On Thursday night, Sean Hannity sat down with Harrison Schultz, an Occupy Wall Street organizer. The segment was confrontational right off-the-bat — with Hannity questioning Schultz about the violence in the movement, and eventually leaving nothing unsaid, with a fiery “suggestion” to Schultz.

On Friday, March 30, progressive activists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn made a visit to the recently reconstituted OWS encampment in New York City. There, Ayers and Dohrn lamented the decline of the American economy even as the military expanded. Both took the opportunity to praise the spirit of the “occupiers.”

Yesterday marked not only St. Patrick’s Day, but the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. And to mark the date, protestors in New York gathered in Zuccotti Park once again to show that the movement is alive and well. However, the protest was short-lived, as the police ended up sweeping the park and ending the demonstration, arresting some of the protestors over the course of the day.

On his show Tuesday night, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly took on “committed left-wingers” / your perpetual Friday night dates Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (that’s right, the ice cream guys) for their attempts to raise nearly $2 million in order to give out “grants” to Occupy protesters.

Traditions used to mean something in America. Values used to mean something. And family used to mean something too. However, in recent years, some biased members of the Mainstream Media (by “mainstream media” I, of course, mean “the most popular cable news channels in the country”) are attempting to destroy our national heritage for political reasons. Just a few months ago it was Eric Bolling attacking The Muppets, and now Fox Business Network’s Lou Dobbs is telling us that we can’t let our kids watch The Lorax. When will this War on Children’s Movies end?

With nationwide Occupy camps being shut down and cleared out of parks across the country, those halcyon days of Fall 2011 — protesters wiping their butts on police cars, job fair organizers being heckled, Miley Cyrus music videos, hipster cops, and awesome bicycle technology — are but distant memories. But they aren’t forgotten. One institution of higher learning, Chicago’s Roosevelt University, is offering a course on the five-month old movement, as Occupy Chicago played out across the street from its campus.

While the Occupy movement is mostly subdued in the various places it awoke in the rest of the country, the protesters at Occupy Oakland, partially motivated by historic local tensions with police there, are clashing with police in the streets, and on The O’Reilly Factor last night, host Bill O’Reilly discussed the potential good that can come from these protests with guests, who did not manage to convince him to embrace the movement.

As CNN pointed out this afternoon, not everyone in the so-called 99 percent is simply “not the one percent” — there’s a range of different economic groups and diverse backgrounds within that huge chunk of the population and, as with many ultimately well-meaning movements, certain groups’ specific needs or concerns tend to be shut out or overlooked. Enter a new movement: “Occupy the Hood,” which is, evidently, trying to reach out to minorities sympathetic to but disconnected from the Occupy movement.

Occupy Wall Street continues to make its mark in demonstrations across the country, but one of their latest attempts to demonstrate in public got nasty quickly when riots broke out between the protestors and police officers. Over 300 protestors were arrested yesterday, after police witnessed many of them tearing down fences and construction equipment.

During a campaign stop in Charleston, South Carolina, a revved-up Mitt Romney got into a spirited tussle with an Occupy Wall Street-sympathetic questioner. “What will you do to support the 99%, seeing as how you are part of the 1%?” “Let me tell you something!” Romney exclaimed. “America is a great nation because we’re a united nation, and those who are trying to divide the nation, as you’re trying to do here, and as our president’s doing are hurting this country seriously…America’s right and you’re wrong!”

During CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin, reporter Amber Lyon from the network’s Special Investigations unit took an undercover look at the secretive group, Anonymous, which has dominated the news for the past few years including recent involvement with the Occupy movement. What they discovered might surprise viewers.

Occupy Wall Street was undeniably one of the biggest news stories of 2011. The movement was an important factor in “The Protestor” being named Time Magazine’s 2011 Person of the Year. Well, the Occupiers are finally getting recognized by another important institution. Yes, that’s right. The American Dialect Society has announced that “occupy” is 2011′s word of the year because of its influence on the global zeitgeist over the past few months.

There’s been discussion brewing In The Blogs™ about “Part of the 99 Percent,” a song about the Occupy movement from the point of view of someone who was once a “1 Percenter,” lost all her (or, whatever, his) money, then became part of the 99 percent and found happiness and clarity. The song was created [...]

