In 2009 and 2010, the media trashed the Tea Party, using the crazied, hyperbolic language possible — and yet were envious of their success at the polls last November, and wanted a Tea Party of their own. Hence, Occupy Wall Street. Richard Fernandez asks a great question at the Belmont Club. Did the MSM’s intensely negative reporting cause them (directly or indirectly) to amp up the craziness at OWS to waaaay past 11 on Nigel Tufnel’s Marshall stack, or is that simply what happens when a mass of people with an ill-defined cause co-habituate in an urban Burning Man festival for months on end?
But regarding the MSM’s coverage, since so much of what passes for “liberalism” boils down to “It’s Different When We Do It,” the amount of double-standards in the MSM is bottomless. But given what we all just witnessed in 2009 and 2010 during the media’s coverage of the Tea Party, their see-no-evil United Colors of Benetton tone when it comes to OWS is that much plainer to see. Or as Allahpundit notes:
This can’t be repeated enough: With a few exceptions, foremost among them the New York Post, the coverage of OWS protests compared to the coverage of tea-party protests is the worst media double standard in recent history. Nothing compares, because nothing else involves this much distortion on both ends of the coverage. It’s not just that most press outlets (like the protesters themselves) look the other way at depravity happening inside Obamaville, it’s that for years they treated the tea-party movement as some sort of feral mob that was forever on the brink of rampaging through the streets — like, say, Occupy Oakland just did. If you missed it when I posted it last week, go watch the ad the DNC ran in August 2009 when tea partiers first started showing up to town halls on ObamaCare. That set the tone. We began the year with tea-party pols being smeared as killers over a shooting they had nothing to do with and we end it with actual rapes being shrugged off by the press because they’re bad PR for a movement they support. Disgrace.
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On the other hand, perhaps it’s for the best, Glenn Reynolds writes at the Washington Examiner today:
In this, interestingly, the Occupy movement may have unwittingly lent a hand to the Tea Party. Everyone who has followed the wall-to-wall news coverage has seen the sad stories of protesters who went deeply in debt for college degrees (admittedly, often degrees in things like Peace Studies, but nonetheless, still college degrees) and who now say they are unable to find work.
Faced with those stories, voters may understandably have concluded that more spending on colleges and schools was unlikely to do much to promote employment, regardless of what the political ads from the teachers’ unions and higher-education folks claimed.
If education is so great, after all, why are so many educated people unemployed and camping out in public parks?
This is a good question, and similar ones might profitably be asked with regard to other public programs whose spending climbs faster than inflation but whose results remain unimpressive — which is to say, most public programs.
It’s not that the education system is our only public-spending failure, it’s just that the Occupy movement has done such a persuasive job of illustrating the particular failures of the education system.
Or course, the Occupy movement has helped the Tea Party in another way: By keeping lefties busy. While the occupiers have been holding their drum circles, the Tea Party movement — now long past the mass-rally stage — has been going about the less conspicuous work of registering voters and organizing.
As I wrote back in 2010, “Rallies without follow-through are just rallies. And the Tea Party movement is now following through with the grunt work of politics: Organizing precincts, waging primary battles, registering voters, and compiling mailing lists.”
Rallies don’t win elections. Neither do drum circles. Organizing does. Let Occupiers and Tea Partiers alike take note.
The Tea Partiers will be working hard next year to maintain the GOP’s control over the Congressional House, and to extend it to the Senate. Even if Mitt Romney (whom Tea Partiers by and large loathe as the definitive Northeast Establishment RINO) wins the GOP’s nomination, they’ll likely hold their noses and support him — which, if he can survive the coming onslaught of the Obama-MSM-Journolist smear machine, just might be enough for his victory next year, if the economy remains flatlined and enough undecided voters want to finally see some Hope and Change (to coin a phrase).
As the temperature keeps dropping and as the blood pressure of besieged residents and small business owners in lower Manhattan towards their would-be Occupiers keeps skyrocketing, presumably, sometime in the next couple of months or so, the OWS crowd will go home.
Since Obama is the system and OWS will likely support maintaining the status-quo at the top of the Democrats’ presidential ticket (certainly, nobody appears to be in any rush to do the 2012 equivalent of getting “clean for Gene”), how will they channel their Rage Towards the Machine?
Update: Related thoughts from Daniel Blatt.
Update: From Ace, “‘Non-Violent Protesters:’ Occupy DC Pushes 78-Year-Old Woman To the Ground.” And from Peter Wehner of Commentary, “The Double Standard of the Press When it Comes to OWS vs. the Tea Party.”
Don’t forget Victor Davis Hanson’s article right her on PJM ‘Occupy What?” with the Money Quote;
“I saw videos of youths burning things in Oakland, but was told that it… “was a small minority” and atypical of the protest. Not long ago I saw no clips of anyone spitting at black congresspeople wading into the Tea-Party demonstration, but was told they did and that it was typical of tens of thousands of racialists on the Mall.”
GOP: Reject Mitt Romney or Lose EVERYTHING!
1398AD: Off Topic
This is what you call a false dilemma.
Fond of drama, I see.
