Last month Times Watch noted how often [1] the liberal '99%' motif found its way into Times journalism unrelated to the Occupy Wall Street campouts.
It's happened again. Basketball reporter Howard Beck's Saturday segment for the paper's 2011 review of sports (on the apparent callousness of NBA star LeBron James) included an Occupy Wall Street shout-out (scroll down to the sixth bolded entry): 'James Reminds Fans He Is Richer Than They Are. [2]'
Before he departed the stage, before the curtain dropped and the N.B.A. plunged into six months of self-imposed darkness, LeBron James gave his critics a stinging farewell to remember.
The Miami Heat had just lost the championship to the Dallas Mavericks. James was a prime culprit, for his abysmal fourth-quarter play throughout the finals. To those who resented the Heat's bravado and bluster, this was karmic payoff. So, James was asked, did it bother him that people were celebrating his failure?
''Absolutely not,'' he said. ''Because at the end of the day, all the people that was rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I'm going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that.''
The critics could enjoy the schadenfreude - ''but they have to get back to the real world at some point,'' he said.
It was a verbal air ball, a sneering dismissal that reinforced every negative perception. James sounded callous - a 1 percenter reminding the 99 percent that he was impervious to their taunts.