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We were referred to: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/ds290410.html It says, in part: The dominant corporate media itself has been feeding Tea Party movement mythology. A review of the Lexis Nexis database from April 9-15 (the week running up to the Tea Party's headline-garnering April 15th national tax protests) reveals that the Tea Party is referred to as a social movement in more than 115 stories, Op-Eds, editorials, and letters, in newspapers across all regions of the United States. Liberal and progressive websites have repeated the same misinformation. The "mainstream" media's framing of the Tea Party stands in dramatic contrast to its treatment of the anti-war movement. In the week run up to the February 15, 2003 global protests against the imminent U.S. invasion of Iraq -- in which BBC estimated that between 6 and 10 million turned out nationwide and internationally -- the protests were recognized as a "movement" in just 24 newspapers stories, Op-Eds, editorials, and letters across the country. In an interesting refutation of the right's claims of "liberal [media] bias," the Tea Party is seen by the mass media as more than four times worthier of "movement" status even though the Tea Party's turnout nationally is in the tens to hundreds of thousands at best, compared to the millions who turned out to march against Iraq. * * * This article has some pretty good information, and if anything it understates the amount of promotion being done by the mainstream media. But I think it is wrong in dismissing the tea party as nothing more than "AstroTurf" (phony "grass roots" movements fabricated by corporate lobbyists and their ilk -- the term comes from the plastic "grass" installed in the Houston Astrodome, the first domed stadium, in the mid-1960s). There's plenty of AstroTurf in the Tea Party, for sure, but there is something else, too. First on the media. Perhaps the key media backer of the tea party is CNN. The article doesn't pick it up because it's not print, and for its purposes, the print comparison (to coverage of the anti-Iraq war mobilizations) was fine. But in an overall evaluation of this movement, the role of CNN is crucial. The tub-thumping promotion is relentless, and friends in those circles tell me that highlighting how white, male, old and privileged the tea party activist core is has become verboten. Now you may be thinking "CNN -- that false alarm!" because its rating chart strongly resembles the trajectory of a plane in flight that's lost all power to its engines. But the point is, tea party types are precisely the core audience that's left to CNN: older suburban and southern white males. That's why they keep on the air soporific anchors like tired, old Wolf Blitzer, southern belle Cambell Brown, and rapidly rising nonentity John King. And, of course, that mummy, Larry King. They should rename "Larry King Live" because its anything but. [BTW, for those outside the United States, I am referring here to the CNN domestic service, not CNN International (sent in slightly different variations to all parts of the world), nor to the CNN Spanish language network, which for obvious reasons, mostly betrays no sympathy to the Tea Party and things like the Arizona anti-immigrant law.] The way CNN operates is not nearly as crass as, say, Fox News. They don't openly espouse, in the network's name, tea party nonsense, but instead the network validates and legitimizes the movement at the same time that it makes critiques of it off-limits. And it works overtime to disguise the loony right-wingers that make up a lot of the movement's core. What CNN doesn't want being hinted at on its air is that the tea party crowd are racists at such a fundamental, gut level that they don't even realize it (in part because for the time being at least, open and explicit espousal of racism against Blacks remains off-limits). So you get these bizarre phenomena like the birthers and accusations that Obama is really a communist, that he's planning a holocaust with death panels and so on. And CNN certainly doesn't let anyone on air with a REAL explanation of what is going on, socially and politically. Because I think it is pretty transparent that the tea party is basically a bunch of hysterical white folks freaking out because the president is Black. That his politics are completely bourgeois and he uses his race as left cover for right wing policies is beyond the understanding of these folks. For example, they keep denouncing Obama for being pro-immigrant, but the recent Reid proposal (instigated by the White House as cover for doing nothing) is by far the most right-wing "comprehensive immigration reform" proposal thus far, significantly to the right of what McCain was raising only four years ago. It comes complete with the archetypal police state measure, a national ID card. In other words, Obama and friends object to the Arizona law but at the same time are proposing a clone on steroids at the federal level. In even the fairly recent past (before 9/11), a proposal to issue and require national ID cards, despite its tremendous potential as a means for social control and political repression, was quite simply untenable, so much so that the closest they could get to it was requiring social security numbers to get drivers licenses (a part of the Gingrich-Clinton welfare reform ostensibly aimed at "deadbeat dads" which turned out to be a great anti-immigrant measure though it took the rulers four or five years to realize it). Joaquín ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
