Tea Party Activists vs. The Mainstream Media

Nashville Storyline: MSM vs. Tea Party Activists









Distrust of the mainstream media has been among the strongest sentiments uniting philosophically diverse tea party activists, who almost universally believe the national media have purposefully underestimated their ranks, highlighted their extremes or portrayed them as racists, rednecks or worse — that is, when it wasn’t ignoring them completely.

What then, to make of the fact that an increasing number of media outlets appear to be devoting increasing resources to chronicling the movement, culminating in a massive media presence at this weekend’s self-proclaimed National Tea Party Convention?

Organizers initially moved to limit access to outlets deemed friendly to the cause, including Fox News Channel, The Wall Street Journal, Breitbart.com, Townhall.com and World Net Daily. But they later relented and now say they’ve issued 200 press credentials, including multiple passes each to many of the elite national media organizations regularly disparaged by conservative activists as Democratic shills — the hated liberal mainstream media, or MSM.

Both the organizers and convention participants have seemed to revel in the media spotlight and have used the attention to chastise the press for what they view as shoddy coverage, though some refused to talk to reporters at all.

“The mainstream media is the enemy,” declared Bob Bunting, a retiree from Hilton Head Island, S.C., attending the convention with his wife, Nancy Bunting. “You are for socialism and Barack Obama.”

Convention organizer Judson Phillips, who in the run-up to the convention was the subject of some tough stories examining his finances and those of the for-profit company he set up to run the convention, said he doesn’t think most mainstream journalists are deliberately mischaracterizing the movement but simply do not understand it.

“There are a lot of studies out there saying that journalists tend to be significantly more liberal than the general populace,” he said. “So when you are coming from a liberal mindset — for a majority of those folks — I don’t think you understand conservatism.”

Speculation about political ideology aside, the tea party story does present some unique challenges for many political reporters It is a diffuse national movement composed of activists with a variety of philosophical motivations that lacks clear leadership to turn to for analysis or leaks and that has little presence in Washington, where most national political reporters and their sources are based.

Still, in recent weeks, The New York Times, the paper conservatives love to hate, has had its reporter who covers conservatives, Kate Zernike, produce a couple in-depth pieces analyzing countervailing efforts by tea party activists to take over local Republican parties from the ground up and Republican Party efforts to harness the energy of the movement.

Meanwhile, The New Yorker magazine, the bible of liberal intellectuals, ran a nuanced 7,500-word analysis of the movement called “The Rise of Tea Party Activism,” which the thoughtful conservative blogger Dan Riehl assessed as fair, even as he noted it highlighted “fringe elements” that some tea partiers see as embarrassing anomalies held up by critics to marginalize the movement.



“All in all, one might have expected much worse given the source,” Riehl wrote.

Even PBS’s "Frontline" is doing a documentary about the movement and is here doing interviews.

CNN, which embedded a reporter on a cross-country tea party bus tour in September, aired its own three-part tea party series last week, with segments about rifts in the movement and an unusual tea party cruise. The network, which some convention goers somewhat grudgingly praised for fair coverage, sent some name talent to cover the convention, including correspondents Mary Snow and Randy Kaye, deputy political director Paul Steinhauser and political analyst John Avalon.

In all, the network was granted credentials for 11 journalists and crew members, according to a convention list reviewed by POLITICO.

That’s more than the eight granted to Fox News, which drew early criticism for crossing the line between covering the movement and actively promoting the tea party movement. (though Fox News Sunday got five additional credentials to facilitate host Chris Wallace’s interview with former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the convention keynote speaker).

“The tea party movement was clearly something that was an important political story that we wanted to cover and try to capture for our viewers,” CNN political director Sam Feist told POLITICO. “We wanted to cover it the appropriate amount and appropriately — not to become advocates, not to become critics but simply to cover it as we would cover any other political story.”

A Fox spokesperson rejected the suggestion that the network promoted the tea party movement, and differentiated the network's news coverage from the treatment given the movement by some of the network's opinion commentators, who have actively encouraged participation in protests.

