Monday, October 03, 2011

CNN Gets It ... sort of

CNN's coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests makes a distinction worthy of mention here at the Pangrammaticon:

A spirited and leaderless protest in the Wall Street section of New York has entered its third week, helping to inspire a growing number of demonstrations united in their passion if not necessarily their reasons for hitting the streets.

Do you see it? CNN is sensitive to the fact that political activity is a passionate, not a reasonable, affair. (Passion is to power as reason is to knowledge.) Of course, since CNN is very much a part of the establishment, it feels compelled to put the protesters down for not having "reasons" for "uniting". The idea that it is passion not reason that brings people together (reason's only function, I submit, is to keep things apart—for perfectly good analytical purposes) does not compute for CNN, because its poesie is scored to a different lyre, i.e., an axe.

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