Atomic Nerds

Seems some members of the media are bent out of shape that the Tea Party Convention is only inviting a few news outlets, and that all of those news outlets are either directly sympathetic to their cause or, in the words of the Convention organizers, “have never bashed, misrepresented, or maliciously distorted the Tea Party movement, its events, or its adherents”. Even Jake Tapper, whom I normally respect for regularly recalling that his role in life includes keeping a critical eye on the government rather than cheerleading it, was bitching about it.

The American Thinker (slightly pompously) makes the point that the right to free association also includes the right to, well, not associate- up to and including with the media, and that to do otherwise has a pretty big stifling effect on a movement that may face hostility. This point is entirely true, though I don’t really think it’s why these media members are pulling the sour-grapes routine or what I think the central one is. Nobody was suggesting that the Tea Partiers ought to be forced to include the press in the name of public good, after all.

It’s that the self-same media is used to always being included in anything relevant, even if the people doing relevant things want them to die in a fire, because the organizers usually want the publicity that badly. When the Tea Party movement started up, the media leapt to the conclusion that they were an irrelevant and silly fringe, and they wasted no time in mocking and deriding them, often to the point of open scorn during what were supposed to be objective reports on national TV. MSNBC and Anderson Cooper called them “teabaggers”, again on national TV- a phrase that refers to an act that is most definitely not prime-time friendly and was clearly intended as a juvenile way of belittling the protestors. The term has since caught on, become standard in the non-conservative media and in political attack ads, and has become nearly more mainstream under that meaning than its original one.

But what happened was the Tea Partiers didn’t stay fringe. They captured a massive undercurrent of dissatisfaction, and managed to sweep up enough ticked off independents and beleagured taxpayers to have a fair amount to do with Scott Brown’s victory in thought-to-be-unassailable Massachusetts- and thus make it crystal clear that no matter how much scorn Democrats and their media friends poured on them, the Tea Partiers were very much relevant and the reflexive derision started to sound like desperation and elitism rather than merited dismissal of genuine kooks.

To which I say: too fucking bad. As it turns out, the Tea Partiers never DID need the media’s help for publicity, don’t need it now, and are completely free to invite whomever they choose to their events- and keep whomever they DON’T want out. Next time, try acting professional and maybe you won’t be off the invite list to cover the next relevant movement’s meeting that comes along. Pointing out that the included networks were chosen on pure partisanship is the height of hypocrisy- it was blatant partisan bias on the parts of those networks and journalists that turned the Tea Partiers hostile in the first place, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of legwork to turn it up.

Want to be invited to the party? Don’t call the first people at the table radicals, un-American, extremists, or make gay sex jokes about them on national television. This shouldn’t be something any journalist needs a reminder of.

Posted current events |