How the Media Created the Tea Party

Nature abhors a vacuum.

Where a void exists, something will come in to fill it. The news media is supposed to act as the intermediary between the people and the government; to question, to bring facts and issues to the fore. When it failed so publicly and so spectacularly during the last election, it created a void which was filled by others. Those “others” included talk radio, a single media outlet – Fox News - bloggers and the internet where Glenn Reynolds’ “Army of Davids” toiled. And this combination of voices, acting as an alternative media, created the Tea Party.

Why is Fox News a big and growing hit on TV while other broadcast news services are losing viewers? They provide a voice to people on the middle and right side of the political spectrum while all of the others do a fine job of articulating the left. They fill a void that was created by the failure of NBC, CBS & ABC to provide a venue for anyone right of center. In fact, much of the media – and that includes organs like the NY Times and MSNBC – has made a conscious decision to appeal to their skewed demographic (minority, urban liberal, faculty lounge) leaving the vast middle and conservative part of the population up for anyone who wants to pay attention to their issues and concerns. Newsweek, which openly announced this shift several years ago, just sold for one dollar ($1).

The Tea Party is really a phenomenon of this decision on the part of the liberal media and its political allies in both parties. Don’t get me wrong, the media has always been liberal, but their liberalism had been tempered. But they simply could not resist the temptation to become the cheerleaders for the first affirmative action president. To paraphrase Christine O’Donnell: “he was them!”

They went so far overboard that they left a very large vacuum. In the past, that vacuum may have been filled with something quite different. But a confluence of events, technology, personality and ideology came together. What it birthed was something rarely seen, a spontaneous uprising of people who have other, better, things to do – most of the time – than spend their time demonstrating in the streets. They have jobs to go to, kids to take to school, homes to clean and meals to fix. Organizing for a demonstration was the work of young singles, students and faculty with nothing else to occupy their time. It was the kind of activity that appealed to bearded Marxists rather than suburban matrons or office workers. So when the Tea Party people actually took to the street or town squares no one in the media could believe they were real. They were accused of being “Astroturf” – fakes paid for by shadowy forces. They were then ridiculed and called by sexually deviant names by smirking faces in the media. The next step was the old doomsday weapon of the left – calling them racist. That bomb went off like a North Korean nuke – it ended up a fizzle. And because that accusation has now been shown to have lost its potency, the Left is now partially disarmed; and it’s all its own doing. The Tea Party people have demonstrated that they can have a dramatic impact on elections. Even if some of the candidates endorsed by the Tea Party people don’t win, they have already knocked off a number of Republican RINOs who won’t be coming back to Washington and have scared the pants off of many Democrats who believed they had a lifetime job in congress.

It’s all because the media, like a love struck teenybopper, fell in love and decided to run off with Barack Obama. It left a vacuum that others filled. It’s too late to move back home. To carry the analogy one step further, they are carrying Obama’s love child and it’s too late for an abortion. They have it; they will nurture it and grow up with it. Meanwhile others have moved into its room at home.