About a week ago, the Tea Party Senate Caucus held its first public meeting. There are a grand total of three members of this caucus, three nuts from three of the reddest states in the country. All three are essentially libertarians. If they would call themselves the Libertarian Senate Caucus maybe no one would pay them much attention. But I guess it's all about the packaging. Three Tea Partiers getting together makes news and gets covered by a room full of reporters.
Why? Three people don't make any sort of caucus. They don't even fill a booth at McDonalds. If anything, whatever press coverage these three looney tunes received should have been derisive. Look! A caucus of three. Hahaha. If they ever get to four, they could form a bowling team!
But no. The press took this pathetic attempt to show impact seriously. They covered it as legitimate news. In the background of press motivated events like this is the idea that the Tea Party has transformed the political landscape. It hasn't except for a few states. But the press would like you to believe otherwise.
Why does something so tiny, the Tea Party, and ultimately ineffectual get so much attention? I think partly it's because these people are acting against racial stereotype. They are a group of white middle age and older Christian people. Think Ward and June Cleaver.
We expect people like this to be polite and considerate, unlike our stereotypes of people of color or non-Christian religions. So when we see white grandmas and grandpas screaming at town hall meetings about government being too big, about the threat to take away Medicare, we think this is unusual and ultimately, newsworthy. It's the equivalent of Ward and June Cleaver going postal.
When liberals and lefties marched against the Iraq War, the press hardly noticed. That was just the angry left behaving as expected. But the angry right? That's a twist, according to the press, something worth covering. Having spent time listening to Ward and June Cleavers go postal over the potential election of a black candidate, I happen to think that the "angry right" isn't unusual at all.
But that doesn't cover all of why the press pays attention to the Tea Party. I think it's also because, anger or not, these people are on the far right. For whatever reason, the far right is covered a lot more by the press than the hard left.
For example, CPAC just held its annual meeting and had a straw poll of Republican presidential candidates. These nut jobs voted for Ron Paul. They voted for Ron Paul in 2007 as well. What chance does Ron Paul have of winning the Republican nomination? He's a fringe candidate and the answer is zero. What is the purpose of giving significant press coverage to a meeting of a group of people who think that a nut job who wants to abolish the Fed is presidential material? Beats me.
In the 60s, the left used to get uber-exposed the same way. Nobodies with big hair and outlandish words like Angela Davis were in the news frequently. Now they are old hat.
I guess that press obsession with the hard right simply represents press fashion. In another decade or so there will still be screaming white Christian grandmas and grandpas of course. But the press will go ho hum, we've seen that before. They'll be on to something new and supposedly fresh, like, I don't know, maybe a group of screaming Park Slope moms with high end strollers. Until then, we're stuck with coverage of the Tea Party that is, as one national reporter admitted to me, mostly overblown.
No comments:
Post a Comment