The Liberal Media’s Guide To Covering A Tea Party

1- Shamelessly promote the event for days in advance, including repeating event organizer’s wildly inflated claims about expected attendance and completely unsubstantiated claims that any unsavory elements at previous rallies is the doing of dastardly “Democrat” activists.

2- Use the event to again ponder “who is the Tea Party?” while observing that despite organizers’ claim for racial diversity, those in attendance are “overwhelmingly white.” (Extra points for ignoring irony of main speaker’s claim that nation has “walked in darkness for too long.”)

3- Cover every possible aspect of the rally, including the media’s coverage of the rally.

4- Finally report actual attendance, without noting it is far less than organizers’ claims.

5- Continue to discuss, ad nauseum, the rally’s impact on upcoming elections, including lame online survey.

6- Rinse. Repeat.

Look, I don’t want to get into the particulars of Whitestock or the ridiculous carnival it represents or how offensive it is that a bunch of white people would gather to reclaim some civil rights they never lost. What I want people to remember is that hundreds of thousands of people marched against the Iraq War in 2003--part of a global action I might add--and it got barely a passing mention by the mainstream press. There were no days of coverage leading up to the event, all-day coverage during the event, interviews of people at the event, followed days of analysis post-event. Not even a lame online survey asking your opinion of the event. There was nothing.

For this I will never, ever forgive the national news media nor will I ever again trust it. My message to the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN and the rest is this: At a time when the nation needed you people to do your job, when it really mattered, when peoples’ lives were at stake, you guys bailed on us. And now, in some kind of pathetic attempt to appear “not liberal” you cover every fart and burp issuing forth from conservative partisans, when it’s completely irrelevant to the grand scheme of things. We are not talking life and death here. We are not sending hundreds of thousands of our kids into battle. We’re talking some whiny-assed titty babies pissed they lost an election to a black man.

Shame on you.