MSM coverage of OWS Nov 17 Day of Action

The following is a long comment I was going to post at Corrente - but Corrente is down for now. And the comment appears to fit here (in response to this Cannonfire post). It was originally in response to a comment by Fran (at Corrente), who seemed distressed that the MSM coverage of the OWS "day of action" was trying hard to make OWS look violent and crazy.

[BTW I was watching Tim Poole livestream the Wall Street protest on the morning of Nov 17. While I was watching, I saw a group of kids coming through and the protesters parting (to form an open path) and calling out to make way for the kids to get through. The line of cops let them through but then appeared to cut off and block passage of one of the adults who appeared to be escorting them.]

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Fran is right. I find this interesting - and I find myself wondering exactly what's going on. Of course the 1% will go nuts. Of course there's the Producers->Editor->Reporter directives and pressure. Various filters (ala Manufacturing Consent). Etc. But it seems that EVERYONE in the MSM has begun singing from the same songbook. About a week ago Yves noted the shift in the NY Times coverage with OWS going from "heroes to goats". Only a few weeks ago, on the ABC News website, the main photo showed a (normal, slightly heroic looking) women protester captioned "I am an American".
Yes, at the very beginning OWS was subject to much MSM ridicule, and there has been plenty of negative coverage throughout, but for a time, quite a bit of the coverage was somewhat positive.

So there's been a radical negative shift in coverage, and it feels nigh universal.

For the print version of the NY Times, the only coverage of yesterdays protests (based on a brief skim) appears to consist of a photo on front page (showing an apparently violent scene, with no indication of the scope of the protest), and a minimalist story on page A22 (relatively short article with some text on A22 and remainder on A23).

For CBS Evening News
"Organizers promised tens of thousands of demonstrators disrupting business as usual here in New York. Frankly, we've seen a fraction of that number, closer to 1000....Now the main event is tonight, a rally scheduled for the Brooklyn Bridge, which of course would disrupt rush hour again. Organizers are talking about tens of thousands of protesters. However, so far Scott, the number of protesters in the hundreds."

New York Daily News took a similar tack.
When I looked the primary OWS story online today was "I WIN! Bloomberg declares victory vs.protesters. The thousands of protesters flooding lower Manhattan seemed to have worn out their welcome." Story starts with "They didn't occupy Wall Street for long, shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, or win many new fans....Their vow to get many more out in the streets fizzled, Mayor Bloomberg declared. 'Occupy Wall Street had predicted on their website that tens of thousands would be participating in today's protests, but there have been far fewer - and so far they have caused what can accurately be described as minimal disruptions to our city,' he crowed....'Today they proved that they're able to piss off the 99% by stopping them from getting home,' said City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. (D-Queens). 'In my opinion, this is their last gasp. With silly stunts like this, they've angered people they're supposed to represent.'"
Now of course this is the New York Daily News, so unsurprizing....but this type of narrative is everywhere.

So the narrative in sites like CBS and NY Daily News is - it all fizzled - not much happened - they just annoyed people - move along.

With ABC News:
The main headline most of yesterday was "Occupy Wall Streets 'Day of Disruption': WN Live Updates"

Now, the quote directly implies that OWS called for "A day of disruption". OWS called for a "Day of Mass Action" or "A day of action". Nowhere have I been able to find OWS or OWS participants calling for "A day of disruption" (e.g. look at occupywallst.org). There's also the headline yesterday on ABC that referred to "Occupy Wall Street's 'Day of Destruction'".
[I wrote to ABC early yesterday, but of course this was not corrected.]
The 'Day of Disruption" language appears to have started with ABC, then propagated everywhere (shaping everyone's perception of what OWS was seeking to do yesterday).

ABC and FOX also propagated the false meme that OWS wanted to shut down the subways.

