Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman shows how it's done. Displeased with your boss, freelance editor or coworkers? Just refuse to share (but do share why).

I have had an NYPD-issued press pass twice. In New York City, the press is "credentialed" by the police department, independently of the City, at its discretion. The process is slow and you have to go downtown for quite a while. Both times I have been very careful to play their game. You have to bring published clips, among their required materials, that prove you need to deal with things like "robbery scenes, fires, homicides, train wrecks, bombings, plane crashes, where there are established police or fire lines at the scene." Now I'm by no means a real reporter's reporter, but I succeeded both times by bringing past stories that had, like, scenery of Hillary Clinton in a St. Patrick's Day parade and what have you. On my most recent successful trip, I went with real reporters—and some of them got denied, and most definitely shouldn't have been, while by working the system, I scored. The point that you'd need to be already doing that reporting to get credentialed (by the police!) to do that reporting is a good one. All this is a preamble to pointing out that yesterday we got used by the mayor's office. READ MORE

Put together by Josh Stearns, this document has been a great resource to track journalists working on Occupy Wall Street stories around the country who've been arrested. So who are they? Only seven of the 25 arrested are full-time employed traditional news-gathering employees. A number were student reporters; a few were interns; a larger number were freelancers. Some work for traditional "objective" news organizations; others work for "non-objective" news organizations, like Alternet and Indypendent Reader. This means something—mostly about the media and what it is now, possibly also who the police perceive as media and relation of reporter to demonstration. But with the exception of a Journal-Sentinel photographer, two AP folks and one Daily News reporter, no major traditional news outlets have (yet!) had staff reporters or photographers arrested. As Erika Fry pointed out last month in CJR, this also has to do with who police departments consider a journalist, and why they decide that. (Turns out, wearing a shirt that says "reporter" doesn't always help in the eyes of the police, as one Rochester student discovered.) A minimum of 40% of people news-gathering who were arrested are women. READ MORE

Kay Merryweather, 34, an artist on the Lower East Side, volunteers at Trinity Church, giving out food. She said that during the financial crisis, when banks were receiving bailouts and financial executives were receiving multimillion-dollar bonuses, the church often ran out before the long lines of working poor were fed. “The bankers were getting all of these millions,” Ms. Merryweather said. “And we didn’t have enough food.” READ MORE

The hubbub around the Occupy Wall Street movement is getting ugly, and the ugly looks like it's going to spill right into the 2012 cycle. Over the next year we can completely regurgitate the language of our the 1960's generation, and, who knows, maybe even top it off with a '68-like party convention meltdown. Unhinge your jaw and get ready to swallow the rat whole and still breathing, America. The silly season is going to be sillier than ever.

In addition to accusing the bum protesters of turning New York into the filthy sewer that they've always accused New York City of already being, conservatives are desperate to inject the Occupy Wall Street movement with some good old American culture war. So far—so far— it's not working.

Plenty have rushed in to cast the movement in the stereotypical language of the 1960s. Summing up the protesters, the Daily Caller's Matthew Boyle dug deep and used a criticism of the working class that hasn't lost a step since The Road to Wigan Pier.

Boyle sure has come a long one-eighty since slamming Christian proselytizers while at Boise State.

Tea party porn director James O'Keefe was spotted at Occupy Wall Street in an outfit as over-the-top as his ACORN-assassinating pimp costume. With his banker collar and horn-rimmed spectacles, O'Keefe was clearly hoping to bait some protesters into a violent altercation, proving to his followers that they are all the patchouli pacifist hippies flower children they're painted to be.

Meanwhile, one American Spectator editor named Patrick Howley, undercover as a protester, helped lead an ill-informed raid on the Air and Space Museum in D.C. After being pepper sprayed, Howley sat down and pounded out a report that indicted the protest. Except, in his passion, he also indicted himself as a leader and escalator of the event. The American Spectator has since edited his report with no correction. (The original is here. Update: We've been told that is actually not even the original, that it's an early revision. This is said to be an original, though we don't know that first-hand. The differences are intriguing.)