The convention credential list — which reflects granted press-pass requests, not actual attendees – also included five journalists and crew members from NBC News and four from ABC. Time magazine was allotted passes for a total of four journalists (likely including at least one photographer), while The Washington Post and The New York Times had a couple journalists each included on the list, and The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and Newsweek each had a reporter on the scene (as, of course, did POLITICO).

And C-SPAN, which has a crew at the convention, aired hours of live sessions and speeches, and intends to carry Palin’s Saturday night speech live, as do Fox, MSNBC and CNN.

That’s to say nothing of the foreign journalists from 11 countries, or the conservative media outlets Big Government (which is affiliated with Breitbart.com), PJTV and Human Events, which were credentialed for nine, five and two people, respectively.

Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart.com and Big Government, said he didn’t request the credentials but was happy to be at the convention — during which, on Friday night, he was approached by a steady stream of fans thanking him for his work and wanting to shake his hand or buy him a drink — and he stressed the need for conservative outlets to chronicle the movement.

“Every time I’ve spoken to this crowd, I ask them how many of you hold the media in contempt,” he said. “And they all raise their hands. It’s almost absurd the degree to which these people can’t stand that they’re portrayed as racist and sexist and homophobe and retrograde knuckle-draggers.” He said his goal is “to break through this New York-Washington-Hollywood, Columbia Journalism School ‘we’re the elite and you need to hear it through us’ axis of media control.”

To be sure, media bashing has always made good conservative rhetoric.

But tea party activists generally point to a few specific grievances to highlight their distrust of the media, dating back at least as far as the first widespread protests on April 15, 2009, when MSNBC’s David Shuster and CNN’s Anderson Cooper had some fun with the double entendre "Tea Bagging".

In their coverage of the explosion of protests at congressional town hall meetings last summer, some media outlets, notably MSNBC, focused heavily on the roles played by a few corporate-funded Washington conservative groups in facilitating the protests to label them as “Astroturf,” a characterization that minimized the grass-roots opposition to Democratic plans to overhaul health care.

In the wake of the Sept. 12 “Taxpayer March on Washington,” many tea party activists alleged attendance at the rally was vastly and purposefully under-reported by media outlets, which — always reluctant to wade into the charged game of giving precise crowd sizes — generally described the crowd as numbering in the “tens of thousands” or “between 60,000 and 75,000,” while conservative bloggers asserted there more than a million people.

And since then, tea partiers have grown weary of a hardening media narrative holding that in-fighting is tearing the movement apart, a theme that took hold after POLITICO revealed philosophical and personal disputes among activists nationwide.

But Chuck Smith, a 66-year-old retiree from the Knoxville area who attended the conference, acknowledged that the occasionally extremist rhetoric, combined with the overwhelmingly white composition of many tea party crowds — including the one gathered in Nashville — make it “easy to paint us as racist or extremist, and I can’t fault the mainstream media for that, but that misses the point.” Smith said reporters "don’t understand what’s happening. We’re not exclusionary. We’re everyday, hard-working Americans fighting back against big government.”

The demographic make-up and extremist sentiments are part of the movement and deserve to be covered as such, said MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who has been among the leading antagonists of the movement on the left-leaning network, and is not attending the convention.

“Certainly there must be a large percentage of disaffected, overtaxed minorities, too. How many of them have we seen at any of these events?” he said. He also pointed to the incendiary opening convention speech Thursday by former Colorado congressman and Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, who declared American values under siege from the "cult of multiculturalism," as well as "Islamification" and asserted President Barack Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."

“Thank God for Tancredo: He really tore off the mask of this thing,” said Olbermann. He asserted the speech should “wind up changing everybody's coverage” of the tea party movement. “You cannot invoke the 'literacy tests' of the Jim Crow South, or claim a president was elected by people who don’t speak English, without revolting decent Americans — conservative, liberal, and otherwise.”


Sources: Politico, AP, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Washington Post, NY Times, Biggovernment.com, Twitter, Countdown, NY Magazine, TIME, Newsweek
Sources: Politico, CNN, MSNBC, Media Matters, Youtube