Fifteen Years Later – A Look Back at How the Media Mistreated the Tea Party Movement
“a party for Obama bashers….It’s anti-government, anti-CNN, since this is highly promoted by the right wing conservative network, Fox”
It’s amazing to think that the Tea Party movement kicked off fifteen years ago and it’s important to remember how the media covered it. When you look at the coverage of Trump and Trump supporters today, the media coverage isn’t much different. It tends to swing back and forth between mockery and outright disdain.
Like then, today’s media is largely made up of people on the left. They never seemed to figure out that the Tea Party led almost directly to Trump.
Rich Noyes of NewsBusters has rounded up some golden oldies of media coverage:
FLASHBACK: When a Juvenile News Media Tried to Destroy the Tea Party
The first T.E.A. Party (Taxed Enough Already) protests took place in various cities on February 27, 2009, a reaction to presumed new taxes that would inevitably result from the Obama administration’s huge bailouts and spending programs. A major national protest was scheduled for April 15, “tax day,” the deadline for filing federal income tax forms.
Filling in as host of MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann on April 13, David Shuster mocked the Tea Party by repeatedly deploying a slang term for a sex act called “teabagging.”
“It’s going to be teabagging day for the right-wing and they’re going nuts for it. Thousands of them whipped out the festivities early this past weekend, and while the parties are officially toothless, the teabaggers are full-throated about their goals,” Shuster sophomorically sneered.
The next night, CNN’s Anderson Cooper got into the act. “Republicans are pretty much in disarray…They’re searching for their voice,” analyst David Gergen dryly opined on the April 14 AC360. “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging,” Cooper snickered…
On CNN that afternoon, correspondent Susan Roesgen decried the protest as “a party for Obama bashers….It’s anti-government, anti-CNN, since this is highly promoted by the right wing conservative network, Fox. And since I can’t really hear much more and I think this is not really family viewing, I’ll toss it back to you.”
Watch the two clips mentioned above:
Since NPR’s media bias has been in the news lately, it seems appropriate to share this screen-cap from an actual segment on the taxpayer funded outlet:
Reminder: This is how NPR covered the Tea Party movement in 2010. pic.twitter.com/QfM2lCllMk
— Mike LaChance (@MikeLaChance33) April 14, 2024
What is the takeaway from all of this? It’s simple. The media has not changed in fifteen years. Anything they see as a threat to their progressive ideology is either mocked as stupid, painted as a dangerous threat to the established order, or both.
They have not learned a thing.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
The tea party is the rabble that cleaned up after itself after rallies.
The neatest, nicest rabble rousers ever. Was then, still is.
Yes, a revolt of the conscientious. Unfortunately, as we keep seeing, nice guys finish last.
Yes, and we’ll continue to finish last until we see and say what’s in front of us. Not of this is by chance. This is a plan, a conspiracy if you will, of the wealthy elite to force the USA into the NWO. The rest of the world is already controlled; there’ll be no problem getting them. Why America is the tough nut is our Constitution which stands as a limitation to total government. For sure the UniParty has abused the limits of the Constitution hideously. 95% of what fedgov does is unconstitutional. But Americans still cling to the notion of limitation in the document. The left continues its campaigns for an Article V convention to finally finish off the 1787 miracle.
Spider in the middle: the CFR, Council on Foreign Relations which coordinates its super wealthy, super influential members to keep chopping away at America’s underpinnings.
Yeah….We shouldn’t have been 9/12 ers because that was about unity. We needed to be 12/16’ers
( the day if the Boston Tea Party) and thrown some people off piers. Slowly we are learning the lesson from the likes of BLM that if you want to show that you’re angry to gotta break some stuff.
Democrat mayors deployed platoons of swat teams in bullet proof vests against what looked like a PTA meeting of grandmothers and non violent tax protestors.
lol, at first I think geez, they are think they are so 8 grade with teabag. Then I think, wow they embrace a sex term. Class act. How many conservative news media use FJB?
But the REAL teabagger…Anderson Cooper thought using his gay term was such a big joke. He would know personally..
AND FBHO too. He started the division.
Matt “Lock The Door” Lauer most certainly knew what a “tea bagger” was. The propaganda branch of the gov’t did a thorough job when it came to disparaging the Tea Party Movement.
The funny thing, to me, was the way they all loved to call a conservative “teabagger” which leads to the question… “then who is the teabaggee?”
Gargle them proggies, gargle them. Watch the teeth proggies, watch the teeth.
Obama joined in the dirty smear tactic because he was one of the few that personally knew its disgusting meaning.
Not snough
“How many conservative news media use FJB?”
News media? I don’t know. Never seen it. Have you?
During his wretched and corrosive tenure, the dutiful and obsequious Dhimmi-crat media lapdogs/trained seals/shills/propagandists deemed any scintilla of criticism of the absurdly deified narcissist-incompetent-dunce, Obama, to be off-limits, and, further, they vilified and slandered anyone who fairly criticized either Obama, himself, or, his stupid and destructive policies, with the well-worn label of alleged “racist” or “white supremacist.”
