The mainstream media willfully ignored the Tea Party Movement last summer and fall. I wrote about it, as did numerous others. It is not a contestable assertion. Now, though, they are attending the Tea Party convention in Nashville in droves, thinking that absolves them of their earlier malfeasance.
Here are a couple of lame excuses:
Speculation about political ideology aside, the tea party story does present some unique challenges for 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.
But wait. While they may have ignored the movement at its beginnings, and the massive Sept. 12, 2009, rally in Washington, as well, they’re on the case now:
Still, in recent weeks, The New York Times, the paper conservatives love to hate, has assigned a reporter, Kate Zernike, to covering the movement, and she has produced a couple in-depth pieces analyzing countervailing efforts by tea party activists to take over 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.
The article linked above begins thusly:
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.
Dan Riehl notwithstanding, there’s only one reason every national editor in the country has pointed their reporters to Nashville, and it’s not to cover this very interesting grassroots movement.
It’s to try to find any extremist convention goer with an Obama-is-Hitler sign to use in news reports to represent the entire movement. Tea Party activists in Nashville this weekend would be wise to assume the media has not changed its view of them.
Jon Ham is publisher of Carolina Journal.