Monday, March 16, 2009

Media overlooks latest Tea Party

Almost a month ago, CNBC analyst Rick Santelli suggested a new tea party--to protest Barack Obama's big government policies--while reporting from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade.

A week later, over forty Chicago Tea Parties were held, I was at the hometown edition. So was the Grant Wood statue.

About half of the major Chicago media outlets, in addition to Marathon Pundit, reported on that one, which isn't as big of a deal as it sounds, since most of the local media is headquartered within blocks of where the Chicago version took place.

Yesterday there was a Tea Party, a big one, in Cincinnati. And the mainstream media for the most part was AWOL.

From the Knoxville News Sentinel:

Handful? Let's count 'em: Cincinnati, Nebraska, Tampa, Lexington, Ridgefield, Conn., Raleigh, Orlando, D.C., Staten Island, Pasadena, Boston, Rochester, N.Y., Jacksonville, Minnesota, Cleveland, Columbus, Mo., Little Rock, Ark., Philadelphia, Kansas City, Harrisburg, Green Bay, Salt Lake City, Fullertown, Lafayette, Boise, Monterey, Maui, Yonkers, Utah, Tucson, Phoenix, Hoboken and Chicago, to name a few.

Noel Sheppard adds his take in Newsbusters:

For instance, with the exception of Fox News and CNN, no major television outlet has covered even one of these events except the original proposed by Santelli on February 19.

Compare that to how these networks practically fell all over themselves to report war protests after the public's opinion changed concerning Iraq in late 2003.

As for print, Tea Parties have been completely ignored by the Washington Post, USA Today, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Miami Herald, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

I guess Americans protesting the president's policies just isn't newsworthy when there's a Democrat in the White House.

The next big round of Tea Parties will occur on April 15. They'll be bigger, louder, and bolder than the first ones.

Eventually the MSM will be forced to report on the Tea Party movement.

And if the media, particularly newspapers, are going to stay in business, they're going to have to leave their ideology at the door and stop picking and choosing the stories they run.

Thanks again to Andrea Shea King for the story tip.

Related post:

Pitchfork populism at the Chicago Tea Party

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