Even more problematic than the media’s behavior regarding the Tea Party was the behavior of government. When Lois Lerner was able to do what she did with ZERO repercussions whatsoever, it set the stage for what the FBI would do to Trump several years later.
I’m old enough to remember the Wisconsin fleebaggers.
They weren’t “mistreated” – progressives in the media identified a threat to power and set out to crush it.
It’s a cold civil war and they will keep on shooting at us … mistreatment is an understatement when the goal is to destroy.
Anyone else getting ads on LI that completely take over the window and play a sound like there’s an alert?
I use Brave or Vivaldi to view this site. I grew very tired of the ads at the bottom with the flickering strobe nonsense.
I try to leave ads on sites that I like … but there are some that are just too obtrusive.
Personally, I wish sites would start having an option to let people give them x% of CPU time for crypto mining rather than having ads on the site that make it unreadable. I would be very happy to contribute some compute time to help pay the site … but I will not be abused by asinine ads. Regular ads are fine, but anything that moves out of its box or turns on sound or video or anything like that … that’s too much for me.
LibreWolf works similarly.
Yes
I’ll get a banner at the bottom, but Duck Duck Go blocks that one.
Nope, just you. That’s a classic adware symptom. I recommend Malwarebytes — it’s free, and it runs only when you ask it to.
Yes, the media denigrated the TEA Party just as it mocks the America Firsters, but it was the establishment GOP who absorbed and compromised the TP politicians elected by the fed-up base.
The Uniparty Borg ensured that all would be assimilated.
Remember that it was CNBC’s Rick Santelli that ranted on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade that called for the Tea Party. Santelli was the first in mainstream media that was critical of Obama and his policies that would grant monies to mortgages that were underwater. It’s one of my favorite all-time clips. There also were many Democrats in the Chicago Tea Party crowd that CNN wouldn’t tell you about.
Thanks for mentioning that origin with Santelli’s rant from the CBOE. When people present “taxed enough already” as the origin of the name, they are forgetting what happened. The revolt was over bailouts to privileged firms, and about the government-induced mortgage crisis; it wasn’t a run-of-the-mill expression of taxpayer resentment, but a protest about government acting beyond its legitimate powers.
Right after the Tea Party gave the GOP the biggest swing in Congressional power in a century the reaction from the treasonous sh*tweasels in GOP leadership was quick, with both Mitch McConnell and the Crying Boner declaring that their number one priority was to crush the Tea Party.
On the comical side, the left tried to copy the Tea Party with their “Coffee Party” which ended up being nothing more than 4 or 5 losers getting together in a cafe – seriously – though the media gave them more coverage than they did of any Tea Party gatherings … including the million people at DC to protest BarkyCare, which the media and the DC criminal officials reported as “about 60,000”.
The anti-Tea Party GOP is the direct ancestor of the NeverTrump movement.
The populist center right movement has a long history. We are finally getting some traction in Congress but it would sure be nice to have politicians who claim to embrace certain policies actually vote for them and do everything in their power to get those policies across the finish line instead of making excuses for failure.
While it seems clear that the media bashed and distorted the “Tea Party,” the other part (and maybe the larger part) of the equation was people who ran on the Tea Party platform, espousing all of the ideas and rhetoric they could that aligned with the Tea Party.
Once elected, they did not care to curb spending and voted to increase taxes.
One candidate I know ran as a “Tea Partier” and then once elected voted for every single proposed fee increase and tax increase. He also voted to expand the government time and time again, never voting to keep it at its same level, or to diminish it.
The Tea Party became a struggle internally for power, and wiped away the idea of representing the people.
When it came to the Tea Party, the Democrats and the Republicans, “we have met the enemy, and they are us.”
As bad as the betrayal of the TEA Party was, it was necessary. We know now, that working within “the system” is not going to change things.
Subotai Bahadur
^This^
You have to work with the system as it is, not as you were taught in High School Civics, back when they had High School Civics.
Why? The left doesn’t do that. What repercussions has Joe Biden had for thumbing his nose at the Supreme Court’s ruling on student loans? He just ignores them, and nothing is done about it. In Arizona, Katie Hobbs just thumbed her nose at the AZ Supreme Court’s ruling on banning abortion, and said she won’t enforce it. In both case, they have violated their oaths of office. Will anything be done about it? They will just get “elected” again.
I’m not going to lie: Shuster’s exact words were pretty clever, as ribald as they were. They were either written by recently graduate of the Harvard Lampoon or a drunk South Park writer. Or it means we really need to ask what kind of things should disqualify him from living within 300ft of a school or park.
We look foolish when we are the least surprised by this. Mass media is a political faction that allies with whatever advances their agenda and personal power.. The vast majority of the individual chapters of this faction align with progressive Democrats, and act as cheerleaders and motivators for the Party base. They produce propaganda because that’s what gets their constituency on point to disrupt their opponents. Conservatives complain about this, but might as well whine about how unfair it is for Democrat politicians to lie about them, it’s how the game is played.