“As the Occupy Wall Street message of representing 99 percent of Americans has spread across the country, news media coverage of the Occupy movement has spread to the front pages of newspapers and the tops of television newscasts,” The N.Y. TimesBrian Stelter reports in a 10.13 story. “Coverage of the movement last week was, for the first time, quantitatively equivalent to early coverage of the Tea Party movement in early 2009, according to data released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.”

Related: “The U.S. anti-corporate movement has inspired an offshoot occupation in London,” reports The Washington Post‘s Suzy Khimm. “It will kick off this Saturday with a rally headed to the London Stock Exchange, as Dealbook notes today. OccupyLSX describes itself as part of a global movement against ‘corporate greed’ and inequality.”

Related: “With democracy in crisis a true grassroots movement pointing out the flaws in our system is the first step in the right direction. Count me among those supporting and cheering on the Occupy Wall Street movement,” Al Gore wrote last night on his online journal.

Back to Stelter: “The data confirms an anecdotal sense that the movement, which slowly gained speed last month, entered the nation’s collective consciousness for the first time last week, when President Obama was asked about it at a news conference and when national television news programs were first anchored from the Wall Street protest site.

“In the first full week of October, according to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, the protests occupied 7 percent of the nation’s collective news coverage, up from 2 percent in the last week of September. Before then, the coverage was so modest as to be undetectable by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which surveys 52 news outlets each week to produce a weekly study of news coverage.

“The study released Wednesday showed that cable news and radio, which had initially ignored the protests almost entirely, started to give the protests significant coverage last week, often with a heavy dose of positive or negative opinion attached.”