Tea Party

Americans showed up by the thousands all over the States to participate in a Tax Day Tea Party. The event was like an elaborately coordinated Civil War reenactment, but instead of guns, people wielded signs that read “No Taxation Without Deliberation,” “Taxed Enough Already,” and “Stop Generational Theft,” to name a few. Reminiscent of a certain other tea party held in 1773, crowds cheered in Massachusetts as a group dressed in 18th-century fashion tossed crates of tea into the Boston Harbor.

The idea for the tea party has been attributed to a few Seattle bloggers who first brought together conservatives on February 16 to rally against too many government handouts. Colorado and Arizona followed suit, lighting a small fire primarily under Republican Americans that was fanned into flame by CNBC’s Rick Santelli’s public blasting of Obama’s policies on air. He voiced, “The government is promoting bad behavior,” and said that he wanted a tea party to happen in Chicago. Santelli angrily declared, “No more.”

Expectedly, media and “news” outlets had a field day, turning the demonstration into a downright spectacle. It is strange because up to this date, there was little to no media coverage, with the exception of Fox News. One would think that a nationwide demonstration of this size, that has gathered momentum in the way it has, would be news worthy, or at least worth mention. Funnily enough, all of this was breaking news to even the Boston Globe, a newspaper in the city in which the original Tea Party took place; they decided to report from Kentucky and disregard their local angle. The rest of the media finally caught on and “covered” the event.

Putting all political affiliation aside, the unprofessional journalism and biased media coverage was jarring, and Susan Roesgen of CNN is a prime example. In a field report in the middle of the Chicago Tea Party, Roesgen interrogated a young father holding his 2 year old son, asking why he had attended the protest. He began to say, “"Because I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln's primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right…" when Roesgen interrupted and asked, “What does this have to do with your taxes? Do you realize that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?” In response, the man said “Lincoln believed that people had the right to share in the fruits of their own labor and that government should not take it. And we have clearly gotten to that point…" before being, again, rudely interrupted. Roesgen combatively responded, “Did you know, that the state of Lincoln gets $50 billion out of this stimulus? That's $50 billion for this state, sir." She concluded the said interview with, “I think you get the general tenor of this,” and wrote off the entire event as not friendly for family viewing, anti-government, and most laughably, anti-CNN because in her opinion, it was “highly promoted by right-wing, conservative network, Fox.”

Roesgen is right, Fox did advertise the Tea Parties, but she mistakes promotion actual coverage and giving it the appropriate amount of attention, when no other media outlet cared to. In fact, it appears that CNN and others (MSNBC included) ended up ceding coverage to Fox News, but then used Fox’s coverage as a reason to discredit the event.
However, the reprehensible journalism did not stop on the field. CNN and MSNBC anchors in studio made sexually suggestive puns by referring to the event as “tea bagging” and calling the demonstrators a bunch of “tea baggers” (look up the terms on Urban Dictionary if they do not immediately disgust you).

I had no idea that journalistic standards had fallen so low such that reporters and anchors create the news and become the news. I had no idea it was appropriate to outlandishly confront an interview subject or discount what an estimated quarter million Americans have to say. As the Augusta Chronicle commented, “Illegal immigrants marching in U.S. streets demanding tax-paid services and citizenship from the country they entered illegally got better treatment from the media.”

What media outlets should have reported is the objective truth. The common grievance among the party-goers seemed to be a general anger among Americans concerned about excessive government spending, bailouts, and taxes. Much of this anger was aimed at the Obama administration and its recently passed $787 billion economic stimulus bill, mostly by Republicans but by Democrats and Independents alike. The threat of big government was another common theme as former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who helped to organize the nationwide event said, “The biggest problem we have is the government is too big… real people understand that and say we can’t take the burden of a burgeoning government.”

See, that wasn’t so difficult. The real news is nice and dry. It is supposed to be. Save your comments and opinions for your blogs and cable network mock-news shows. It seems the BBC News has been the only one to consistently get it right.