"Occupy Protesters: Professional and Well Educated"

[limpyhobbler]

1. Co-Author of New Occupy Study: Media Misled by Harping on Household Salaries

by Allison Kilkenny in The Nation on January 30, 2013 - 12:37 PM ET

...Setting aside the fact that this was a damned if they do, damned if they don't moment for Occupy—they're either poor, dirty hippies or the sons and daughters of the wealthy elite, but never, ever Americans exercising their First Amendment rights—the narrative constructed by the media simply isn't true.

Even one of the study's co-authors takes issue with how the media is interpreting the study.

Professor Stephanie Luce emphasizes emphatically that the data represents household income—not individual income, an important distinction to keep in mind because the data skews higher than real income for Occupiers.

"The problem was we did not end up reporting on individual income. About a quarter of our respondents earned less than $15,000 a year, but since many of them were students, we weren't sure if that would be misleading and if that would be a level of detail that would take a lot to go into describing those households," says Luce...

from http://www.thenation.com/node/172531

Also the sample was taken at just one rally in 2012. That rally wasn't necessarily representative of the whole "movement". And the sample group wasn't even necessarily representative of the whole rally. Incomes in New York City are not representative of incomes in the rest of the country.