Update (8:44 p.m.): Current TV founder co-founder Joel Hyatt confirmed Al Jazeera will purchase the network in an email to staff this evening. 

Mr. Hyatt's email contained several interesting details including that Mr. Gore asked Colin Powell's for advice on working with the Arab network and "Colin Powell told Al that Al Jazeera is the only cable news network he watches." In the email Mr. Hyatt also revealed he and Mr. Gore will both serve on the advisory board of Al Jazeera America and that Time Warner Cable is dropping Current because it "did not consent to the sale to Al Jazeera." Read Mr. Hyatt's full email below. 

Since its inception, Current has suffered from low ratings. In 2011, the network attempted to counter this by bringing on ousted MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann and former MSNBC contributor Cenk Uygur to help them re-brand with a focus on left-leaning talk. That experiment didn't help the network revolutionize its ratings. In March, Current acrimoniously parted ways with Mr. Olbermann and replaced him with former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. Last month, when asked about his show, Mr. Spitzer quipped, "Nobody’s watching, but I’m having a great time."

According to the Times, if the deal goes through, Al Jazeera won't use Current to distribute Al Jazeera English, which is based in Qatar. Instead, the company will begin a new, New York-based English-language venture. Though some Current TV staff members may stay on, Mr. Stelter wrote that the network's "schedule of shows will most likely be dissolved in the spring."

Al Jazeera has gained a growing audience with its journalism over the years, but the network has also earned criticism its coverage is anti-American.

Though he often uses Twitter to trash his (many) former employers, as of this writing, Mr. Olbermann has yet to weigh in on the rumored deal. Mr. Gore and Mr. Spitzer have also not responded to requests for comment from the Observer.

Joel Hyatt's email to Current staffers:

From: Joel Hyatt 
Date: January 2, 2013, 6:36:46 
Subject: BIG NEWS FOR THE NEW YEAR!
Al and I are thrilled and proud to announce that a few moments ago Current was acquired by Al Jazeera, the award winning international news organization. 

When considering the several suitors who were interested in acquiring Current, it became clear to us that Al Jazeera was founded with the same goals we had for Current: To give voice to those whose voices are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the important stories that no one else is telling. Al Jazeera, like Current, believes that facts and truth lead to a better understanding of the world around us. 

Al and I did significant due diligence as part of our evaluation process. We were impressed with all that we learned about Al Jazeera and its journalistic integrity, global reach, award-winning programming, and growing influence around the world. That influence has recently been demonstrated by Al Jazeera’s important and impactful coverage of the Arab Spring, which was widely credited as being the most thorough and informative coverage from any media company. Colin Powell told Al that Al Jazeera is the only cable news network he watches (which he is able to do because Comcast carries it in the Washington, DC market).

As you may know, Al Jazeera is funded by the government of Qatar, which is the United States’ closest ally in the Gulf Region, and is where the United States bases its Middle East Air Force operations. I have had first-hand knowledge of Qatar’s policies as a result of my tenure on the Board of The Brookings Institution. The Saban Center for Middle East Policy is a joint venture of The Brookings Institution and Qatar, and it has offices in Washington, DC and Doha, Qatar. Its purpose is to propose practical public policies that can contribute to peace in the Middle East, and its founding Director is my friend, Martin Indyk, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel.

While considering this decision, I spent a week in Doha, Qatar, where Al Jazeera is headquartered, and I am pleased to tell you that I could not have been more impressed with their operation. First of all, they are bringing large-scale resources to journalism – something which we have not been able to do. Al Jazeera has more than 80 bureaus around the world, and is seen in more than 260 million homes in 130 countries. Al Jazeera has a staff of over 4000 people, including 400 journalists. Its journalists hail from more than 50 countries, with every conceivable nationality and religion represented on its professional team. Al Jazeera is a major global media player. 