A few days earlier, Michelle Malkin went on Fox and Friends and slammed the protesters, claiming Apple's founder for the conservative right as the "miracle of the spontaneous order of capitalism." Jobs had not been dead for 24 hours.

That Jobs' giving from the late 1990s through 2010 includes such conservative luminaries as Bill Bradley, Ed Kennedy, Rahm Emanuel, and—uh oh!—Nancy Pelosi was not going to get in the way of Malkin making a point.

A Tea Party leader who Tea Partiers insist doesn't speak for all of them spoke for all of them, denying that the Wall Street protests are anything like the Tea Party movement. Then, with a completely straight face, Tea Party seed group FreedomWorks wrote that the Wall Street demonstrators "may be well-intentioned but lack basic economic knowledge."

Back in January, we asked if the 99ers would become the answer to the Tea Party. While many credit the youth that now occupy Wall Street as the spark, 99ers, those who have reached the end of their unemployment benefits, were protesting Wall Street back in August of 2010. Now, the 99ers are organizing to join "the 99 percent."

So a protest movement that wasn't worth anyone's time just a couple weeks ago, and was barely worth even ridiculing 13 months ago, is now a circus. Occupy Wall Street has all of the engaging class struggle zeal, anti-Wall Street and corporate influence pizzazz and huge turnout numbers of the month-long Wisconsin protests six months ago, but right in the media's backyard and without any of the tedious need to go to Wisconsin. The event has even become a must-stop on the self-promotional tours of Kanye West, Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann. (A Glastonbury, except for assholes.)

But don't worry everybody, Al Sharpton is there too, reports TMZ!

And as the Supreme Court has ruled, corporations are assholes too. So Ben and Jerry's endorsed the protest, using the "stand with ____" declaration that's become the common go-to language of the sloppily politicized. The whole thing was probably a good inside joke with the ice creamery's billion-dollar Unilever conglomerate owners, which is battling unions over a plan to close its pension plan.

That sort of battle is going around these days. The next day in Nashville, Tea Party groups held a "We Stand with Gibson" rally in support of the guitar maker's ongoing battle over wood imports with Obama's "jackboots" at U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services. The Nazi allusions were numerous.

Then a guy defecated on an NYPD squad car.
Is America not entertained? It will be when a whole new generation meets the third party nominee, Pigasus. He's back.

Abe Sauer can be reached at abesauer at gmail dot com. He is on Twitter.

Tonight, at PowerHouse Arena, it is the Brooklyn Launch Party for Tom Scocca's Beijing Welcomes You, a nonfiction chronicle of what Beijing has so recently become. As China is now (well, as usual) so much in the news, we asked him some questions! READ MORE

"Nothing is certain but death and taxes" and, since 2007, "trend pieces about miracle fruit parties." Oh yes: "The miracle fruit party" is the trend piece that just won't die, despite that there have likely been more feature stories about miracle fruit parties than there have been actual miracle fruit parties. READ MORE

The rumors have it that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is getting released on his own recognizance today, from his current state of house arrest. I read last night's Times story three times ("Strauss-Kahn Case Seen as Near Collapse"), and it's one of those cases where the reporters are conveying more than they can say; it's good reporting and also a really poorly edited piece of garbage? Because it doesn't actually explain the situation that would result in Strauss-Kahn's change in bail status. Let us sort the anonymous "law enforcement" claims about the accuser from most to least serious! READ MORE

When Andrew Breitbart commandeered Anthony Weiner’s admission-of-digital-lecherousness press conference earlier this month, just seven minutes elapsed before he began to recount the tale of how America was first introduced to his strange media empire. In 2009, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles approached Breitbart with footage of low-level ACORN employees apparently offering to abet the proprietors of an illegal immigrant child prostitution ring. “To those who say your journalism here is suspect,” a reporter asked, “what do you tell those folks?” Breitbart snickered. READ MORE

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