Chicago Tea Party Gets Scrutiny but Scant Coverage
At a fundraising dinner (for education if you must know last night), I spoke with several people who were interested in the mechanics of the Chicago Tea Party Protest, and Rick Santelli’s plea against the serial spending packages coming out of DC. Most had heard something that vaguely suggested that Santelli made a scripted speech, rather than a spontaneous opposing viewpoint to the bailout packages.
Perhaps they read it here in the Tribune, or the New York Times, or heard in on the Mancow Muller radio show on WLS, who repeated the claim today (while saying a well put So What?), but the general story coming from the media (all based on a rather wild article from Playboy Online) was that the protest against spending was not a grass roots movement. Mind you, neither the Tribune nor the New York times carried a word about the actual Tea Party protests, even though the protest occurred right outside the Tribune lobby, the only coverage was that there may have been some type of scripting involved.
To which, as Mancow stated, so what? But the scripting story has proven out to be totally false. I have calls with Sam Adams Alliance members every day, but neither Sam Adams nor the Chicago Daily Observer (nor anyone else) was able to the get much organization behind the protest. I would get a better bullhorn next time, but indeed, so what? The protest went on without much direction and the loosest of organizations and will probably come back around again on April 15th per a Facebook page summarizing the event.
Well, unannounced in the Tribune, Playboy has disappeared the story. Santelli debunked it on CNBC. The Atlantic Monthly has thoroughly trashed the claims of scripting here. Rebutting the story required one to believe that Milt Rosenberg’s producer does not have the power to fortell the future, which though open to discussion, is good enough for me.
So we are left with some stranded stories, covering a “controversy” but ignoring the actual protest itself. At last count there were 130 stories on Google News claiming some type of controversial scripting of events, from the likes of the Tribune and the New York Times, and 75 stories actually covering the event, from the likes of the Chicago Daily Observer and some increasingly relevant blogs.
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John Powers is the President of the Chicago Daily Observer
Reading from a scripted speech? Is that like Obama relying upon a teleprompter?
Actually, the writer who claimed to debunk the fact that several monied Right Wing groups are behind the tea parties, Megan McArdle, is the live-in girlfriend of someone who developed \’astroturfing\’ for one of those groups. FreedomWorks is funded by the Forbes Foundation and other conservative trusts. It has now removed Santelli\’s name from its sites promoting tea parties after Santelli took exception. Other organizers are affiliated with Ron Paul\’s \’revolution.\’
The only spontaneity that seems to have occurred is that some of the participants in the protests did not realize that the organizers and other participants came from established conservative organizations.
Bingham, did you read McArdle’s article? You don’t respond to any of her substantive points; you just insinuate falsehoods, like the Playboy article. The central points of the Playboy piece were clearly false, and you only know the identity of MM’s boyfriend because she pointed it out in her post.
“Bingham” is clearly a typo and should say “Interloper.”
Even if they were scripted, why would that make the protest any less legitimated? Virtually every leftist protest is scripted, are they also then illegitimate? Or is different rules for the left?
Hell, not just scripted, the protesters at those left wing affairs are often quite literally professional protesters PAID to be there! Again I guess this is a classic case of left wing projection.
Back to the coverage, or lack of it… CBS has their WBBM studio across the street (it can be seen in many of the protest pics) yet failed to mention it at all. Then again the Sun-Times and NBC’s WMAQ couldn’t bring themselves to cover it either.
While it’s true I could never find mention of the Tea Party in the Tribune, WBBM-AM actually did have a small mention: that “several dozen” protesters were marching, and the one report I did hear that evening had a sound bite from a marcher. It was, of course, one selected as being on the more extreme side, but it existed.
Next Wednesday is the Illinois Gun Owners Lobby Day in Springfield. In the past, we saw the same thing with that- the Trib buried a tiny reference in another, unrelated article, and WBBM-AM’s reporter said there were a “couple of hundred” marchers.
There were 3000.
Get used to it: the message won’t penetrate the gate and the gatekeepers are still operating it to their own purposes.
We had a Tea Party in Omaha — 2 days notice — over 60 people turned up in 18 degree weather.
Mention was made of the Omaha Tea Party in the Atlanta Journal Constitution–but not in the Omaha World-Herald. Perhaps we weren’t “scripted” enough to generate any local “controversy”.
Maybe next time, instead of a connection to evil rightwingers, they can have their protests organized by something nice and wholesome, like International ANSWER.
The Trib covers debunked smears, but not the actual events. They can’t even meet the minimum requirements of newspaperdom — report the news, don’t make it — and they wonder why Tribune Co. is in bankruptcy? Why the media’s approval ratings are lower than Congress’? Why they’re hemorraging subscribers?
Good riddance.
Imagine if the TeaParty protesters were leftists, and the president were McCain.
We’d see widespread, front-page, gleeful coverage.
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