The rest of the world thinks so too. Al Jazeera English has won many, many awards including an Alfred I DuPont Award for Best Documentary, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Four Freedoms Awards for freedom of speech and expression, an Amnesty International Award for International TV and Radio, the prestigious Peabody Award, and the Huffington Post Ultimate Media Gamechanger award.

All of this is compelling, but what really convinced Al and me that Al Jazeera would be a great home for the people of Current was their publicly stated Values and Core Capabilities. Their mission includes the following: Diversity (“bringing stories from the underreported communities, societies and cultures from across the globe), Journalistic Integrity (“committed to the uncompromising pursuit of truth and the ideals of journalism”), and A Voice for the Voiceless (“promoting the basic human right of the freedom of expression for people everywhere”).

Al Jazeera is planning to invest significantly in building “Al Jazeera America,” a network focused on international news for the American audience. Al and I will both serve on the Advisory Board of Al Jazeera America, and we look forward to helping build an important news network.

Obviously there will be a lot of transition work in the coming weeks. Al Jazeera does not have a management team in place in the U.S to run this new venture. They are extremely impressed with our people and our accomplishments. I will be holding staff meetings in the next few days and will introduce the senior folks from Al Jazeera who have led the planning for this entry into the United States. (I will separately communicate as to the day and time for those staff meetings.) We will communicate more of the details of this acquisition during those meetings.

Getting this transaction done was very difficult. One of Current’s distributors, Time Warner Cable, did not consent to the sale to Al Jazeera. Consequently, Current will no longer be carried on TWC. This is unfortunate, but I am confident that Al Jazeera America will earn significant additional carriage in the months and years ahead. In the United Kingdom, it has become the number three news network (behind the BBC and Sky News). It did that by investing in great programming – as it intends to do in the United States. 

Al and I are incredibly proud of what all of us have been able to accomplish together. Throughout our short history, Current has been a thought leader for the media industry, innovating many exciting features that became standard after we introduced them. (Tweets on television anyone?!) Just this past year, we’ve been able to provide our viewers with fantastic interactive and social TV 2.0 coverage of the Presidential Election, including a peek inside the Obama Campaign headquarters, in depth analysis of the Libor Scandal, the breaking and relentless coverage of the Trayvon Martin scandal, and the list goes on and on. We have won most of the important awards in the journalism profession. We have stayed true to our independence and courage. And in our choice of new corporate parent, we are continuing to strive to make a difference – to provide the American people with information and analysis they need to live better, more secure, happier lives. I am confident this will continue into the future. 

As I reflected deeply about this decision – both to sell the company and to whom – I kept coming back to one basic notion: The purpose of journalism is to provide those who don’t know with information and knowledge so that they can become those who do know. Bias and hatred are fueled by ignorance. Information and knowledge are the only antidotes to that ignorance. That is the role journalism must play – to provide the knowledge that sweeps away the bias and hatred caused by ignorance. It is a noble pursuit. I am proud of each and every one of you for your dedication to pursuing that noble goal. And it is a privilege to have worked with all of you these past few years.

Please accept my best wishes for a happy, healthy, exciting and fulfilling New Year! 

All the best,
Joel

If Current TV misses the audience benchmark in two consecutive quarters, another clause is triggered that would allow Time Warner Cable to drop the channel. The condition was built into the most recent distribution pact between the two parties, which was signed in 2010.

"Time Warner Cable has been flirting with the idea of pulling Current off its systems for some time now," said one of the sources, who all spoke on condition of anonymity.

To make the egg on Current's face even tastier for Mr. Olbermann, an anonymous source informed Reuters that if not for Olbermann's now-defunct Countdown, "Current TV likely would have missed Time Warner Cable's viewership benchmark."

Mr. Olbermann, who regularly drew more than a million eyeballs a night in his prime slot at MSNBC, was averaging just 177,000 viewers a night on Current TV.

According to Reuters, Current is distributed to 60 million cable subscribers nationwide.