Last night, hundreds of Occupy Wall Street protesters stormed Zuccotti Park, tearing down metal barricades and clashing with police, leading to the arrests of 68 activists. In a celebration of the group’s activism in 2011, a crowd of 500 demonstrators chanted “We are the 99 percent”. One officer was injured during the protest.

In the world of the microscopic news cycle, a year is a mighty long time. Think “dog years” on steroids. Over the course of the past year, in thousands (around 7,500 ) of articles and millions (between 3 and 4 million) of words, Mediaite has covered the ups and downs of that whizzing, ricocheting media world. In case you lost track in that sea of information, we’ve compiled a list of 2011 Media Winners and Losers that we hope will be the start  of a conversation, not the end of one. Here, in no particular order, are Mediaite’s 2011 Media Winners and Losers.

One of the biggest conservative criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that it has been too focused on protesting corporations and not focused enough on protesting Congress. Well, OWS protestors are now calling for a massive occupation of the National Mall when Congress returns from its winter recess on January 17th. The Occupy movement has been revitalized by recent outrages over the National Defense Authorization Act and the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act.

As we enter the new year, the most important question on people’s mind is whether or not the world will officially end as we know it by next December. But let’s face it, if 2012 is really going to bring about end times (because we should clearly be basing our plans for the end on the Mayan calendar), it’s going to have a tough act to follow. Many people are writing up 2011 as the year of this or the year of that, but let’s keep things in perspective here: 2011 was the year that the world descended into random chaos.

In being part of a movement that takes a stand against corporatism, it’s very important to be forward-thinking. Also, forward-looking. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has been vigorously campaigning for Mitt Romney in Iowa, and introduced the presidential candidate in a recent stump speech.

Police arrested five Occupy protesters who were camped outside the Des Moines campaign headquarters of Republican frontrunner Ron Paul.

Many many months ago, when Glenn Beck, one of the highest-rated cable news hosts on television, released his first work of “faction” The Overton Window, our editors promised a “100-part” review of the novel to accompany Beck’s somewhat forgotten “100-year” plan that stole the headlines in summer 2010. They were kidding, of course, but I somehow find myself continuing the tradition upon giving the novel my first read this weekend, and finding that hindsight adds a context to it that surely was not intended, but renders the work that much more significant: the protesters in the novel who Beck described as a fictionalization of the Tea Party Movement resemble what we now know as “Occupy Wall Street” in ideology and problematic behavior far more than they do the 2009 explosion of right-wing activism the Tea Party represents.

While in New York, the cleaning up of Zuccotti Park slowed the momentum of the increasingly large and difficult to control Occupy Wall Street movement significantly, many cities across America have yet to clean up their own “occupations,” Nashville among them. The Tennessee protesters had an ugly mishap this weekend, however, as the protesters erupted into fisticuffs on Christmas Day.

Derek and John Tabacco, the founders of the Free Wall Street Now movement, appeared as guests on Your World With Neil Cavuto Monday, just moments after wrapping up the first Occupy Wall Street job fair. With 400 jobs across various levels of employment being offered, the Tabacco brothers deemed it, “an exciting day,” before revealing some of the actions taken by the protesters to drive them away.

Last month, Occupy Wall Street protestors almost ended up in the background of some scenes for The Dark Knight Rises, the final movie of Christopher Nolan‘s Batman trilogy, but the producers ended up scrapping the idea. Now a popular TV show is facing its own problems trying to incorporate the Occupiers into its plotline. Law [...]

Another day, another video of someone attempting to heckle Chris Christie. This time, Christie got the Occupy Wall Street “Human Microphone” treatment at a Mitt Romney rally in Iowa.

Really, at this point, you have to have a kind of bad, masochistic streak to decide you want to shout this guy down. It’s like an ugly person buying front row tickets to a Don Rickles show. Come on, you know what’s gonna happen.

Back in November, on the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street’s origin, Derek and John Tabacco — two Wall Street-area small business owners — headed down to the protests holding signs that said “Occupy A Desk” and “Get a Job.” Dubbing themselves the “Wall Street Freedom Fighters,” the brothers were the first real signs of an anti-OWS protest, but stressing to us at the time that they weren’t against the principles of what OWS stood for, they simply wanted the protesters out of Zuccotti Park because they were hurting their businesses and area tourism. Now the duo has decided to do something more than just hold a sign.