: "I can put it out there. I can say what I want."

A young man, asked to explain why he should get what he wants — to have college tuition paid for — says it's because that's what he wants:



As he takes a slug and then another slug from his bottle of pink drink, you get the feeling he's not picturing this video going viral. He probably feels like he's a nice, amiable person who doesn't gear up into fighting mode every time he's asked a question.

I got to this video via Rush Limbaugh, who played the audio on his show yesterday and said — describing the Occupy Wall Street folks generally:

These people, as ignorant as they are and as few in number as they are, by the way -- it really is a small bunch of people; and the media is doing everything it can to build 'em up and make 'em look huge. They're so jealous of the Tea Party, they want this thing to be bigger than the Tea Party, and it isn't, and it can't be. It is dire for the left right now...

The left is really flailing away. They've got nothing. Obama can't even pack a 200-person hall in Pittsburgh.

Rush's website includes the requisite Drudgetaposition:

Speaking of "the media is doing everything it can to build" up the Occupy Wall Street movement, here's a NYT article about how according to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, the protests account for 7 percent of media news right now.

The data confirms an anecdotal sense that the movement, which slowly gained speed last month, entered the nation’s collective consciousness for the first time last week, when President Obama was asked about it at a news conference and when national television news programs were first anchored from the Wall Street protest site....

Some protesters have assailed news media outlets for scoffing at their leaderless nature and lack of agreed-upon goals, but some have also carefully courted attention from those outlets.

“They insist on their story being told, even as they’re arguing about just what the story should be,” the media critic James Rainey wrote in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times. Mr. Rainey suggested that reporters resist the urge to make instant judgments about what the protests represent: “Sometimes the most courageous story is the one that says: I haven’t seen this before. I’m not sure what it means. I don’t have a clue where it is going.”

I like Rainey's statement. It's close to the way I approach blogging about the protests around here in Madison. I just walk into the crowd with a camera and look for what's interesting, trying to get a picture of what people are doing and what they think they are doing.