Tea Parties

They suggest that “news” shows don’t go into reruns. But it certainly seemed that way when Bill Clinton marked the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing by repeating the same reprehensible smear from 1995. “Anti-government talk” emanating from conservatives naturally, inevitably led to 168 lives snuffed out in the wreckage of the Murrah Federal Building. On the night of April 16, ABC…

Over the past year since its inception, the media have worked hard to discredit and denigrate the tea party movement. News organizations employed various strategies, from dismissing the protests as astroturf, to using derogatory nicknames for participants, and finally labeling it as a violent extremist fringe. In their futile attempt to get something to stick, the media have become increasingly…

On her CNN program on Monday, Campbell Brown forwarded one of the Left's talking points about the tea parties by stating that "it does appear that we are seeing a rise in right wing extremism recently." However, her guest, historian Robert Churchill of the University of Hartford, downplayed her claim and claimed that groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center were "exaggerating" the threat.Brown…

Two weeks ago (noted at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), the combined audience for the Big Three Networks' Evening News shows for the week of March 29 fell to just below 20 million. That audience was about 5% less than what Matt Drudge in the summer of 2006 headlined as "TV's Lowest Week." The Big Three's combined audience crawled back above 20 million during the week of April 5. But Chris Ariens of…

One clue that health care is not being well received among the public: Liberal media members, instead of celebrating the wonderful era of health-care access to come, can't stop obsessing over unsubstantiated allegations of racism among Tea Party activists, as if trying to change the subject.New York Times columnist Frank Rich's super-sized entry on Sunday, “Welcome to Confederate History Month,”…

For weeks, MSNBC has advertised Rachel Maddow's two-hour special broadcast about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building. This special, aired on the 15-year anniversary of that bombing, was billed as a way for viewers to see what can happen if anti-government sentiment gets out of control. "So tonight, exactly 15 years later, this special edition of ‘The Rachel Maddow…

On Monday’s Joy Behar Show on HLN, when guest Mark Williams of Tea Party Express complained to Behar and fellow guest Ari Melber of the Nation about Tea Party activists being smeared as racist, the HLN host claimed that she had not brought up race during the segment, even though she opened the discussion by referring to stereotypes about Tea Party activists as she cracked that perhaps public…

MSNBC's Donny Deutsch kicked off a week-long segment on Monday about "America the Angry" and hinted that the "rageaholics" in this country could create another Oklahoma City-style bombing. After one guest mentioned Joe Stack, the man who flew a plane into an IRS building in February, Deutsch wrongly derided, "I don't know whether he was Republican or Democrat. I'm assuming he was probably a…

The political inclinations of Hollywood actors, when they're publicly disclosed, are almost always reliably left-of-center. As such, it's quite refreshing to learn of another conservative or libertarian in Tinseltown, especially when the celebrity in question is actively working to advance an understanding of constitutional principles and opposing big government. Janine Turner ("Northern Exposure…

On Sunday's Face the Nation on CBS, host Bob Schieffer asked columnist Kathleen Parker about her views on the tea party: "the rhetoric that's coming out from the right side, especially from the tea party....you think it may be dangerous." Parker replied: "this heated rhetoric and some of these words...that are pretty loaded, 'reload,' 'targeting'...there's a danger there."Parker, syndicated with…

James Pinkerton of the New America Foundation and Fox News contributor Judy Miller both gave kudos to the Media Research Center and Eyeblast.tv on Saturday's Fox News Watch. Pinkerton applauded Eyeblast for hosting a clip of NBC's Kelly O'Donnell questioning of black tea partyer and his "best answer." (See the Friday NB post, “White NBC Reporter Confronts Black Man at Tea Party Rally: 'Have You…

New York Times reporter Kate Zernike, the paper's main reporter on the Tea Party beat, dropped all pretense of fairness in her story for the front of the Sunday Week in Review,"Tea Party Supporters Doing Fine, but Angry Nonetheless." Her summary of the movement: "They tend to be white and male, with a disproportionate number above 45, and above 65. Their memories are of a different time, when the…

Robert McCartney, the liberal Washington Post columnist, has done something that Chris Matthews and his fellow leftist MSNBC hosts have yet to do: attend a tea party rally without being confrontational and/or snarky. McCartney went to a tea party with an open mind last week and this is what he discovered: I went to the "tea party" rally at the Washington Monument on Thursday to check out just…

April 15 was a hot day for Tea Party rallies, and also a hot day for liberal talk-radio denunciations of the Tea Party movement. Randi Rhodes claimed it was just a crowd of stupid people looking for a free lunch: They have a lot of free time to travel about and around the country, don't they? These are the same people that just were in Boston; then they got on buses. They never ask who pays their…