I don’t think many in the Donner Party support Obama or participating in the system at all for that matter. Those that do now, won’t when they realize that he isn’t going to imprison the bankers and hand out that stash of C-notes they sit on. As for the OWS crowd hopefully they’ll go to Charlotte next summer.
The predictable idiocy of the media is its own reward (or punishment.) By being so consistently hypocritical, they are tacitly telling the reader or viewer there is no point in buying what they’re selling. The careful observer already KNOWS what they are going to say, all one needs to ask is WHOM the story is about. If it’s conservatives, Tea Partiers, Republicans, etc, etc, the story will invariably as negative as possible. For Democrats, “Occupiers”, liberals, etc, the opposite. Why buy the cow (or the bull) when you already know what the milk is gonna taste like?
Much as those in the Soviet Union learned to interpret Pravda.
“There is no news in Pravda, just as there is no truth in Izvestia!”
“Even if Mitt Romney (whom Tea Partiers by and large loathe as the definitive Northeast Establishment RINO) wins the GOP’s nomination, they’ll likely hold their noses and support him ”
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I have made it my personal mission to see to it that this doesn’t happen.
I firmly believe that what we are witnessing is a test of the establishment GOP’s power and influence channeled through Mitt Romney. Their support has almost nothing to do with Romney himself or their confidence in him, but what he represents.
It will be a crushing symbolic loss for conservatism if he is to garner the nomination, and will validate the fear that the Tea Party is simply a useful tool for the ensconced leadership to wield when they deem useful.
Hold my nose for Romney? Absolutely not.
As it stands, I will hold my nose for Perry if the nominee is not Herman Cain or if somehow Gingrich manages to pull ahead.
It will be a crushing symbolic loss for conservatism if he is to garner the nomination …
Yes, but it will be a catastrophic actual disaster for America if Obama manages to win a second term. Which would you rather do — try to salvage freedom and prosperity in this country with an imperfect candidate, or be a drama queen and throw a hissy fit?
Not sure that is necessarily the case. A Republican House and Senate will keep Obama largely in check. Historically second presidential terms are largely attenuated, albeit for judicial appointments.
You are assuming that Romney cannot help but be an improvement over Obama. I am sure that many California Republicans thought the same way about Schwarzenegger. Or Charlie Crist’s voters in Florida. Or Specter’s voters in Pennsylvania. Or….
how close were we to reading the headline…
“ows mob kills 78 year old woman”?
had she fallen the wrong way, the entire movement would be shut down in a week.
My suggestion for political ad.
Show OWS footage with the caption.
This is the Hope&Change! that you voted for.
As the national news media remains silent on the number of rapes occuring at the OWS events. I recall the wall-to-wall coverage of the “rapes” happening in the Super Dome after Katrina. Of course, those stories were blatantly false.
With OWS, a group supported by Obama, we have real life victims, which the media conveniently ignores.
In the U.S. Mainstream Media the News is not the truth and the truth is not the News.
.
If a tree falls in the forrest,
And ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, NYT, WaPo, and MSNBC don’t report it,
Does it make a sound?
The fact is many people like what the MFM is peddling. Obama still has a lot of support, and I can only conclude that his constituency approves of how he handles things. He could be re-elected again and that is a scary thought. OWS is a micrcosm of what our society can look like if he is allowed to remain in office another term. Our educational system is working as it’s designed.
OWS hypocrisy can be funny too! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0SkCTFKHos
It’s prophylactic at this point, what ever viewpoint the Malfeasant Media takes, the opposite must be true.
sometime in the next couple of months or so, the OWS crowd will go home.
Disagree. This is just a first rehearsal. Come next spring’s warm weather, the shielded anonymous organizations behind these Lord of the Flies campouts will have had months to deploy their donated funds (OWS now has about $500,000) for much greater efforts countrywide.
The current testing of the waters in dozens of cities has provided the organizers with very useful knowlege: that the municipal governments will make negligible efforts to enforce their own laws about public gatherings. This is an analogy with the student takeovers of Universities of the 60s, in which craven administrators rolled over as the municipalities are now doing.
In addition to the 500K publicly acknowleged by the nonprofit umbrella of OWS, much greater resources are available to these Popular Front occupiers. Unions and leftist organizations are pouring funds into them in hopes of gaining control for the big campaigns of spring and summer 2012, and of course they already enjoy the intense and unquestioning support of the MSM.
i’d look longer term…
obama loses the wh, and these people will go crazy.
The predictable idiocy of the media is its own reward (or punishment.) By being so consistently hypocritical, they are tacitly telling the reader or viewer there is no point in buying what they’re selling.
That’s true, for the minority of people who regard MSM with some critical analysis. The majority, however, still plugs along armed by said MSM with ‘facts’ and ‘analyses’ which they credit with being the state of current events. The influence is immense, and is only slowly weakening, if at all.
Romney isn’t going to get the nomination.
Cain is.
Romney and Cain are tied just about everywhere.
The rest of the support is divided between Gingrich, Perry, Paul, Bachman, Santorum, and Huntsman (roughly in that order), none of whom stand a chance.
