Media Bias

-By Warner Todd Huston

Nothing says “media bias” like coffee in the morning.

If anyone ever wanted to see an example of the bias of the Old Media no better example can be found than the different ways that it has treated the tea party movement and the coffee party astroturf effort. The tea party movement was initially ignored, then it was ridiculed, then it was attacked as dangerous, but no where in the Old Media was it treated as a valid, powerful political movement despite the literally millions of Americans that have attended them.

On the other hand, the astroturf coffee party effort created by an Obama campaign staffer was treated as a viable, important effort from the second it was announced and all that quite despite the fact that no coffee party event seems to have been able to turn out more than 20 people at a time.

Let’s look at some numbers. Just from those first tax day tea party events (April 15, 2009) the number of participants topped *500,000. And since then there have been thousands of more tea party protests of all sorts sponsored by any number of local and national groups and they, too, have turned out thousands of participants. There have been tea party participants in the millions since April of 2009.

Of course, the Old Media has done its best to downplay the number of tea party protestors. Instead of detailing the actual numbers, the Old Media continues to use the nebulous phrase “hundreds of protestors,” or when the numbers are greater the dismissive “thousands of protestors.” An excellent example of this can be seen in the great Washington D.C. protest of September of 2009. Where the foreign press noted that as many as a million flooded Washington D.C. on September 12, 2009, the American Old Media insisted on using the less accurate phrase “tens of thousands.” When asked to quantify a million people no one would use the phrase “tens of thousands,” unless, of course, they were trying to diminish the amount.

Also since April of 2009, we have seen tea party groups begin a foray into local politics. From coast to coast tea party groups have been holding candidate forums, endorsing candidates, and proffering candidates from their own ranks. Now, as it is right now this moment, we are still at a nascent stage of these electoral efforts, so it is difficult to say what will come of it. But the fact is, they’ve begun at various levels from north to south and east to west.
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Tea Party: Instantly Attacked by Old Media, Coffee Party: Immediate Respect from Old Media”