"They haven't made their point"
The most benign of the viewers' emails and texts being read out on Sky News and the BBC during and in the immediate aftermath of the occupation were expressing variations on a belief that the eviction was the appropriate course of action because the protest proved itself inefficacious - the protestors "had their chance" but failed to get their point across and so should now gracefully accept their defeat and retire. The chief problem with this perspective is that it's belief that society functions as a great floor debate where everyone has an equal platform and opportunity to speak and the most cogent arguments will always win out. This is, of course, nonsense - the reason that the Occupy movement operated by taking hold of such a prominent public space as St Paul's is precisely because the usual denizens of the City of London are afforded much greater opportunity to provide public apologetics for their commercial agendas than those making up the camp outside St Paul's in the last four months.
Just consider the airtime Stephen Hester and his ilk are given to explain not only their own continued receipt of vast sums of lucre, but also to couch the continued losses and failure of the banks they run in terms of success. Viewed in this light, I would say that the protest has actually been extremely successful in raising consciousness of the inequalities of unencumbered capitalism - at the most simple level its continued use of the figure of 99% (as opposed to the richest 1% of the population who control 38.5% of global wealth) is a good example of one of the more memorable messages emerging from the camp.
As for the reporting itself - the use of 'vox pop' often masquerades as an display of journalistic balance or objectivity; in many instances it claims to be reflective of our democratic society - the viewer's 'man in the street' opinions add to a colourful panoply of views alongside the opinions of politicians, clergy and protestors themselves. This actually creates a false dichotomy between protestors and 'the public', as if purpose of the Occupy movement or any form of protest is actually to act as a form of popular, X Factoresque, electioneering. This being the case, these protestors have, we're told, lost "the public vote". In fact, vox pop is merely a disguised media contrivance that has nothing to do with true democracy: the opinions sought and aired are selected and the clear bias of coverage usually lies in this selection.
"None of these people work"
A particularly common stroke in press coverage of most protests or challenges to the civil and economic status quo is the selection and isolation of individual figures and the use of seemingly 'material facts' about them to discredit the movement as a whole. The irony in the case of Occupy LSX is that many media outlets, in their strident defence of the cathedral dedicated to him, forgot St Paul's admonition "For the body is not one member, but many". The use of individuals to shape opinion of the whole produced many illogical and reductive results - i.e. because some protestors at the camp were middle class students their presence was supposedly an example of lazy, bourgeois indulgence rather than genuine political conviction - the tents outside St Pauls perhaps not dissimilar to the tents at Glastonbury. In actual fact, the better coverage shows that students, unemployed, homeless and employed people all contributed to the life of the camp. It was noticeable in live coverage of the eviction that the BBC would frequently gloss over speaking to the middle-aged homeless claiming an affinity with the protest in favour of young people with non-regional accents - those who accord with the now fixed, almost clichéd, media narrative of pampered Charlie Gilmour-type students.
It is interesting to compare this 'laziness' argument with the repositioning of right-wing media after the riots last summer when several convincing cases were made for the argument that the people involved were the disenfranchised poor. Suddenly we were bombarded with a handful of examples of rioters who had jobs - how could they have rioted when they were employed? They weren't disaffected after all - they were all just mindless yobs! Where the common adage is that your right to complain is weak and inauthentic if haven't you don't 'participate' in society by working, it's worth nothing how the media decides the reverse can be equally true when it suits.
"Just compare this nonsense with real protestors in the Middle East or Russia"
Analogies with Tahrir Square or Russian pro-democracy movements have been used as a stick with which to beat the Occupy protestors - the Occupy camp's reluctance to move on when merely told was ungrateful. They should consider themselves fortunate that they live in a country where they have a right to free assembly. The flaw in this argument is the notion of human and civil 'rights' themselves. The problem for those trying to discredit the camp in this way is that rights are exactly that. Freedom to protest is not a privilege people should thank their leaders for before kindly moving on when asked. What is instead missing from the references to Russia and the Middle East in the context of discussions about an occupation in the heart of the City of London is the parade of egregiously wealthy oligarchs, sheikhs and political despots and the flow of their money into the City to be protected, defended and increased, often at the expense of their own people.