You remember when the Tea Party began, just one year and one week ago? First, it took weeks before the mainstream media and even the federal government recognized we existed. And ever since, the coverage has been incessantly negative, critical, and dirisive. According to the liberati, Tea Parties were angry mobs, racists, Nazi-lovers, terrorists, extremists, idiots, militia-types, “Astroturf,” a wing of the Republican Party, and plain old angry white men.
A few days ago I heard about the creation of a Tea-Party-ridiculing movement called “The Coffee Party.” The organization is unabashedly for all things liberal: Obama and Dem Congress, big government, socialized health system, etc. This past weekend at a righty blog (can’t remember which), I posted a commented that, unlike the Tea Party movement, the “Coffee Party” will probably enjoy thorough and positive coverage from the mainstream media.
Sure enough, in less than a week the Coffee Party gets positive coverage from both the NY Times and WaPo, and a fawning CNN interview.
Clay Waters at TimesWatch writes:
After ignoring the Tea Party—the fast-growing anti-government movement—for two months, the New York Times finally noticed the massive country-wide protests that took place on Tax Day, April 15, 2009. Even then, the Times reacted to the rallies with snide accusations of anger and Astroturf—that is, of not being a genuine grass-roots movement but instead being funded by right-wing paymasters.
By contrast, it took the Times a mere week to jump on the nascent leftish “Coffee Party” movement for Tuesday’s report from Kate Zernike, “Coffee Party, With a Taste for Civic Participation, Is Added to the Political Menu.” The Washington Post got there even quicker, with a front-page feature that ran on Friday, February 26.
The first post at CoffeePartyUSA.org, a mission statement, was made on Monday night, February 22. Eight days later, the group has sympathetic feature stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times. Not bad for a week’s work, Coffee Partiers!
(Side note: Zernike did a decent profile of Seattle blogger Keli Carender on the front page of the Sunday Times, sandwiched between her false accusation that a CPAC speaker, Jason Mattera, indulged in racial stereotyping in an anti-Obama speech, and this pleasant profile of a left-wing protest movement.)
Zernike’s Tuesday story saw only the most benign motives in the Coffee Party movement—no accusations of anger or Astroturfing, no liberal labels, and an inordinate faith in the metrics of Facebook:
Fed up with government gridlock, but put off by the flavor of the Tea Party, people in cities across the country are offering an alternative: the Coffee Party.
Growing through a Facebook page, the party pledges to “support leaders who work towards positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.”
It had nearly 40,000 members as of Monday afternoon, but the numbers were growing quickly—about 11,000 people had signed on as fans since the morning.
“I’m in shock, just the level of energy here,” said the founder, Annabel Park, a documentary filmmaker who lives outside Washington. “In the beginning, I was actively saying, ‘Get in touch with us, start a chapter.’ Now I can’t keep up. We have 300 requests to start a chapter that I have not been able to respond to.”
The slogan is “Wake Up and Stand Up.” The mission statement declares that the federal government is “not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges we face as Americans.”
Local chapters are planning meetings in cities from Washington to San Antonio to Los Angeles (where there have been four in the last month.) The party (coffeepartyusa.org) is planning nationwide coffee houses for March 13, where people can gather to decide which issues they want to take on and even which candidates they want to support.
This summer, Ms. Park said, the party will hold a convention in the Midwest, with a slogan along the lines of “Meet Me in the Middle.” The party has inspired the requisite jokes: why not a latte party, a chai party, a Red Bull party? But Ms. Park said that while the Coffee Party—and certainly the name—was formed in reaction to the Tea Party, the two agree on some things, like a desire for fiscal responsibility and a frustration with Congress.
“We’re not the opposite of the Tea Party,” Ms. Park, 41, said. “We’re a different model of civic participation, but in the end we may want some of the same things.”
The pro-Obama motivations behind the gatherings were minimized, and this particular denial of partisan leanings was totally unconvincing. How can one campaign for Obama while also paying “little attention to politics”?
Eileen Cabiling, who founded the Los Angeles chapter, said she had campaigned for President Obama, but paid little attention to politics until the Tea Party convention and Mr. Obama’s State of the Union speech, where he rebuked Congressional Democrats and Republicans alike for their inability to move on legislation.
Notable by its absence was any probing into the background of chief “Coffee Party” organizer Annabel Park. That was left to William Jacobson on his Legal Insurrection blog, where he cited some of Park’s posts on her Twitter account, including this charming appeal to sweet reason posted by Park on January 26, where Park sounds far less measured than she does in Zernike’s sympathetic handling:
we need to re-engage the grassroots movemnt that got Obama elected. we need to get busy. cannot give it away to tea baggers.
Jacobson also uncovered Park’s support for the Obama campaign, which Zernike didn’t see fit to mention, much less point to as a possible sign of the Coffee Party being pro-Obama “Astroturfing” as opposed to a genuine grass-roots movement. (It doesn't appear to be, but then, neither is the Tea Party movement that was constantly accused of being such.) Jacobson found that Park was “one of the organizers and operators of the United for Obama video channel at YouTube.” …
There’s another interesting thing Jacobson found at the aforementioned Legal Insurrection blog:
Park is a former Strategy Analyst at the NY Times …
Take that in: The founder of the Coffee Party is a freaking fellow employee at the newpaper that gave her organization a glowing puff piece. No wonder the so-called “newspaper of record” whitewashed her background! Can you say conflict of interest? A “documentary film maker”? Sure, for the freaking Obama administration! You think the reader would be interested in knowing that?
It gets even more nefarious: Blogger “Nice Deb” did a Google search of her own on Annabel Park and discovered:
Annabel Park was also part of a pro-illegal immigration YouTube project in 2008:
Filmmakers Eric Byler, Annabel Park, and Jeff Man run “9500Liberty”, a pro-illegal immigration online documentary project discussing issues in northern Virginia (youtube.com/user/9500Liberty). In the past they’ve resorted to re-re-re-repurposing supposedly controversial comments from an older white gentleman in an attempt to racially demagogue the issue, but now they’re back with a new video called “IMMIGRATION Crackdown HURTS Our Economy”
Don’t even try to tell me that the omission of Park’s background was unintentional. And don’t even argue that Zernike didn’t even know; because even if she didn’t, it was sure as hell easy as a simple Google search to find out. This is the politically partisan crap that passes for objective news these days at papers like the NY Times. No wonder they’re losing subscribers left and right.
But wait! There's more! Park was interviewed on CNN this morning. Sentiments of “not taking sides” and especially “We’re not aligned with ... any party.” Yes, you read that right. And CNN let Park talk unchallenged. No tough or digging questions. Just ... loooove for patriotic American activism!
Excuse me while I run to the bathroom and puke.
The Coffee Party is a perfect way for the mainstream media to continue bashing, minimizing, and delegitimizing the Tea Party movement. I predict they will continue to give them constant, positive coverage until at least the mid-term elections in November. And, like Kate Zernike, they will (deliberately?) neither vet the leadership to unearth their partisan connections, nor fact-check the statements made by said leaders.
How disgusting these puff pieces are, especially in light of theses papers’ treatment of the Tea Party. It is liberal media bias at its most blatant—and that’s saying a lot considering the many examples of such bias turning up these days.
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