According to the Times, Current management "unanimously" agreed that Mr. Olbermann had failed to honor the terms of his five-year, $50 million contract, giving them the right to give him the boot. After declining to speak to the Times, Mr. Olbermann slammed network executives Mr. Gore and Joel Hyatt on Twitter, saying they had fired him unethically and he would seek legal recourse.

"Current was also founded on the values of respect, openness, collegiality, and loyalty to our viewers," the network wrote in a letter to viewers. "Unfortunately these values are no longer reflected in our relationship with Keith Olbermann and we have ended it."

"I'd like to apologize to my viewers and staff for the failure of Current TV," Mr. Olbermann tweeted Friday afternoon. He went on, 140 characters at a time:

"But for more than a year I have been imploring @AlGore and @JoelHyatt to resolve our issues internally, while I've been not publicizing my complaints, and keeping the show alive for the sake of its loyal viewers and even more loyal staff. Nevertheless, Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt, instead of abiding by their promises and obligations and investing in a quality news program, finally thought it was more economical to try to get out of my contract. It goes almost without saying that the claims against me  in Current's statement are untrue and will be proved so in the legal actions I will be filing against them presently.  To understand Mr. Hyatt’s “values of respect, openness, collegiality and loyalty,” I encourage you to read of a previous occasion Mr. Hyatt found himself in court for having unjustly fired an employee. That employee’s name was Clarence B. Cain: http://nyti.ms/HueZsa. In due course, the truth of the ethics of Mr. Gore and Mr. Hyatt will come out. For now, it is important only to again acknowledge that joining them was a sincere and well-intentioned gesture on my part, but in retrospect a foolish one. That lack of judgment is mine and mine alone, and I apologize again for it."

Mr. Olbermann's exit has been rumored since January, when, due to his dissatisfaction with Current's technical capabilities, he "declined" to cover the Iowa caucuses. Mr. Olbermann left Countdown's previous home, MSNBC, abruptly in January of 2011, after clashing with network executives. With any luck, this pattern of interpersonal problems will be further elucidated by The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin's new HBO project based on Mr. Olbermann.

Mr. Spitzer's first foray into TV, CNN's Parker Spitzer, was also plagued by infighting until the network dropped co-host Kathleen Parker. Parker Spitzer's one-man iteration, In the Arena, was canceled in a line-up shuffle last summer.

Update (6:44 pm): A source with knowledge of the situation told us Mr. Spitzer began talking with Current last November as tensions mounted between Mr. Olbermann and the channel's owners. Mr. Olbermann was reportedly angry about the channel's low production values compared to his former home, MSNBC. Despite these tensions, our source said no deal was made to bring Mr. Spitzer to the network because Mr. Gore, was desperate to keep him.

"Gore just tried to kiss Keith's ass," our source said. "It was like the geek trying to impress the cool kid in high school."

Mr. Gore's attempts to placate Mr. Olbermann were clearly unsuccessful.

The hour-long show will be produced live in San Francisco and will air at 9 p.m., after Countdown with Keith Olbermann.

"The War Room will be a nightly show for political junkies like me and anyone who cares about the future of our country, focusing on the 2012 election from all angles," she said in a press release. "Democrats will love it.  The far right will hate it. Those in the middle will appreciate it.  I can't wait to get started."

Ms. Granholm teaches at UC Berkeley School of Law and appears regularly on Meet the Press.

Geraldo Rivera interviewing protesters at Zuccotti Park on Saturday, Oct. 1. (Photo: Hannah Grant)

THE PROTESTERS AT OCCUPY WALL STREET have had at least one of their demands met: the perceived "media blackout" decried by so many, including Current TV’s Keith Olbermann, has clearly ended. Is the protest a story now? The Observer asked NBC's Michelle Buettner, who arrived Sunday and had just finished interviewing a father with a precious young toddler perched on his shoulders. "It's a story," she snapped. "We're here covering it."

Hey, it took The Observer four days to show up, we offered.