There's an Occupy Wall Street "must reads" tab at the top of the main ABC News page - this leads to:"Wall St. Commuter: 'We’re All 99%. This Is Ridiculous.'" Article starts with "As part of Occupy Wall Street’s plans for its largest protest ever, occupiers may garner more disdain from the 99 percent than the 1 percent by attempting to clog New York’s subway system."  There's also the link to the video:"NYC Commuters Find Protest 'Shameful'"

The point of going to the subways was outreach (as I noted in a comment above), not an attempt to block the subways. From occupywallst.org:
LUNCH: Occupy The Subways - 3:00 p.m. We will start by Occupying Our Blocks! Then throughout the five boroughs, we will gather at 16 central subway hubs and take our own stories to the trains, using the "People's Mic".

The ABC Nightly News coverage for Nov 17 (this would have been simultaneous with the CBS News report linked above). Excerpts:
"Tonght - boiling point"...."Our reporter askes those protesters - what do you really want"
"As we come on the air tonight, the Occupy Wall Street movement is reaching a flash point"..."This is what it looks like from the sky tonight. Masses of people taking to the streets here in NY City"...."Arrests, chaos, and clashes with police"..."bracing for chaos as the portesters swarm the Brooklyn Bridge"..."ABCs Dan Harris on the front line, asking demonstrators today'Just what do you want from all of this'".."good evening to you from the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, where protesters managed to shut down both lanes of trafic on this historic span"...."This massive protest march tonight"... "Now after two months of marches and chants there remains a simple question. What's the concrete goal of this movement..."

ABC Then shows the whackiest signs and most clueless protesters.
For example, one protester: "the concrete goal is to claim the concrete. This is our park..."
The signs shown include signs such as "eradicate males", etc.

[So unlike NY Daily News and CBS, ABC's narritive is - huge turnout - massive number of protesters - man, they're whacky - I can't understand what they're protesting about - they're weird - a freakshow of crazy clueless people swarming the bridge]

On ABC News online today, the primary Occupy related headline is:
"Occupy Overtime. Who really wins in protests?" Clicking the link leads to the story "Occupy Protests Across the Country Take Toll on City Budgets" [Talking about how the protests are costing cities money, with no consideration of the wasteful, overwhelming policing overkill.]

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It seems that almost all the media is singing from the same hymnbook.
It's literally like watching the propaganda parodies in the movie Robocop.

I've been around a while, and I'm used to this kind of thing....except....
the simultaneity of the shift across all the media... and the magnitude of the shift....and the journalistic errors (yes, the MSM is really sloppy, but the degree of false/erronious material here is striking).
So I'm wondering....exactly what is happening here?
One thing that strikes me - a couple weeks ago, Democrats were looking at using OWS to run for election. That Democratic endorsement might have given OWS legitimacy in the MSM, producing some favorable coverage. Now that Democrats have largely dumped it, the Democratic-affiliated segment of the press no longer has a reason to treat it at all properly/accurately.
Also, in general people (and especially the elite) will favor perceived "winners". Since most cities appear to have been successful in evicting the Occupation encampments, this may foster the perception in the MSM that Occupy is "weak" - and out come the knives.

Thoughts on what we're seeing here?

[Update: Potentially another part of the answer - corporate lobbying machine going into overdrive.]

Barackryphal - commentary regarding Techdude

[This comment is responding to this post and thread.]
Thought it might be good to provide a bit more info.

When Neal Krawetz discovered Adam Fink's claimed credentials matched those of Techdude, and posted this online (August 4, 2008), Fink contacted him claiming libel and that this was a case of identity theft – that he wasn't Techdude.  Neal gave him benefit of the doubt and posted an update to this effect on August 6.

Shortly thereafter (August 9) Koyaan posted updates to a post, noting comments by TexasDarlin in which TexasDarlin effectively appeared to be claiming that Techdude indeed was Adam Fink.

It seems that immediately thereafter both "Techdude" and Adam Fink went silent – Fink stopped responding to phone calls and e-mails about this matter (i.e. I know of two bloggers who were attempting to communicate with him about this – in one of these cases, he stopped in mid-correspondence at this point, though just prior to this he had been loquacious in denying the identity and had been corresponding in a "friendly" tone). Thereafter, TexasDarlin and Polarik both distanced from the Techdude material (with TexasDarlin pulling the Techdude posts).

