Source One: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/728
This first article is taken from a blog site, the author being an Australian write/scholar named McKenzie Wark. The article takes a biased “left” tone including negative remarks about our current political system such as “It may sound counter-intuitive, but there really is no politics in the United States. There is exploitation, oppression, inequality, violence, there are rumors that there might still be a state. But there is no politics.” The author seems to be making the case that everyone is blaming “Wall Street” but is saying that Wall Street is more of an abstract concept, it’s not a physical place or thing but more like a group of people whose mass amounts of money allow them to get around our political system (hence the quote above that politics don’t really exist at all). The author has a very solid rhetoric, using rhetorical questions and flaws of our current political system to convey his point that the Occupy Wall Street protesters are in fact correct in what their doing. The author says that politics are no longer practiced in this country and I reluctantly agree.
The second article is from Bloomberg News (a financial website owned by Mayor Bloomberg) and the article has an obvious “right” biased to it. The article is written by Noah Buhayar a multimedia journalist. Right off the bat I noticed the rhetoric of the author, the author basically dismisses the OWS protesters because he feels that they do not know how the country works “The understanding of the Occupy Wall Street crowd of what makes our country work is probably fairly limited”. The author then goes on to criticize the motives of the OWS protesters basically saying that the protesters don’t care that the banks failed, they just want more resources devoted to the 99% (which the author believes is greedy of them).
Source Three: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AU_ZQKTbOTw#!
The third source is an excerpt of the show “Countdown With Keith Olberman” which was aired on 11/15/11. From prior experience I know that Olberman doesn’t like being affiliated politically but if anything, he leans further on the left than right side. Olberman uses a very offensive rhetoric, going out and attacking Bloomberg. However, he also takes a very historical approach to backing his views up saying that in history, suppressing a protest is never the best away to go about it. He backs this belief up with examples like the Civil Rights Movement. Olberman also shows how Bloomberg is a hypocrite, showing that he arrested protesters for tying up traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge but allowed traffic to be held up for the filming of Batman on the 59th Street Bridge.
Very nice work — especially in your use of quotations as supporting evidence. Please do add your own thoughts with a They Say/I Say frame.
One thought: you chose excellent quotations for all of these sources. However, I’m not sure that the quotations you chose from Wark provide enough evidence of your claim that he has a “biased ‘left’ tone.” Are there any other quotations in that piece that you can point to to substantiate that claim?