The Tea Party & Fox News

[ChairmanAgnostic]

In many ways, the pseudo revolution of 2010 was concocted by Fox News (with other news services being taken in or jumping on the band wagon).
If a group of tea baggers decided to meet, even 100 or so of them would cause a huge stir in the media, mainly driven by Fox.
(recall that liberal meetings received little or no press coverage, even with tens and hundreds of thousands attending)

Now that Fox is under attack, at long last, I suspect that the media's love affair with the Tea Baggers will also come to an end. Fox has too many problems to deal with to keep the Tea Baggers alive. Problems from across the Atlantic Pond, a possible investigation from congress here, falling ratings, and successful boycotts of Fox' most lunatic morons.

Reality will eventually strike home. Tea Baggers will disappear in a pot of tepid, murky water. Fox will be outed as an evil disgusting organization that should be banned. And most of the loudmouthed assholes on Fox will find no new place to call home.

[FreakinDJ]

1. Really - you don't say

[fascisthunter]

2. Yup... The Media Manufactured opposition to the People of this Country

I hope it all comes out that there was a conspiracy and that the media gets regulated due to their abuses of lying and misinforming for political/economic agendas of those invested in this deregulated economy.

[gratuitous]

3. You may be correct

But I think you're giving the non-Fox popular media either too much or too little credit. They want to pander to the knuckleheads and the know-nothings because it's easier to sell them Bump-Its and other useless crap. The Tea Baggers will go the way of the dodo, and within 18 months nobody will remember anything about them, and the impact of fawning media coverage in 2010 will be completely forgotten. As an example, I refer you to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who had such an outsize impact on the 2004 election. When was the last time you heard about those charlatans?

It's just a set up for the next time. The popular media don't have a memory, and they do their level best to forget anything of value that might inform the current situation. As such, whatever nonsense is being spouted by some conservative asshole, even if it's 180° different from what they said just last week, becomes Holy Writ for the duration of their appearance, and used as a cudgel on whatever the issue of the day is.

[pampango]

4. Researchers embedded themselves in the Greater Boston Tea Party...

http://blogs.reuters.com/chrystia-freeland/2011/07/11/scenes-from-the-tea-party

Like their fellow Tea Partiers across the United States, those in Massachusetts are older, white, and predominately male. 97 percent are white; 57 percent are males; and 83 percent are over forty-six years old (with more than half are older than age fifty-six). In addition, Bay State Tea Party activists envelop themselves with the same conservative news sources used by other Tea Party participants. When we asked Massachusetts Tea Party activists an open-ended question about their preferred news sources, 51 out of 69 respondents reported being Fox News watchers. ... Only 11 of 69 respondents claim to read the Boston Globe, and only seven Massachusetts Tea Party activists report getting their news from ABC, NBC or CBS News.

...After Fox News, conservative radio programs (such as Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham), and conservative websites (such as The Drudge Report and Red State) topped the list of Tea Party news sources. Several Boston-area Tea Party participants said that it was through watching Glenn Beck’s show that they found out about the Tea Party in the first place.

As Chrystia wrote, Tea Partiers divide the U.S. population into two groups: those who work and are worthy beneficiaries of government programs, and those who don’t who they believe should get nothing. ... Government programs are not intrinsically objectionable in the minds of Tea Party activists, and certainly not when they go to help them. Rather, government spending is seen as corrupted by creating benefits for people who do not contribute, who take handouts at the expense of hard-working Americans.

There were two categories of people, though, that were unquestionably included in the nonworking group: young people and unauthorized immigrants. ... Moreover, discussions of immigration seemed to provoke an especially emotional response. One Boston member spoke of wanting to “stand on the border with a gun,” while another complained about the “free-for-all south of the border.”

[myrna minx]

5. CNN is more than happy to pander to the TeaBaggers - they already do -

so they'll pick up any slack that FOX loses.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

7. CNNooze stopped providing news some time ago

Blitz Wolfer is an embarrassment, but given his history, it is understandable.

[madinmaryland]

6. The tea baggers are just a continuation of the "i've got mine, screw everyone else" wing of the

Repuke party. We used to call them the 25-percenters and deadenders during the last couple years of the bush misadministration.

[Blue Owl]

8. Like two turds of one nasty bowel movement

n/t