Meanwhile, I’d been digging around for weeks, and (by late July) had come up with other material. This included an import company using a webmaster who I thought was probably Adam Fink and who used the e-mail address Techdude@yahoo.com. There were also a series of postings from 2006-2007 under the handle techdude at Computer Forensics World: Forums.

The material in these posts (e.g. "Digital Forensics Examiner" in mid-Missouri location, etc.) provided sufficient information to identify the poster as Adam Fink. There was also a false lead – someone posting under the handle Techdude at Stormfront (this ultimately turned out to be a different person). There were also a few others using this handle online, but they all could be readily excluded based on information in their posts and obvious linguistic differences.

I contacted the owners of the import company and was told that Techdude@yahoo.com was indeed Adam Fink. I was also corresponding with someone else who asked me to keep certain information confidential. I was also conducting linguistic analysis (I have a stats background and some experience with machine learning, but prior to this had not worked on authorship attribution).

I'd also been corresponding with blogger Joseph Cannon. On August 31, he posted the information directly tying the handle "Techdude" to Adam Fink (via the Yahoo e-mail account).

This posting occurred a bit earlier than I would have liked (though it's understandable, since interest in Techdude had begun to wane – and it’s preferable for a blogger to strike while the iron is hot). I'd wanted to complete the linguistic analysis I was performing, and I was still hoping to resolve things with the person who had provided me with confidential information (i.e. so that everything could be made public).

I subsequently completed the linguistic analysis, and posted a brief comment on the outcome - see penultimate comment in this thread.

The upshot was that the analysis confirmed that Adam Fink was the author of the TexasDarlin Techdude postings (and also clearly showed that the person at Stormfront was someone else).

To provide a bit more detail – there were three relevant bodies of textual information: 1. the Techdude postings regarding the COLB, 2. material I’d obtained from various sources that had definitively been written by Adam Fink, and 3. postings under the techdude handle at the computer forensics forum, where information in the postings appeared to identify the author as Adam Fink.

[Brief tangent: There's a lot of information within the computer forum posts that indicate the poster to be Adam Fink. For example, the poster identifies himself to be a "Digital Forensic Investigator" who runs a private computer forensics business in the mid-Missouri area. Adam Fink’s company advertised as "The only privately run Computer Forensic Science Laboratory in the Mid-Missouri area". In addition there are many matching details. E.g.

From a posting by techdude at the computer forum:  "I am all too familiar with the bug you picked up. To make a long story short you can not remove it except by wiping out and reformatting the drive....A few months ago I was hired to clean an entire office infected with this malware – after a week of searching the entire NTFS structure, logs, cookies, and trial and error....You will most likely see a new application called something like Spyware Sheriff (I forget the exact name) which pretends to be an anti-malware application."

From a posting by Adam Fink in an online chat:

"Comment From Biggs: The worst virus I've ever come across is the one that looks like it's spyware ...it pretends to be a 'virus scanner' but it will screw up your life

Adam Fink, CrLI CCE: Biggs - I know that one well. I spent 2 weeks trying to fix a client's entire office network with that one. Sadly there is no fix..just a reformat/reinstall. They should find the guy who wrote that one and have them force fed hot sauce."]

I analyzed the three bodies of text mentioned above, along with many other sources of online text, as noted in the Cannonfire comment I linked. After a lot of experimentation (using material of known authorship), I concluded that the most reliable method for correctly concluding authorship (in my hands) was to use a very large set of random alternative authors, to extract appropriate linguistic features (e.g. these can be function words, parts of speech, so called "unstable words" that have many synonyms, etc.), then to use statistical or machine learning methods (on the feature set) to do the ascription. So there's information on textual features from documents known to be produced by each of the authors, and there's information for these same features for the document or corpus of unknown authorship. Basically, which known author is the document (of unknown authorship) closest to.  If a particular person is suspected to be the author, and the document ends up being ascribed to the suspected author rather than any of a large set (e.g. 100) of random alternative authors, then there’s pretty strong evidence that the suspected author is indeed the actual author.