Romney will pick up Huntsman’s one percent and maybe some of the Paul supporters who can’t stomach voting for a former Fed Reserve chairman, assuming they vote at all.
Gingrich’s supporters will split 50-50.
Bachman and Santorum supporters are going to go to Cain, as will most of the Perry supporters.
That gives Cain the win.
Romney isn’t going to get the nomination.
Cain is.
Much as I would rather have Cain or Gingrich as president, there’s a problem here: the Republican nominee has to win the general election. If it’s Cain (or Gingrich, or any of several others), the Kneepad Media will go into full attack mode, painting the Republican as a dangerous extremist, an abuser of women, a racist and/or Uncle Tom, and someone who wants to end all civil rights laws and bring back slavery (hat tip to Whoopi Goldberg).
At this point, someone like John Huntsman (perhaps someone very much like John Huntsman) steps forward and declares his third-party candidacy, and the media anoint him as the Reasonable Alternative to the Extremist RethugliKKKan. All he needs to do is get five or ten percent of the vote, and Obama wins another four years. Isn’t that a delightful thought?
Unfortunately, if Romney is the nominee the media will do the exact same thing they have done/are doing to Palin, Cain, Perry, etc. Conservatives who support Romney in the hope that he will not be quite as vulnerable to media attacks as other Republicans had better think again.
Falling into the “electability” trap simply encourages journalists to ramp up the attacks.
This is a hint of things to come in the next year as we approach the election. All. Stops. Pulled.
Never been to Burning Man, not the biggest fan but have a family member who is a regular.
Burning Man has quite a successful and complex infrastructure not to mention they leave their site cleaner than when they arrive.
Definitely not holding my breath for the OWS people.
Oh yeah — and Burning Man does all the permits (a lot) and pays the fees.
The OWS crowd doesn’t see it, but they are statists protesting against themselves and the FUBARity of the leftist state, which creates client groups with expectations of ever more free stuff but can’t deliver when the state runs out of people to stick it to. In effect, they wind up sticking it to themselves.
“Rallies don’t win elections. Neither do drum circles. Organizing does…” — so, does this mean that community organizing is an important and noble job after all? Or is it only important and noble unless it’s the liberals and the lefties who do it? I detect a hint of hypocrisy in this.
Yes, I can detect the hypocrisy in your response. Not all organizing is Obama-defined “community organizing.”
There is organizing for the good, and organizing for the bad. I’m sure Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky did a lot of organizing. Not much of it for the good of the people of Russia. The organizing that the communists have done in North Korea hasn’t resulted in much good for the people of North Korea. The organizing that has been done by ACORN hasn’t dropped the poverty level one iota for people in the inner cities, but it has done wonders for Obama and the Democratic Party machine.
So yeah, there is a difference between organizing for the good of the country and a majority of people, and the organizing done to get and consolidate the power of a few elites.
There is an important difference between organizing to win elections, and organizing Obama style, to get gov handouts. The Tea Party wants nothing but good government, so they can get on with their lives, Obama supporters want those Obama dollars, either for handouts, or for crony capitalists.
And then there is this favorite of mine on a more day-to-day form or hypocritical hate speech passed off as ‘justice.’
On May 17, 2011 on The Ed Show on MSNBC Melissa Harris-Perry said this about President Obama:
“This is a President who signed an act that actually reduces the ways in which we go after marijuana, make it harder to put people in jail around cocaine at the Federal level, actually liberating more black bodies from the criminal justice system…”
Change that to ‘white’ bodies and I think MSNBC has racist egg-speech all over their face. And Rachel Maddow just loves Perry and has her on as a regular but Maddow complains about the ‘profilers’ in the racist state of AZ.
I guess they give Rhodes Scholarships to anyone these days; certainly analogy and comparitive logic weren’t high on the list of qualities.
It is incorrect to call this a double standard. It would be a double standard if the goal of the media was to clearly observe current events and report on them honestly, but that is not what the media wants to do. The media wants to lie to the American people. They work tirelessly to deceive us so that we will be fooled into embracing social, political and economic ideologies that are demonstrably false.
This is why I find complaints about media bias so exasperating. The problem with the media is not mere bias, but deliberate dishonesty. They lie. The tell one set of lies about the Tea Party, and an opposing set of lies about Occupy. At no time do they actually tell the truth.
Why? Because they are leftists.
This is what evil looks like.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is the Tea Party of the left, just a different kind of tea . . . if you get my drift.
Sorry, no Mitt Romney. I will not vote for him period.
You don’t understand.
OWS is a non-violent protest. Therefore any violent protester are NOT part of OWS.
At least, that’s the view of most of the news media.
There is no possible Republican that won’t be portrayed as the worst thing to happen to humanity since Attilla the Hun. Please remember how Governor Palin was popular in Alaska, with plenty of support from Democrats as well as independents and Republicans, right up until she became the VP nominee.
We must defeat the MSM as well as Obama in order to save the country. Now I’m going to do everything I can to defeat Romney in the Primaries but, if he becomes the nominee I’m going to buy a flesh colored chothespin for my nose on Election Day!