There’s been a lot of chatter about the difference in the “liberal” media’s wall-to-wall coverage of the rise of the tea party mobs in 2009 and its failure to cover the Occupy Wall Street movement today.
There are several reason for this, including the fact that tea partyists signaled that they were on the verge of violence from the outset. First, they put their propensity toward violence on display by showing up in a succession of congressional town halls where they indulged in fits of rage, supposedly over government spending, directed at their representatives. Then they began showing up armed outside venues for presidential events and other political gatherings fully armed.
“If it bleeds, it leads” in journalism. And the corporate media could not risk not being on the scene when some nutcase finally popped off and attacked a politician — except of course, there were no reporters around when that finally happened, to Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson, in January 2011, nearly two years after the tea bagger summer.
Media Matters points to another reason Occupy Wall Street is not getting the same coverage as the tea baggers did early on — the tea party was sponsored indirectly by Fox News, which gave it virtually wall-to-wall coverage that first year:
Recall that the Tea Party movement was (theoretically) born on CNBC, when reporter Rick Santelli started ranting about Obama on the floor of the Chicago stock exchange, warning viewers the new Democratic president was steering the country towards a Castro-like Cuban economy. CNBC then hyped the clip incessantly (“Shot Heard Around The Word”/”Santelli’s Manifesto”), while NBC led the evening news that night with the cable clip from its sister station, announcing Santelli’s rant to struck a “populist” chord. (In fact, polling at the time suggested a strong majority of Americans supported the Obama plan to stem foreclosures; the plan Santelli had railed against.)
Fox News then quickly claimed ownership of the anti-Obama movement, providing free [publicity] and advertising for the right-wing rallies.
As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted in 2009, Fox News was “officially promoting” the movement, which was putting it mildly. Fox News didn’t just promote the Tea Party, Fox News became its turnkey marketing and publicity machine. Fox News, with its millions of dollars in production value and tens of millions of dollars in free airtime, took a grassroots anti-Obama movement and injected it with cable TV steroids.
This offers an excellent opportunity for Current TV to make a name for itself, and, as Keith Olbermann notes in his interview with Matt Taibbi above, his show was the first national cable outlet to report extensively on the action.
Check out Taibbi’s reporting in Rolling Stone on the occupation here.
My memory was that complaints about government spending came later. I remember it starting with all those health care town halls that turned into shouting matches.
Health insurance reform brought it all to a head, but the issue that first sparked outrage within the Republican base — this was in February 2009, just five months after the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression (and three weeks after Obama was inaugurated) — was a plan floated by Larry Summers (I think) in which the government would help homeowners who were underwater. My take at the time was that what had these guys really upset was an assumption that all the financial help would go to minorities.
It started on Feb. 19, 2009, when Rick Santinelli on CNBC went off, calling for a new protest like the (also fake) Boston Tea Party. If you listen to his rant — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEZB4taSEoA — you can hear hints of coded racism. There is also a conspiracy theory out there that Santinelli’s rant was pre-arranged to spark the protest movement, but that seems unlikely. Your average tea bagger type does not watch CNBC.
The very first rallies (the ones where the protesters actually wore tea bags stapled to their
headshats) were protests against mortgage relief — how dare the government help citizens!This may have also been Obama’s earliest capitulation to the tea baggers (or maybe he just gave into the big-bank mortgage holders). Plans for large-scale mortgage relief for consumers never really materialized. Instead, the government gave the relief to the banks, who doled it out in bonuses to their execs.
Within weeks, though, Dick Armey and the other corporate-funded astroturfers had maneuvered themselves out in front of the parade. They ginned up the mobs against health care reform with the death panel claims and other lies. But it wasn’t until Congress went on its summer break that the meltdowns at town halls happened.
The first of these that I recall was in Delaware, at a meeting led by GOP Rep. Mike Castle, who was at the time a shoo-in for the Biden Senate seat. The topic was not health care, however. It was Obama’s birth certificate — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwgzYkTDsmQ. And, of course, Castle lost to tea baggery Witchy Woman Christine O’Donnell in the primaries.