Tea Party Coverage Proves Mainstream Media's Bias Journalism

The mainstream media continues its accelerating downward spiral into the journalistic sewer and cesspool, a development that is shocking and staggering to any observer who knows the devastating consequence of this journalistic malpractice.

One of the multiple consequences of this malpractice is that the public is being fed a steady stream of mainstream media propaganda to prop up and propagandize for the Obama administration. If the truth were being reported, there would be an uprising that would make the recent “tea parties” look like a little Sunday school picnic by comparison. The Obama administration is out of control, firing radical and un-American programs at machine-gun speed — and making blunders at the same rate, which have already done irreparable damage to America’s future.

As anyone tries to keep up with the radical gyrations of the Obama administration, they can see this new president behaving like a bull in a china shop or a hungry child in a candy store. It’s almost impossible to keep up with Barack Obama’s radicalism and his blunders. This is change that can destroy America.

Yet, America is fed pabulum instead of reality by the mainstream media. The latest classic example of that phenomenon came with the reporting on the tea parties. They were held to protest President Barack Obama’s out-of-control spending, taxing, regulating and government and bureaucratic expansion. Those in attendance at the tea parties knew what to expect of the mainstream media — an almost certain downplaying of the tea parties and their significance or ignoring them altogether. As we now know, those predictions were 100 percent accurate.

When I went through my daily task of evaluating the coverage of the 12 papers I get delivered on a regular basis, even I was a little shocked by the blatant bias and damnable dishonesty that I found in coverage of the tea parties.

You can start with The New York Times, the leader in biased, dishonest and fraudulent journalism, and a paper that sets the agenda for the mainstream media, both print and broadcast.

When I first looked through The Times for tea party coverage in its April 16 edition, I found nothing. The Times is expert at hiding stories it wants to downplay. Finally, after repeatedly thumbing through the paper I found the tea party story buried at the bottom of page 14A.

The bias jumps out at you immediately, as The Times tries its best to hide the fact that 250,000 people turned out for about 700 tea parties across the country. So The Times first mentions “moderate turnout” and cites the case of Philadelphia, where it says the turnout was 200. Needless to say, they emphasized Philadelphia rather than Atlanta, where the turnout was about 100 times higher. The Times only mentions turnouts in cities where it was about 1,000 or less and avoids those with bigger turnouts than that.

This is all the more inexcusable as The Times had a reporter in Atlanta, as indicated in a note accompanying the story. The Times tried to take the focus off of this amazing grassroots explosion in protest against the Obama policy. If three people show up for a peace demonstration or a pro-gay-marriage demonstration, that would be treated as a major story.

The Times totally missed the importance of the development because it wanted to downplay any criticism of the Obama administration, for which it acts as a virtual press agent. To show you how determined The Times was to avoid the real story, it devotes two paragraphs of its story to a gay protest about the fact that even in Massachusetts, where same sex marriage is legal, such gay couples cannot file joint federal tax returns.

When you read The Times story, you understand why the paper may be heading for bankruptcy and extinction. There were six reporters on the story, but it failed to capture any of the flavor or color of the story. Of all those stories I read, it was about the most boring and worthless, even though six reporters worked on the story.

Someone should tell The Times that they can produce that kind of lousy journalism with one reporter rather than six, save money and still maintain their low standards. When you combine lousy writing with biased journalism and expend huge resources in doing so, you don’t have a formula for success. I doubt if there is much of a market for weak writing combined with strong bias. The Times has become a journalistic joke —along with the rest of the mainstream media.

If that reporting isn’t bad enough, on the editorial page, there is a pathetic column by Gail Collins in which she tries to paint Mr. Obama as a fiscal conservative and a great budget balancer. She writes Mr. Obama responded to critics by pointing out that “the country can’t flourish on the sands of deficits and financial bubbles.”

