This is an interview I did with The UpTake. The Occupy movement has successfully put the economic injustice plaguing the United States on televisions across America, says Tina Dupuy, a nationally syndicated op-ed columnist and managing editor
December 22, 2011

This is an interview I did with The UpTake.

The Occupy movement has successfully put the economic injustice plaguing the United States on televisions across America, says Tina Dupuy, a nationally syndicated op-ed columnist and managing editor of Crooks and Liars.

The reason that most Americans were unaware of these issues before the Occupy movement caught fire this fall is that 60 percent of us get our news exclusively from local news sources. Those 30-minute local news segments devote a full 10 minutes to commercials and two minutes to “teasers” of stories to come. That leaves very little time for real news about real issues. Dupuy says that newscasters too often fill the gap with trivial stories such as reports about “Dancing with the Stars” or news of a cat stuck in a tree in Germany.

“We don’t have a real broad knowledge of issues that affect us, like the housing bubble or about what our local and national government is doing,” says Dupuy. “But at least now the local news is showing protest signs of what economic injustice is. They’re being forced to cover these issues and cover the raids, arrests and encampments and have the protestors on television talking about these issues.”

“Now we’ve seen our local news talk about the homeless population, talk about people who aren’t able to find jobs, talk about students who are now sharecroppers to banks because they have $200,000 in student loan debt — debt they can’t renegotiate.”

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