The New Republic:

“The mystery that will launch a thousand media seminars is: How did a modest encampment in Zuccotti Park morph in less than a month into a global news story?

“At the beginning, this protest seemed fairly small,” said Blair Taylor, a 35-year-old, working on his Ph.D. in political science at the New School, who has been visiting Zuccotti Park since the onset of the protest. “Originally, there was a lot of right-wing sentiment—9/11 Truthers and Ron Paul supporters. Now it’s much more left-wing.” That was certainly my impression at Zuccotti Park as I interviewed at random an herbal beverage brewer from North Carolina; a 55-year-old historian of feminist art and magic who lives three blocks away; a sculptor from suburban Westchester County; and an unemployed construction worker from Staten Island who acknowledged, “These problems are going to take years to fix. It won’t happen overnight.” Maybe I would have come up with something different if I had not conspicuously avoided everyone with large, visible tattoos or a manic glint in their eyes.

My very tentative theory about the media success of Occupy Wall Street begins with the cleverness of the initial concept. Even if no one whom I interviewed at the protests had seen anyone even remotely responsible for the economic meltdown, it is easy to imagine that the demonstrators were confronting Goldman Sachs partners and hedge-fund managers daily on their way to work. Occupy Wall Street has a much more dramatic ring than Camp-Out in Lower Manhattan. Another major factor was the way that the normally astute New York Police Department fanned the movement with their indefensible use of pepper spray and their initial penchant for mass arrests. When you are trying to create a mass movement, it is way better to be martyrs than ignored.

The final aspect is that the Occupy Wall Street protests filled in a missing piece in the political puzzle. Mark Schmitt shrewdly suggested that liberals had long been fantasizing about a Tea Party of the left. But I also think serious journalists had been waiting for some bellow of outrage over the way that Wall Street plutocrats had been laughing all the way to their annual bonuses. Why in popular culture is Bernie Madoff a more notorious symbol of greed than AIG or the bankers who packaged sub-prime mortgages? Someone in America had to get mad other than Elizabeth Warren. So when the demonstrators with their amorphous sense of injustice arrived in Zuccotti Park, media stars were born.”