Dear C4SS Supporters,
This week, I’ve submitted 6,381 Center op-eds to 2,786 publications on every continent except Antarctica (also excluding, as Center advisor Roderick Long points out, Atlantis; and I must say that my distributions thus far are in fact limited to continents on Earth). That’s fewer than usual — we had less content than usual.
So far, I’ve tracked four pickups this week — and it would only have been two if one of my own older columns hadn’t been picked up and if I hadn’t found a “missed pickup” from more than a year ago. More on that below, too.
This week’s pickups:
- Darian Worden’s “What Counts as Political?” ran in the Kent, Washington Reporter as “Important to recognize, acknowledge religion in politics” on August 31, 2010. Yes, that’s more than a year ago. Why did it only just now pop up in Google search results? Friends, I have no idea.
- “The ‘War on Drugs’ is Really a War on You,” by Kevin Carson, appeared in the Carroll County, Maryland Standard on November 1.
- The Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age published Kevin’s “To Occupy Wall Street: A ‘General Strike’ Producing for Ourselves” on November 1.
- On November 2, Arizona’s Sonoran News published a column of mine from a couple of months ago: “Barack Obama: Crazy or Con Man?”
So: Reduced submissions, reduced pickups. What’s going on here?
David D’Amato now writes for us when he has time, rather than on a regular basis. Also, one of Kevin Carson’s pieces came out at “feature article” rather than “newspaper op-ed” length. So I only had three articles available to submit to newspapers. Hey, that’s how it goes.
As far as the low number of pickups (saved somewhat by discovering a missed pickup and by having an older piece picked up), reduced content volume explains some of it.
Another factor is that a lot of our content right now is centered around the Occupy movement (which several Center personnel, including but probably not limited to Director Brad Spangler, Associate Director James Tuttle and Research Assistant Ross Kenyon, are actively and enthusiastically involved in) … and our take on that movement doesn’t fit into the emerging mainstream media narrative.
We’re treating Occupy as an imperfect and emergent, but potentially revolutionary, movement. The mainstream media is treating Occupy as a gaggle of discontented reformist Democrats.
We could argue all day about whether the MSM is an active participant in, or just a dupe of, the political establishment’s attempts to co-opt Occupy (positively by the Democrats, as a designated “tool of the enemy” by the Republicans), but either way op-eds that conflict with that portrayal of the movement get a cool reception.
Among C4SS writers, I’m clearly the one with the most pessimistic view of Occupy — but I still think we’re taking the right tack on it. That tack may cost us some pickups right now, but I expect it to gain us credibility as both analysts and activists over time. Just my opinion, but strongly held.
Have a great weekend!
Yours in liberty,
Tom Knapp
Media Coordinator
Center for a Stateless Society
