Keith Olbermann and Michael Moore criticized the media for ignoring what they saw as an important new political movement currently forming on Wall Street.
The Occupy Wall Street group has been camped out in a plaza a block from the New York Stock Exchange for nearly a week. In a statement posted on its website, the group laid out why it is protesting:
We are unions, students, teachers, veterans, first responders, families, the unemployed and underemployed. We are all races, sexes and creeds. We are the majority. We are the 99 percent. And we will no longer be silent. As members of the 99 percent, we occupy Wall Street as a symbolic gesture of our discontent with the current economic and political climate and as an example of a better world to come.
Olbermann sent a producer and a camera to speak to people in the encampment. He played that footage on his Thursday show before speaking to Moore. Olbermann said that, for some reason, the protesters had been "Ignored by those who presumably support them, by those who oppose them, by those who seemingly should just be reporting on them."
He asked Moore, "that's 2,000 or 500 or 50 Tea Partiers there...it's on the evening news, isn't it?"
"Oh, absolutely," Moore responded. "It would be the top story." He said he couldn't understand why the networks and other media had not covered the story more fully, and called the movement "the very first attempt to take a real stand" in the years since the financial crisis.
Moore then referenced comments made by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who warned that persistent economic pain could lead to unrest and riots in the streets.
"The smart rich know they can only build the gate so high," he said. "And ... history proves that people, when they've had enough, aren't going to take it anymore. And much better to deal with it nonviolently now, through the political system, than what could possibly happen in the future, which nobody wants to see."
Olbermann again expressed puzzlement that the "left wing media" was seemingly brushing over the Occupy Wall Street story. He then turned to the execution of Troy Davis, who was killed on Wednesday night.
"A man was murdered last night in our name," Moore said.