New York City police in riot gear raided and cleared the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park around 1 a.m. Tuesday. As it happened—coincidentally or not—this was past press time for local papers. There was no mention of the raid in the New York Times on my doorstep this morning, and when I woke up around 5 a.m., TV news seemed just to be catching up—though my Twitter feed contained little else.
There are any number of reasons police would spring a raid like this in the middle of the night: to gain the element of surprise, to avoid daytime bystander crowds, or to “reduce the risk of confrontation in the park,” in the words of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. But the effort to clean up the park clearly also came with an effort to contain the media and reduce the risk of adverse coverage.




