Tempest Rising
This whole tea party thing looks highly dangerous. Even though estimates of how many turned out for the tea party protests are relatively modest, it’s still a significant number, and the whole event could spiral into a much larger movement through media mishandling.
1. Fox News is taking an activist approach to covering the tea parties, encouraging its audience to attend them, including their own virtual one on their website. Fox is trouncing the competition in the ratings right now.
2. The other major news networks are ignoring them–so there’s no rebuttal possible to the tea partyists’ claim that it’s a nonpartisan, non-right-leaning movement.
The Huffington Post is taking this on as a citizen journalist event–which is really really important. Ignoring the news doesn’t make it not happen, as the big networks should know by now. We need coverage to demonstrate that the news media aren’t biased against conservatives, and polling and on the ground reports to uncover what types of people are attending these events (and dumping tea into the Boston harbor, ugh). FreedomWorks, one of the organizers, is talking up the liberal contempt of it, labeling them “tea party deniers.”
Otherwise, this hysteria and rage could blow up into a serious movement of civil protest like not paying taxes, etc. Consider the growth of MoveOn:
“They sent an e-mail to 100 friends with a link to moveon.org. A September 24, 1998, article in the San Francisco Chronicle, Net’s Role in Scandals May Alter News Media, mentioned the effort in its final paragraph, noting that the site had attracted 500 signatures in its first day of operation. By the end of the week, that number was 100,000.”
FreedomWorks has over 370,000 supporters already. Scary stuff.
Had to include BMac’s digital protest above, thanks Brian!
Posted on April 16th, 2009 by DeepthiW
Filed under: Global Culture, Media, Movies, Participatory Culture, Politics, School, Uncategorized
I quite like what Greg Saunders has to say about the whole thing … (hat tip http://www.ThisModernWorld.com)
“In the grand scheme of things, getting people to complain about taxes on April 15th might be the easiest thing in the world. It’s right up there with “eating ice cream on a hot summer day” and “laughing whenever Glenn Beck cries”. Bitching about taxes is America’s true pastime. So when a few thousand people gather on tax day to whine about their taxes (after getting massive tax breaks, btw), it’s hardly the second coming of the American Revolution. Hell, I remember a time six years ago when millions of people took to the street to protest the government. We all saw how well that worked out.
When their rallying cry is “Grrrr…I hate you TAXES!”, there won’t be a whole lot left to keep the tea bagging movement together after April 15th. Manufactured-populism and a fractured-understanding of American history will only take you so far. The great-great-great-great grandchildren of liberty will have to find some other crusade to motivate them like birth certificate forgeries or investigating whether Bo Obama was really a rescue dog. Sure, some die-hards will stick around like the asshole who keeps flipping through your DVD’s at three in the morning oblivious to the fact that the party is over, but within a few weeks, the only people left to carry the “tea party” torch will be the GOP & Fox News personalities trying to recapture the “good times” with all the subtlety and humility of Chubby Checker trying to get everyone to do the twist.
I’m going to miss the “Tea Party” movement. I’m going to miss the powdered wigs and the lunatic ranting. I’m going to miss the ideological uncertainty and the unpragmatic futility (seriously, you’re mailing tea bags to the White House to demand lower taxes after you just got a tax cut?). Most of all, I’m going to miss the jokes. These last few weeks have been a golden age for juvenile humor that passes for insightful political commentary. It’s a rare movement that chooses to describe itself with terminology that also means “testicle slapping” and those of us who relish in the foolishness of conservative activism will be much worse off for it.”
That is a good write up. Maybe my concern about civil disobedience is overblown, after all, it was 4 am when I wrote this, suffering from grumpy insomnia. Who knows what my blood chemistry was all about.
But I still think that the media coverage is an issue that could do more to increase recruitment to this movement from among the normal and half sane. We need to record and distribute images and words that prove these are loonies and an extremist movement. We need it to stay an extremist movement, and suppression always gets people riled up and interested.
Reality is what you make of it these days, and if we make it look like we’re suppressing freedom of speech by ignoring people, it will look like we have something to fear and hide.