American Tea Party

Some pictures at Instapundit. A few sent to me below the fold.

Howard Kurtz is briefly sane before turning back into a lunatic hack. He notes the media blackout on tea parties...

Most of the mainstream media fell down on the job, ignoring the growing movement or mocking it as a bunch of wingnuts.

The New York Times has run zero stories (the only mention was Times columnist Paul Krugman taking a brief swipe at the parties.) The Washington Post has done zip until today, with a story on two planned D.C. parties on Page B-4. The Chicago Tribune ran a 300-word story and an item on postal workers mistaking tea for a hazardous substance. The Los Angeles Times did a 500-word piece on a small protest in Hermosa Beach and has a media piece today. The Boston Globe, published in the city famed for the original tea party: nothing. CNN ran its first news story on the protests Monday (followed by a piece by me on the coverage). MSNBC's coverage had consisted of Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox mocking the "teabagging" until Chris Matthews held a more serious debate Monday.

That's "the other side" of the story he gives you for balance, in a "to be fair" type one paragraph diversion. The main side he pushes is that FoxNews is too much the cheerleader for tea parties -- arguably true, yes, but given that FoxNews' mission is to be a tonic and corrective to the lapses and biases of the MSM, ought we not dwell on the MSM black-out of the movement rather than FoxNews' "overcaffeinated" reportage?

I know for a fact that when 50 or so professional leftist protesters congregate to protest, say, the Asian Dawn ("I read about them in Time Magazine"), the MSM covers the story, often prominently. CNN's top headlines never fail to include some small potatoes lefty protest. And yet when millions of amateur protesters get together, the MSM deems it unworthy of mention.

steve_in_hb made that point to me yesterday: the left protests on a near-daily basis, because they're students or permanent casualties of the acid-fueled Summer of Love. As a general matter, they are underemployed; they don't usually have to get away from the office to protest. Furthermore, it's largely the same people week-in, week-out protesting; as such, these are largely social gatherings, street parties with placards.

They know each other. They share sticky-icky with each other. They, excuse my language, fuck each other.

Now the Tea Party movement represents millions of people who've never protested before, or who have rarely protested. And these rallies are huge -- 5000. 10,000. 15,000 strong. Not the 50 or so clump-bearded old hippies repurposing their Giant Paper Machier Dick Cheney Puppets as Giant Paper Machier Rush Limbaugh Puppets to agitate for "localism" on the radio.

And yet the media steadfastly refuses to cover the rallies. The left's rallies are "dog bites man" stories, the expected, the mundane, the frankly unimportant. The Tea Party rallies are "man bites dog," the unexpected, the novel, the... newsworthy.

And yet the blackout continues.

But FoxNews must be criticized for overplaying the events.

While the MSM makes crude, disrespectful jokes about the the protesters being enthusiasts for the deviant sexual act of lowering one's testicles into another's mouth. That's blog type snark -- and fine for blogs. But for CNN?

Let me ask MSNBC and CNN -- if a FoxNews reporter, covering a pro-choice rally, should look at a group of woman and remark, "Well, I guess we know the right place to be if you want to get laid," how would they react?

Would it be termed some harmless joke? Or would be taken as crude, demeaning, and absurdly unprofessional?

As mentioned, a couple of pictures sent to me.

From Brian Faughan at the Weekly Standard and Red State, at the DC tea party. An interloper -- can you guess who it is?

Based on that picture, I estimate the crowd size at 15-20,000, but then, the fat sack of not-funny in foreground might be screwing up my estimates.

Jeffrey is at the Chicago rally, and sneaks in an endorsement:

posted by Ace at 01:52 PM

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