• Time, Tuesday, November 15, 2011 3:54 PM

By staging last night’s raid of the Occupy Wall Street encampment in the middle of the night, New York City ensured no coverage of the event in this morning’s print edition of The New York Times.  But lack of other media coverage may have been the result of more than just timing.

“TV news seemed just to be catching up,” when Time’s James Poniewozik woke up at 5 a.m., “though my Twitter feed contained little else.”  Documenting what he calls “an effort to contain the media and reduce the risk of adverse coverage,” Poniewozik writes of Mother Jones’ Josh Harkinson being told that journalists needed to stay in a “press pen,” a New York Post reporter (via the Times’ Brian Stelter) saying he was “roughed up by riot police,” and local TV crews being denied access to the goings-on. 

In fact, Poniewozik says, the way last night’s news emerged to the public was similar to what occurred in the Arab Spring uprisings and other foreign breaking-news events: “a flood of raw information online—some of it from mainstream press outlets—that eventually trickled into major print and electronic media.”

Read the whole story at Time »