If you enjoyed John Hood?s recent Daily Journal column on misrepresentations of the Tea Party movement, you might like to read Andrew Ferguson?s take on that topic for the latest Commentary:
From the earliest sightings, in February of last year, the Tea Partiers appeared in most press coverage as an alien tribe, suitable for either political caricature or anthropological puzzlement. A CNN reporter covering a Tea Party in Chicago on April 15 was lucky enough to find, among 5,000 Partiers, an overwrought fellow with a picture of President Obama done up as Hitler. The broadcasting of that image became a kind of template, requiring that every reporter undertake a desperate (and in truth, often successful) search for wackos at every Tea Party. The Chicagoan with the Obama-Hitler sign became a mascot in Tea Party press coverage?the poster boy, literally. Four months and dozens of Tea Parties later, an ABC reporter was still evoking him and his poster as evidence that these events were ?driven, in part, by a refusal to accept a black president.?
Politics were turned into pathology. It was difficult to find a story mentioning the Tea Partiers in which the words fear or anger didn?t figure prominently. When the protests moved to town halls around the country during the congressional summer recess, Newsweek.com treated readers to a photo gallery showing these unfortunate earthlings in various states of duress and shades of purple.
Ferguson goes on to explain that the caricature is hard to maintain given the fact that ? to borrow Hood?s words ? ?most voters agree with the tenets and activism of the Tea Party movement.?
