Get the barf bag ready. In what is arguably the most egregious example of liberal bias in the mainstream media since … um, yesterday, CNN online has a fawning propaganda piece disguised as an objective news story on the “Coffee Party.” The article is called Meet the people who are percolating in the Coffee Party (aw, how cute) by some lib hack with a journalism degree named Jessica Ravitz. My blood is boiling as I type this, but I’ll suffer through it for you, dear readers.
First ingredient in this free infomercial is its glowing, exaggerated “grassroots” description:
They’re professionals, musicians and housewives. They’re frustrated liberal activists, disheartened conservatives and political newborns. They’re young and old, rich and poor, black, white and all shades of other.
Umm, wouldn’t that be a description of the Tea Party? “Professionals, musicians, and housewives”? What the hell does CNN think Tea Partiers are? “Frustrated liberal activists”? The only thing they’re frustrated about is that they can no longer have Bush and Cheney in the White House to march around calling terrorists, Nazis, and war criminals.
Disheartened conservatives? Ravitch scoured the country to find one whopping conservative (a gay man) who defected from the Tea Party movement to this one. The Tea Party is mostly disheartened conservatives. Not only that, but there are a lot of disheartened liberals too. Since the Tea Party movement began, CNN was wanted to ignore the growing liberal disillusionment in Obama and the Democrat Congress, as well as the mass abandonment of independents—including Obama voters—to movements like the Tea Party.
But CNN—like the rest of the MSM—chose to initially ignore, and then deride and slander Tea Partiers as racist violence-prone angry mobs. When you’re in the Tea Party you’re angry, but if you’re in the “Coffee Party,” you’re frustrated and disillusioned.
Second ingredient: Taking gratuitous digs at the Tea Party (remember this is supposed to be an objective news story):
Born on Facebook just six weeks ago, the group boasts more than 110,000 fans, as of Friday morning. The Coffee Party is billed by many as an answer to the Tea Party (more than 1,000 fewer fans) [Read: Nya nya nya nya!], a year-old protest movement that's steeped in fiscal conservatism and boiling-hot, anti-tax rhetoric.
This new group calls for civility, objects to obstructionism and demands that politicians be held accountable to the people who put them in office.
What do you mean “this new group demands that politicians be held accountable to the people who put them in office? That’s exactly what the Tea Party was created for, you dunce! If you and your lib media drones weren’t so busy counting white people and “swastika” posters, maybe you would’ve noticed that.
The message is loud and clear: Tea Party = boiling hot, rhetoric (used pejoritavely to mean empty talk), obstructionist, and fiscal conservatism (also used pejoratively). Coffee party = civil, level-headed, substantive.
Third ingredient: Make the organizers of the movement look like sympathetic, ordinary citizens to which you can relate. Omit any inconvenient truths that detract from your fairy tale:
In the subsection called “The one who was 'never active in this stuff,'” heretofore politically dormant Americans are celebrated for finally getting involved in the political process. Um, hello? Who the heck do you think many of the Tea Partiers are? Unbelievable.
The next subsection, called “The Atlanta coordinator,” reads in part:
Hopkins was 5 when she stared at the two water fountains: one marked "colored," the other "white." The New Yorker was somewhere in Virginia at a train stop with her mother and grandmother, and, well, she'd never drunk colored water before and figured white was what she wanted. But her grandmother yanked her away from that water, muttering something about her getting them all killed.
Are you kidding me? They’re actually trying to connect in the readers mind the Coffee Party with the Civil Rights Movement of 45-50 years ago. By doing this they are legitimizing it, and deligitimizing the Tea Party. Because the Tea Partiers have nothing to do with civil rights, and certainly no one who’s a Tea Partier could have been affected by racial discrimination that happened those many years ago. (At the same time, the Tea Party movement has been ridiculed as “angry old white men,” which means they would more likely than the young and fresh “Coffee Partiers” have been alive during that time in American history.)
That moment, and her childlike understanding of what it meant, stuck with Hopkins and has driven her ever since. The stay-at-home mom used to work in the real-estate mortgage field but left when she became disheartened by the industry.
Oh, I see. This coordinator is just a simple stay-at-home mom who became dishearted by … not the overspending overcontrolling federal government but the mortgage industry.
She feels hopeful about the people who are re-engaging in and taking ownership of the political process
Again, a perfect description of the Tea Party movement being co-opted to describe this (and only this) movement instead.
Of all the members of this faux movement, notice one person not mentioned? That would be founder Annabel Park, who has a high-up in the infantry of Obamatons ever since the presidential campaign. Nothing less than whitewashing to give the impression that the “Coffee Party” was an authentic Facebook-born grassroots movement—and again insinuating that Tea Party movement was not.
Final ingredient: Pictures
Unlike CNN footage of the Tea Parties, which featured red-faced angry yelling white people carrying signs that “provoked violence” and even caused people to worry about President Hope&Change’s physical safety, the photos of the Coffee Party members are all rosy and smiley. Message: These people may not be greedy corporate CEO’s, or gun- and Bible-clingers who are pissed off there’s a black man in the White House. They’re just simple Americans and they caaaare.
This whole thing, photos and all, is just painful to look at. If CNN had any journalistic integrity, this is exactly what they would have done when the Tea Party—a true grassroots movement devoted to seriously demand accountability from Washington—came on the scene. Instead, they played the typical Democrat mouthpiece and railed against them on the T.V. screen on the web.
“Saturday Night Live” or The Onion could not have created such a grotesque caricature of a lib/Dem propaganda piece as CNN has done itself.
I have just one question for “journalist” Jessica Ravitch: How much money did Obama, Emanuel, and Axelrod pay you and your “news” company to concoct this free infomercial?
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