What a supreme phony and hypocrite extraordinaire is Mr. Obama — the greatest spender and debt creator in American history is complaining about deficits and financial bubbles. He has the talking disease and is unable to distinguish between the reality he creates and the hot air rhetoric he blows forth. I’ll give Ms. Collins credit for one thing. Despite her weak reasoning and absurd conclusion, she did make me laugh. She actually wrote, “Obama has been trying to set an example of prudent government …”

The wildest spender, the greatest contributor to national debt in history, the man who supports one of the most expensive spending bills in history that no one even read that voted for it, is painted as “prudent.” Too bad everything in The Times isn’t that funny, because its worthless for facts or logical opinion — so maybe they can sell it as comedy.

Then we come to The Philadelphia Inquirer, a cheaper imitation of the bias and journalistic malpractice of The Times. What did it do with the tea party story? It was even worse than The Times. It left it out of the A-section and buried it on page 8 of the B-section (Local News). The main bit of malpractice was burying an important national story deep into the section on local news. The reporters who wrote the story did a workmanlike job, but that can’t make up for editors who are biased and blind in their news judgments.

USA Today, a giant in circulation, but small in journalistic principles, as you would expect, buried the story at the bottom of page 3A. It had no discussion of the importance of the tea parties or their future political implications. You get a sense of what the editors think by what they featured on the front-page: “Strip searches at school: Discipline gone to far.”

So much for the bias of the mainstream media. What about the newspapers that gave tea parties the coverage they were entitled to. The Bulletin, as you would expect, featured the tea parties on the front-page with two pictures and two stories. The New York Times and the other major national papers could learn from The Bulletin, which delivered a much better picture of the significance of this important development. One other nice touch to The Bulletin story —it documented the bias and vitriol of the broadcast media in its coverage of the tea parties.

Another newspaper that gave the tea parties the coverage they deserved was Investor’s Business Daily. It put the story on the right-hand top of the front-page and carried a picture of the Springfield, Ill., tea party that included a sign reading, “Give Me Liberty … Not Debt!” It also gave the story the column inches it was entitled to. Incidentally, Investor’s Business Daily is worth reading just for its two editorial and commentary pages — by far the best such pages of any newspaper I know of and I’ve read a lot of them.

Some of the other smaller circulation papers also made The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and USA Today look bad by comparison.

The Trenton Times ran a front-page story with two pictures on the local tea party and also ran another story on the national tea parties placed on page A9. The Morning Call of Allentown also ran a big front-page story with a front-page picture that featured a sign reading “Washington D.C. You’re All Fired.”

The coverage of the tabloids, as you would expect, was not as strong as the broadsheets. The New York Post carried the story on page 7, with three pictures, including one with a sign that read, “Honk If I’m Paying Your Mortgage.” The New York Daily News put the story at the bottom of page 8. The Philadelphia Daily News did not report on the national story at all, but did carry a lively and interesting column by Stu Bykofsky on page 4.

The Financial Times of London, considered one of the best papers in the world, missed the story altogether. However, it does have a special perspective, but the financial and economic implications of the tea parties strongly suggest that The Financial Times’ failure to cover the story was a serious mistake.

The Wall Street Journal, one of the best papers in the world, if not the best, carried the story on page 3 with a picture with one sign reading, “Born free but taxed to death.” The Journal also carried a commentary by Karl Rove that did the best job of putting the importance of the tea parties into a sound perspective.

The moral of the story is that you can’t trust the mainstream media, and if you do, you’re likely to get a false impression of the world. You may want to read The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, but don’t rely on them (unless you just read the sports pages). You also can assume as biased as their coverage is, it continues to get worse. If you rely on the mainstream media you’re getting something that is closer to propaganda and fiction than to news. Just as the Obama administration is out of control, so is the mainstream media.

Finally, don’t underestimate the damages these papers are doing. The mainstream media was largely responsible for electing Mr. Obama. It has been responsible for covering up his radical policies, radical appointments and endless blunders. If not reversed somehow, the course set by Mr. Obama has the potential to destroy America and the free world. That means America faces three enemies that will destroy us if they get their way: the terrorists, the Obama administration and the mainstream media.

So do something to save yourself and the country from this unholy trinity. You can fight the terrorists by signing up at www.actforamerica.org. You can fight the Obama administration by getting behind conservative and Republican candidates. You can fight the mainstream media, by boycotting its outlets and by signing up to boycott The New York Times at www.boycottnyt.com. The life and country you save may be your own.

Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.

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