"So we're all sort of getting our bearings," she said.

Indeed. Zuccotti Park was suddenly crawling with one-man camera crews feasting on the colorful scene. "I'm over it!" one demonstrator who had traveled to the protest from Florida said. "Everyone's a media whore!" Geraldo Rivera's crew was shooting B-roll of the bean sprout-and-cheese sandwiches being served for lunch as anchor after anchor interviewed a young man in a pink polka-dotted leotard and bra sitting next to a chalkboard that read "OUR ECONOMY IS MODELED ON A CANCER.” Another crew captured a protester, covered head-to-toe in a black Darth Vader-esque costume, who posed in a sort of crouching tiger over the spread of slogan-bearing signs. "We're talking to a Columbia University professor, a political science professor," ABC's T.J. Winick told The Observer excitedly. "So if you want to get some quotes from him, feel free to go up to him after we're done." (Bonus! The young man was black.)

In the first week, protesters bemoaned the lack of mainstream media coverage. In reality, there was no media blackout. The Guardian's Ed Pilkington was on the story early and The New York Times's Colin Moynihan has been covering the protest on the ground since September 17, the first day. Capital New York’s Joe Pompeo tallied up the number of pieces and concluded there were “plenty of stories, none of them big.” But then the snarkerati took it up. The first crew sent by Fox News was from the satirical late-night talk show Red Eye; The New York Daily News ran an editorial carrying the headline "Occupy Wall Street protesters are behaving like a bunch of spoiled brats." Gawker wrote in an early primer on the protest, “Is This Thing Going to Descend Into Exciting Chaos? Unlikely.”

"I think mostly the coverage has been bad," said Anthony DeRosa, the social media editor at Reuters who had been following the protest in the media and on Twitter and visited the protest in person for the first time Saturday. "I was surprised. I thought it was mostly young trustafarians from what I was reading. Turns out the crowd is very diverse--young, old, various races, men, women, you name it. And when I arrived they were in the midst of general assembly"--the protest's hyperdemocratic method of decision-making--"and everyone was so attentive. Each person stood up, had a legit and coherent beef and the crowd echoed it patiently.

"I don't see myself as a supporter," he said. "I saw that these people have a legit beef and they're being unfairly portrayed, which is as much journalistic malpractice by the mainstream press as taking a side. I'm not taking a side, I'm pointing out that the press is being unfairly dismissive. It's as if you don't dismiss them you've failed as a journalist, which is ridiculous. Cynicism is some default position you must take, which is bullshit."

In all, coverage appeared to be as confused and directionless as the protest, perhaps for the same reason. “It's difficult for the media to build a narrative because this is a leaderless protest," Occupy Wall Street's spokesman Patrick Bruner observed as the protest entered its second week.

By happenstance, the Times’s Ginia Bellafante had just taken over for Susan Dominus in writing the Big City column, which aims to highlight contrasts between the rich and poor in New York--a paradigm into which the protest fit neatly. Ms. Bellafante’s column about the protest, "Gunning for Wall Street, With Faulty Aim,” described the protesters as "street theater.” One caption noted that the protesters’ demands were still unformed: "Coming from many states, they had many causes. One said simply, 'I want to create spectacles.'"

That protester was Becky Wartell, 24, who was one of many demonstrators who were unhappy with the story. "I didn't say simply, 'I want to create spectacles,'" she told The Observer. She’d spoken at length with Ms. Bellafante, she said, and her quip about spectacles was in reference to her role on the arts and culture working group, the committee that creates signs and coordinates street performances among other forms of creative expression. "I love the juxtaposition of this incredible community in the heart of the financial district," Ms. Wartell said. "I do want to create other fun juxtapositions to get people's attention."

“I got so much hate mail,” Ms. Bellafante told The Observer. “But largely the people who wrote me were not there the first week and assumed I had spoken to the two or three kooks out of the incredibly knowledgeable, Mark Rudd types,” she said, namechecking the Weather Underground cofounder.

