New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter may have let his personal views color his enthusiastic reception [1] of the popularity of Occupy Wall Street's '99 percent' motif, but he was right that it is cropping up in a lot of places these days, especially among liberal activists. It has certainly sunken into the collective consciousness of New York Times journalists.
One prominent example: The front page of Monday's Times featured a story by William Broad on affluent tourists taking trips on a mini submarine for a view of the Titanic, 'Plunging Deep (in Pockets) to See Titanic at 100 [2].'
Down, down, down you go, for two and a half hours, jammed with two other people in a tiny submersible, all the way to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean - and all for a glimpse, through a five- or eight-inch porthole, of the ravaged remains of the once-grand ship where the Astors and the Strauses played, dined and, in some cases, died.
The trip is not for the claustrophobic, nor the 99 percent: a two-week cruise that includes one dive, lasting eight to 10 hours, costs $60,000.
The politically freighted phrase has found its way into spots in the paper both likely (a report on banker's complaints by Jesse Eisinger of the liberal nonprofit ProPublica [3]) and unlikely (a review of three books [4] about the designer Coco Chanel).
The November 30 story 'When the Knives Come Home [5]' by food writer Julia Moskin opened: 'In the food world, chefs are the 1 percent, and the rest of us are the 99 percent.'
The November 26 Letters to the Editor page was headlined 'Inequality in the Air: The 1 Percent and the 99 [6],' with several letters from aggrieved liberals taking umbrage with a previous Times story on extra perks for first-class airline passengers.
Hard to imagine a Tea Party slogan taking a similar grip on Times writers.