When I suggested last week that "Violence Is the Answer" to the Occupy movement's relative lack of media coverage, a lot of folks in the comment thread were outraged—outraged, I tell you—presumably because they either didn't bother to read past the headline, or are too stupid to understand nuance.

Regardless, it turns out that Nate Silver at the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog has at least partially backed up my thesis with actual data, finding that media coverage of the Occupy movement has consistently spiked after each confrontation with the police:

There is no easy way to know how much coverage of the protests would have increased in the absence of these confrontations with the police. Nor, for that matter, is it possible to know how much they contributed to the size of the protests themselves, which seem to be growing.

Still, the volume of news coverage has tended to grow in a punctuated way rather than a smooth and linear fashion, having increased after each confrontation with the police.

At the time, it wasn't clear to me that merely getting oneself maced or arrested was enough to spark media coverage, but apparently I was wrong. Even a one-sided confrontation with police seems to do the trick. So perhaps Mayor McGinn really is showing solidarity with the movement when he allows the police to attempt to provoke the protesters into a news-making confrontation?