In fact, Ms. Bellafante is openly sympathetic to the protesters’ general grievance. “You know I think that it is insane and immoral that we tax hedge fund managers and private equity managers, the way we tax their income is capital gains, and that would be a great rallying point,” she said.

A young man being interviewed at Occupy Wall Street.

But in the beginning, the crowds were small and the protesters were unfocused, she said, with the “fringier elements” predominating. “The rest of her quote was, ‘I want to blow bubbles down Wall Street,’” Ms. Bellafante said of Ms. Wartell. “I understand where she’s coming from. She represents a trend there that did see that approach, the theatrics and spectacle approach, as the way to go. Personally, that’s not the way I want to change the world. That’s not how I think we get the Tobin tax.” The Tobin tax, suggested by Nobel Laureate economist James Tobin, is a tax on short-term currency conversions.

Other New Yorkers who might have been sympathetic to a more coherent protest were also repelled by the Bohemian scene, Ms. Bellafante said.

“The Wednesday of the first week, I wrote about a woman who was sort of dancing with her top off in Liberty Plaza,” she said. “She then starts to represent to the passerby what the movement is about and that’s kind of embarrassing ... I just think that tactically they need to step up their game.”

Ms. Bellafante's column appeared online Friday night, unfortunate timing considering the protest quickly changed tenor the next day after 80-some demonstrators were arrested. The grassroots movement has galvanized rapidly since then. As of Sunday, one member of the finance committee said the group was taking in close to $1,000 a day in crumpled ones and fives donated on site. In just two days, the media center went from a laptop and an umbrella to a miniature CNN newsroom with a generator, restricted entry and more than five computers. The movement bought its spokesman Mr. Bruner, an unemployed 23-year-old college grad, a BlackBerry.

Ms. Bellafante wrote a second story following on her "spectacles" piece, "For Police, Another Protest Brings Another Overreaction," in which she expressed a measured optimism. "Specific ambitions still had not emerged, but a new intensity had begun to replace the limp theatrics," she wrote.

"Like night and day!" Arun Gupta, a founding editor of the free paper The Indypendant and one of the creators of the pop-up newspaper The Occupied Wall Street Journal, said of Ms. Bellafante's coverage. "The first piece she wrote--that was a hit piece ... then she writes this other piece that, it flips it around, where she compares the police to a three-year-old having a tantrum."

Of the coverage at large, he was bullish. "It's definitely gotten better," he said. "The best PR they ever got was the cops pepper-spraying a white woman."

The media narrative definitely changed after a video emerged of two apparently non-violent protesters being pepper-sprayed by a senior police officer, said one sympathetic reporter who was covering the protest for a major New York daily but did not want to speak for attribution.

"The key point was conflict, which every media person loves,” he said. “You have a group of gutterpunks and over-educated college students sitting around talking about things--that's not a story. It's a story when those people clash with police."

But even as the reporters thirst for violence and the TV cameras gravitate toward the outrageous, reports are coming in with increasing nuance. The Daily News ran a story about the packages being shipped to the protest every morning. "What started as a loosely organized sit-in to protest the practices of Wall Street has grown into something much larger and harder to define--an ever-changing, ultra-democratic clamor for social change," wrote staffer Christina Boyle. What happened to "spoiled brats"?

(Full disclosure: The Observer has produced about three dozen items on the protest since its inception displaying varying degrees of snark. “I think their outrage is well founded,” said executive editor Aaron Gell, whose first item on the protest on observer.com was titled, “The Wall Street Protesters: What the Hell Do They Want?” “My tone was skeptical, but my point was that if you’re opening on Broadway, you need to get your act together. And they seem to be doing that.”)