Insofar as possible, it’s preferable to keep the genre similar (to exclude genre effects). I ended up finding that the statistical authorship attribution tool JGAAP was a quite useful. There are different statistical or machine learning approaches for doing the ascription, but I found that in this case they basically all gave the same result. As an aside, I’ll mention that after posting the Cannonfire comment, and having done a lot of experimentation on other cases,  I’ve concluded that Support Vector Machine (available within JGAAP) seems to have the highest accuracy – and in this case (i.e. Techdude), the results of SVM match those using other methods (e.g. cross-entropy, etc.).

Basically, the Techdude COLB material, the computer forensics techdude comments, and the Adam Fink documents were found to have the same author (i.e. Adam Fink).

As another aside, I'll mention that the same approach also further confirmed the identity of Polarik and Polland (though his style tends to drift more over time and genre than Fink's does), and it also verified that Obama was clearly the author of Dreams (and Ayers was not). Indeed, with Dreams it even excludes Ayers as the author of the specific short segments that Cashill claimed were most likely to have been authored by Ayers. It also identified "Spengler" as David P. Goldman (prior to his inadvertent self-outting).

Aside from the formal analysis (which I put the most faith in), there are a lot of unique matching word strings tying together the three bodies of material by Fink. For example:

COLB Techdude: It does not generally take a fully equipped computer forensics lab to

Computer forensics forum Techdude (Adam Fink): nor a fully equipped computer forensics lab so

A few other examples:

COLB Techdude: call the good folks over at Vital Records

Adam Fink: We are looking forward to see what the good folks over at DC3

COLB Techdude: I enjoy forensic challenges such as the Department of Defense's DC3 Forensic Challenge which this year (and last) just so happen to

Adam Fink: The results of the 2007 Department of Defense's Cyber Crime Center (DC3) Digital Forensics Challenge are in.

COLB Techdude: Just more food for thought.

Computer forensics forum Techdude (Adam Fink): Just some food for thought.

There are many many more such matched phrases.

Also, the corpora share the same "jokey" language in places (e.g. from the postings at the computer forum: "At least with your minor in possession charge you know how the court system works – just kidding.";"All I can say is YIKES!";etc.), both COLB Techdude and Computer Forensics Techdude (Adam Fink) ridicule PhD's, etc.

Also, at the computer forensics forum, Techdude (Adam Fink) comments: "finding embedded graphics that were steganographicly hidden" (i.e. this refers to finding a hidden message within an image - the word "steganographic" specifically means "concealed writing"). This was in essence what he was claiming to do with the COLB and Maya’s "hidden" name.

I'll also mention that there are questions of exaggeration and competence that arise with Fink (separate from the COLB case). Adam Fink's claim to have worked on 7000 forensic cases appears unrealistic and inflated.

Also, in the afore noted KRCG sponsored "Chat with forensic computer expert Adam Fink"

In response to someone saying "The worst virus I've ever come across is the one that looks like it's spyware ...it pretends to be a 'virus scanner' but it will screw up your life"

Fink replies "I know that one well. I spent 2 weeks trying to fix a client's entire office network with that one. Sadly there is no fix..just a reformat/reinstall. They should find the guy who wrote that one and have them force fed hot sauce."

"I know that one well"??? There isn't "one" such type of malware – there are hundreds of different malware programs that masquerade as anti-malware "virus scanners". The "Sadly there is no fix..just a reformat/reinstall." (which is what he apparently actually did when hired to deal with malware problems at an office – he reformatted all their computers) also indicates ignorance.  I’ve removed fake "virus scanner" malware (multiple different forms) from many computers – a reformat is essentially never required if you know what you’re doing.

This past year, a client who hired him to deal with cyberstalking was murdered, apparently by her ex-husband. Fink told the local newspaper that he had communicated information about the cyberstalking to the DA's office, which set off a bit of a brouhaha when the DA's office noted that he had never actually communicated such information to them (and they also noted that if he actually had such information to report at the time, he should have contacted the police rather than the DA's office).

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