“MSNBC contributors can’t figure out why so many women are part of the Tea Party,” Caroline May writes at the Daily Caller:
Confusion was the word of the day on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning when the panel questioned why so many women have been drawn to the Tea Party movement.
Co-host Mika Brzezinski, The New York Times’ Sam Tanenhaus, CBS’s Lesley Stahl, columnist Mike Barnicle, and Newsweek’s Jon Meacham were initially stumped when Stahl prompted the discussion.
“I wanted to ask all the gurus here, why so many of the Tea Partiers are women. I find that just intriguing and don’t quite understand why that has happened,” Stahl said.
To which the panel replied: “I have no idea.” “Sarah Palin?” “I don’t know.” “I don’t know either.”
After nearly two years of protests, speeches, and signage, the Tea Party — it seems — is still a mystery to some media insiders.
Sonja Eddings Brown, president and founder of The Kitchen Cabinet, an organization dedicated to mobilizing fiscally conservative women to get out the vote, was stupefied by the exchange. “It’s hard to say whether it’s just Lesley Stahl, or whether it is MSNBC as whole that is so completely out of touch with America, and so deaf to the footsteps on the ground, that they would spend a morning dialogue trying to figure out ‘WHY’ there are so many women leading the Tea Party movement,” she told The Daily Caller. “Are they kidding?”
Stahl can’t even identify the ideology of her co-workers in the CBS newsroom — why would anyone expect her to understand the nuances of a populist political movement that isn’t on the left?
(But then, MSNBC isn’t exactly a go-to source for women’s issues in general, of course. Incidentally, did anybody ask Tanenhaus about the subject of his book last year?)
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