European outlets were more likely to take the protest seriously before any pepper spray was unleashed, said Victoria Sobel, a protester who works on the finance and media committees. She said the European media seemed more "excited." The media team has received interview requests from European outlets including Radio France and independent newspaper in Slovenia, we were told. One Bangladeshi journalist who was in town covering the United Nations was "ecstatic," another media team member, Julien Harrison, told The Observer. "This is a story," said one reporter from the Paris-based Anka News Agency who had been covering the protest since the first day. He was sympathetic to the claims by some protesters of a deliberate media blackout. There are those who believe the coverage has been directed by powerful players pulling strings behind the scenes.

But the reality seems more complex. And like the protesters, the journalists are driven by varying motivations.

"The local and national media were more skeptical in a hopeful way," said Ms. Sobel, who has been giving interviews since the early days of the protest. "A lot of people thought this was going to happen in 2008, and it meant a lot to a lot of people that it didn't happen in 2008. You really expected to see maybe the unions do something at that moment and it never happened."

But as the protest coheres, the media response is "falling into place," she said.

We were speaking with Ms. Sobel at a table in the McDonald's on Broadway half a block away from the protest, which serves as the unofficial green zone, with a steady stream of both protesters and police. As we spoke, the Anka News reporter sat down nearby to upload photos. "They are saying 700 now," he said gravely, referring to the number of arrests. "This is a big story."

CORRECTION: The original version of this story said ABC's T.J. Winick was interviewing a Columbia University student; in fact the young man was a professor. The Observer regrets the error.

John Farley of MetroFocus, jailed for covering the protests (photo via MetroFocus/Sam Lewis)

(Though not all-inclusive, this page will be updated regularly. Have a suggestion? Leave it in the comments!)

Two months in, Occupy Wall Street media coverage has swelled from a fringe movement to the importance of a daily beat. To guide you through this media saturation, the Observer presents the best stories and angles from the worldwide OWS news desk, including coverage of the media “blackout” when the protests began in September. (But be sure to check out our coverage as well.)

October 31

The New York Times "With Generators Gone, Wall Street Protestors Try Bicycle Power"

October 11

The New York Times "Want to Get Fat on Wall Street? Try Protesting"

October 4

Mother Jones "From Oakland to Melbourne, Over 2,000 Occupy Arrests (Map)"

The Media Blackout

While supporters can no longer complain that there is a media blackout on "Occupy Wall Street," here's a timeline breakdown on some of the bigger media stories about the media's noncoverage of the movement from September.

September 17th (1st day of protest):

ABC blog: "Protesters Begin Effort to ‘Occupy Wall Street’"

CBS Local: "Demonstrators From Across Nation Descend On NYC To ‘Occupy’ Wall Street"

Bloomberg News: "Protesters Converge on Lower Manhattan, Plan ‘Occupation’"

New York Daily News: "Protestors joined by social media rail against Wall St. greed - forcing NYPD to lock down streets"

Even Fox News had a story the first day: Demonstrators 'Occupy Wall Street' to Protest Influence of Money on U.S. Politics

September 18th (2nd day of protest):

(A slow Sunday for the MSM.)

Huffington Post: NYPD Shuts Down Wall Street

September 19th (3rd day of protest):

Bloomberg News:  "Wall Street Areas Blocked as Police Arrest Seven in Protest"

The Guardian: "Wall Street protesters: over-educated, under-employed and angry"

The New York Times: "Wall Street Protests Continue, With at Least 6 Arrested"

The New York Observer: "Wall Street Faces the Wrath of Anonymous During Weekend Protest"

But with all that print news, it still took the networks a little longer to catch up. On September 20, Dylan Ratigan had a correspondent try to talk to the people involved, using the protests as a jumping off point for a roundtable discussion about America's economy.

One day later, Keith Olbermann took to CurrentTV to complain about the media blackout over the protests, and then called the institutions who were covering it a "piece of a crap." *Cough Cough*

Michael Moore came on Mr. Olbermann's show two days later to complain on the media about the media's blackout.

