See Robert David Graham, Independent reporting of #OccupyWallStreet 

By reporting, I mean such things as contacting the park’s owners asking for an official statement. The protesters are occupying Zuccotti Park, owned by the same company (Brookfield Office Properties NYSE:BPO) that owns the adjacent skyscraper. An obvious step would be to contact them asking for a statement, but I could find no journalists that had yet done so. Well, if “journalists” aren’t going to do this, I can do this myself. I sent an email to their VP of Communications. I got a response, which I posted to my blog. When I posted it, I also Googled the sentences from the official statement, and found no results. I was indeed the first one “reporting” on this. Since then, others have mentioned the official statement, probably by picking it up from the #OccupyWallStreet Twitter hashtag that links to my blog.

Brookfield’s official statement expressed their frustration with how the protesters were breaking the rules of the park (my blog post shows a picture I took of the posted rules). In particular, they haven’t been able to do their daily maintenance and cleaning of the park for the past three weeks. For a reporter, that leads to the obvious question: is the park staying clean? and if so, how? The answer reporters would find is this: the protesters themselves are taking care of this. They are exhorting people to not litter, they are making sure the trash cans have fresh bags and patrol the park picking up litter. They make sure the trash bags are set out in the right place to be picked up by the city’s garbage service

… The protest isn’t angry. Quite the opposite, it is loving and accepting. If you go up to protesters with the opposite political view and debate them, they will express their undying love for you and ask for you to join them to increase the diversity of viewpoints. I did this myself, and watched this happen to others, including cops. This attitude pervades everything they do, and is frequently reinforced by the hard-core occupiers.

Now compare to Erin Burnett, CNN. (“What are they protesting? No one seems to know.”) 

Photo by David Shankbone, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0