You Can Call It “Tea Party”, but That Doesn’t Make It Tea Party

I didn’t watch the Presidential debate last night. I even shut down my Twitter feed so I wouldn’t have to spend an hour ranting about it. Oh, I wouldn’t have had a problem with the candidates. I think they’ll all acquit themselves just fine and, if I need to, I’ll read the debate transcript tomorrow and pick out the good parts. I have a problem with the fact that CNN was involved with it. Oh, I get that the Tea Party Express was burning up to get themselves hooked up with a mainstream media outlet. It has to be tough living under an assumed grassroots name when you have all those big media dreams. But CNN? The network behind the wickedly-biased YouTube debate in 2007? Aside from MS-NBC, you’d be hard-pressed to find a new outlet that’s been more openly hostile to the Tea Parties than CNN over the past two years.

Let me remind you of a few examples.

1. Susan Roesgen, a CNN correspondent, went to the Chicago Tea Party rally in 2009 itching for a fight. When she didn’t get it, she did her dead-level best to make the folks there look like a bunch of butters. To my knowledge, CNN never apologized for her stunning ethical lapse and did not renew her contract her three months later.
2. CNN anchor Anderson Cooper took the “teabagger” slur, invented just the night before by MS-NBC, and shot it directly into the mainstream on his prime-time show. He issued a half-hearted “if anyone was offended” apology at a talk about a month later. CNN did not, to my knowledge, take any disciplinary action against him.
3. Jeffrey Toobin, frequent CNN guest, went on Anderson Cooper’s show just a couple of days after the “teabagger” slur and called the Tea Parties “hostile”. He also accused them of trying to “tap into an anger that’s beyond rationality” when prompted by the show’s guest-host, CNN senior correspondent Christiana Amanpour.
4. Last October, Eliot Spitzer, disgraced former Governor of New York and CNN host called the Tea Parties “vapid” and said they would “destroy the country”. Again, no apology that I can find. Spitzer’s show is no longer on CNN. Apparently, it was as attractive to television viewers as Spitzer was to women he didn’t have to pay.

That is the network to which The Tea Party Express eagerly and deliberately lent the Tea Party name. That is the network that will make happy talk tonight and savage the Tea Parties — average, everyday Americans who don’t want to hand their kids a mortgage-level debt burden on the day they are born — just as soon as they possibly can.

But hey, they got their name on television, which makes it all okay, doesn’t it?

Other Posts of Interest:

• Network that Mainstreamed the “Tea Bagging” Slur Chides NRSC for Use of the Word “Hickey”
• When Politics is Personal, Slapfighting is Inevitable…and Fun to Watch!
• Today, We Can Kill the Teabagger Bogeyman in Massachusetts

Tags: 2012 Election, Media Bias, Tea Parties

Category: Oh, THAT liberal media., The 2012 Horse Race