So we guess by Mr. Moore and Mr. Olbermann's own definition, it wasn't until Lawrence O'Donnell's wrathful indictment of the NYPD and Deputy Inspector Anthony Bologna on his September 26 broadcast that the media blitzkrieg really started. But even when the shows started interviewing protestors, they were more focused on the actions of the police than what the protesters were fighting about.

Honestly, who could blame them? The collective known as Occupy Wall Street wasn't just one entity, but a collection of many different organizations and ad hoc groups, making it harder for the press to identify what, exactly, these people were protesting. Gina Bellefante from The New York Times took a pretty critical view of the entire spectacle in an article that ran on the September 23, summing up the protest as a cause that was "virtually impossible to decipher." She was missing the point, but the lack of a singular game plan or argument for the protesters baffled a lot of the media.

Then there's the blurry boundary between citizen journalism and the protestors themselves: John Farley of MetroFocus was detained and put in a jail cell for nine hours after he went to cover the September 24 protests. Wonkette's Riley Waggaman has reported live from the scene, but admits that he supports and identifies with Occupy Wall Street's ethos on corporate America. It's hard to remain a disinterested party when you keep getting mace in your eye, which leads to a somewhat OWS-skewed perspective. On the other side of the coin we see protestors like Nathan Schneider from Wagingnonviolence.org handling the P.R. for the OWS at their DIY press center while writing pieces for The Nation and the Huffington Post about the occupation. Objective journalism, this is not.

And then there were the comparisons: Was this how the lefties did a Tea Party? If so, the media certainly weren't treating the two with equal coverage, argued Anthony DeRosa at Reuters. Open-source guru Tim O'Reilly was actually surprised that the Tea Party wasn't attending Occupy Wall Street, since both organizations are (theoretically, at least) against the government taking money out of the hands of small business owners and using it to bail out banks. He also didn't like the way those damn kids dressed.

The protests have also been compared to hippie festivals like Bonnaroo and Burning Man, as was suggested in Thursday night's this Daily Show clip.

But it was OWS's self-comparison to the Arab Spring uprisings (since they both relied on new forms of social media activism) that drew the chilliest reception over at The Wall Street Journal:

In Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Syria and Libya, young people put guns in their hands and their lives on the line. They dropped the keyboards after their Internet access was cut off. In contrast, America's Arab spring looks more like hibernation. It begins and ends with a social-media discussion thread.

That could change, of course, if the kids simply stop grumbling with their Facebook friends. They might try going out and taking it to their enemies.

Which, ironically, is exactly the one thing OWS did accomplish successfully: Taking it to the streets and organizing an IRL meet-up to face the enemy...or at least a national symbol of it...on Wall Street.

Finally fed up with the media's treatment (or lack thereof), Arun Gupta of The Indypendent started his own newspaper, The Occupy Wall Street Journal, which debuted Saturday, October 1.

Currently there are almost as many reporters covering OWS as there are actual protesters. Even Fox News has got in the game, though their attempts to dismiss the assembly by editing their interviews had quite a backlash. Greta Van Susteren was forced to comment after the New York Observer revealed an un-aired interview with an advocate.
The New York Times has also changed its tune, putting coverage of the protests on the front page of the paper. This may be due to the Brooklyn Bridge march that lead to over 700 arrests...and the fact that cuffs were slapped on one of their own freelance reporters. Gawker's Adrien Chen was allowed to go through.

Andrew Ross Sorkin from Dealbook made a surprisingly persuasive argument for OWS being more than "street theater," saying:

At times it can be hard to discern, but, at least to me, the message was clear: the demonstrators are seeking accountability for Wall Street and corporate America for the financial crisis and the growing economic inequality gap.

And that message is a warning shot about the kind of civil unrest that may emerge — as we’ve seen in some European countries — if our economy continues to struggle.

It was an unexpected announcement that ABC suggests had nothing to do the recent Comcast takeover of NBC, while The Times notes that Olbermann is getting the Conan treatment and will not be back on the air for "an extended period of time."

