Posted on 10/19/2010 7:13:59 PM PDT by Conservative Coulter Fan
Members of what US conservatives call the “mainstream media” know they are viewed as opponents by the Tea Party movement. But few expect to be handcuffed when they turn up at campaign events.
However bizarre in its particulars, the arrest on Sunday of Tony Hopfinger, a journalist, by security guards working for Joe Miller, Alaska’s Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for the Senate, was an incident waiting to happen.
Although fuelled by dislike for taxes, hatred of the “liberal media” – including virtually all channels, barring Fox News, and most print publications – is a central tenet of the Tea Party’s world view.
Mr Hopfinger, who had written stories questioning aspects of Mr Miller’s background for his website Alaska Dispatch, was handcuffed after he approached the candidate at what his campaign said was a private event. “I am leaving and this guy is just hounding me – he was right in front of me, blocking the way,” Mr Miller told Fox News after the incident.
Like most US elections, this year’s midterm race is chiefly a contest between the Democratic and Republican parties. But not far behind is the strange tussle between the Tea Party movement and the media.
Tea Partiers see the media as an arm of the bicoastal liberal elites. The media, on the other hand, see the colourful biographies of people such as Christine O’Donnell, the Republican candidate in Delaware, or Sharron Angle, the Republican Senate candidate in Nevada, as unmissable stories.
Whether it is Ms O’Donnell’s youthful dabblings in witchcraft, or Ms Angle’s support for prison regimens devised by the Church of Scientology, Tea Party candidates are as far as you get from the robotic types that sometime emerge from the party machines.
But it is Sarah Palin, probably the biggest Tea Party icon, who personifies the symbiotic aspect to the relationship. A vituperative critic of the media, Ms Palin is also a skilful extractor of what such limelight can provide – from stardom-assisting skits on Saturday Night Live to helpful publicity surrounding her best-selling book. Ms Palin rarely fails to call the media out at her rallies.
“They are coming after our candidates hard with cheap shots and with fouls,” Ms Palin said at a rally in Nevada on Monday, in which she pointed at the media enclosure and elicited loud jeering. “You can’t count any more on an objective referee to blow the whistle on the fouls . . . You have revealed their true colours and their bias. More power to you American people.”
Ms Palin’s complex relationship with the media dates back to her selection as John McCain’s running mate in the 2008 presidential election, when she was feted as a star but also caught on a CBS interview being unable to recollect the name of one newspaper she had read. That, plus sustained focus on Ms Palin’s alleged ignorance of the world – and the tabloid pursuit of her then-pregnant daughter Bristol – led to a rapid souring.
Even Fox News, for which Ms Palin is now a paid contributor, has on occasions caused embarrassment. Earlier this year, in an interview with Glenn Beck, the talk-radio tycoon, Ms Palin was unable to name one Founding Father, despite constantly invoking them in her speeches. “Well all of them,” she said after a long pause, “because they came collectively together with so much diversity in terms of belief.” On being pressed, Ms Palin alighted on George Washington.
Partly as a result, most Tea Party candidates in this election are avoiding outlets other than Fox News and sympathetic radio stations and internet sites.
“We do get advice not to do interviews and not to be overly candid,” Rand Paul, the Tea Party-supported Senate candidate in Kentucky, admitted to Fox News recently.
In a debate last week Ms O’Donnell, who is considered unlikely to win her race, taunted Wolf Blitzer, the CNN moderator, over the fact that she had turned down his interview requests. Then, in an echo of Ms Palin, who appears to be a role model, she teased Chris Coons, her Democratic opponent, by saying: “You’re just jealous you haven’t appeared on Saturday Night Live.”
Ms O’Donnell’s only national interviews have been with Fox News. But even they appear to have been curtailed. In her last one, two weeks ago, she was asked about her “plan for Pakistan”.
Referring to it as a Middle Eastern country, Ms O’Donnell said the US should work to create democracy there. Then she praised Pervez Musharraf, the country’s last military dictator. “Pakistan was a great ally for us in the war on terror,” she said. “We have to help them get back to where they were.”
Bloggers are “journalists” now?
only if they’re leftists?
“If 10 million Tea Party members canceled cable and sat TV then you might get their attention. The only thing they understand is when you hit them in their pocketbook hard.”
The reason we have Russia and not the Soviet Union is because Reagan bankrupted them. It was a teachable moment that we forgot.
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