The fake correspondence was published on the Philadelphia gossip site Phawker.com, which has since published a correction. The email exchange began when Philadelphia Daily News reporter Stu Bykofsky contacted the Olbermann for an article he was writing about the suspension controversy. Olbermann was temporarily suspended by Griffin on Friday after an article in Politico revealed that he gave money to three Democrats during the last election in violation of NBC ethics policies.

Bykofsky emailed the address keith@keitholbermann.com and received a series of responses eviscerating his article and berating MSNBC management.

"I could have Phil Griffin fired tomorrow if I felt like it, trust me. And if he keeps yapping about me in public, I may," read one of the responses to Bykofsky.

The thing is, KeithOlbermann.com is actually owned by The Daily Caller. A visit to the site shows an archive of Daily Caller posts about Olbermann. Carlson purchased Keitholbermann.com in July from a Virginia man named Jason Drake. Drake told The Observer on Monday that Carlson bought the site from him for $400.

At the time of the purchase, Carlson wrote a blog post that explained his plans for KeithOlbermann.com.

“We plan to make The Daily Caller the one-stop online shop for Keith Olbermann commentary … We will be THE Keith Olbermann superstore,” Carlson wrote.

Bykofsky told The Observer that he "believed the emails to be coming from Olbermann."

"I was fooled, but I was fooled while I honestly tried to reach Keith Olbermann," Bykofsky said.

Carlson hosted the show "Tucker" on MSNBC from 2005 until 2008 when it was cancelled due to low ratings. He launched the Daily Caller in January. Carlson and Phil Griffin have not responded to requests for comment from The Observer.

Olbermann, who returns to primetime tonight, did apologize "for having precipitated such anxiety and unnecessary drama," but his only regrets seem to stem from the way his superiors handled the situation.

"You should know that I mistakenly violated an inconsistently applied rule – which I previously knew nothing about – that pertains to the process by which such political contributions are approved by NBC," Olbermann wrote.

Network ethics policies prohibit staffers at MSNBC and NBC News from making political donations without obtaining prior approval. Olbermann may have been unaware of the policy and MSNBC's application of its ethics rules was reportedly iconsistent, but neither of those excuses address his failure to disclose the contributions on air.

At least one of the candidates who received money from Olbermann, Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva, also appeared on "Countdown." Olbermann never disclosed this to his viewers. In his statement, Olbermann said he would have come clean about the contributions, but was prevented from doing so by MSNBC.

"I did not attempt to keep any of these political contributions secret; I knew they would be known to you and the rest of the public. I did not make them through a relative, friend, corporation, PAC, or any other intermediary … When a website contacted NBC about one of the donations, I immediately volunteered that there were in fact three of them; and contrary to much of the subsequent reporting, I immediately volunteered to explain all this, on-air and off, in the fashion MSNBC desired," Olbermann wrote.

Olbermann may not have hid his donations, but he didn't tell MSNBC or his viewers about the gifts until they were revealed by Politico. Full disclosure is one of the basic concepts of ethical journalism and a disclosure statement after the fact is worth very little. Proper disclosures allow consumers to more fairly evaluate the content in a media outlet. Admitting to something after it is discovered isn't a disclosure; it's getting caught with your pants down.

Supporters have argued that Olbermann and his fellow cable news hosts practice opinion journalism and should be entitled to their opinions. No one has asked Olbermann not to have a point of view, or even, not to give money to politicians. MSNBC policy doesn't ban campaign contributions outright, it simply asks staffers to reveal them to the network in advance.

Olbermann claims he "immediately volunteered" to "explain all this … in the fashion MSNBC desired," but Politico's Mike Allen says anonymous sources at the network have told him that the network suspended Olbermann because of his refusal to apologize. If it was indeed a public apology MSNBC was looking for, Olbermann's statement clearly didn't satisfy them.