Inside Blogotics

Tea reporters

Among conservative bloggers and media critics, CNN’s Susan Roesgen and her coverage of the tax day “tea party” protest in Chicago is about as popular as measles.

“Poor little Susan Roesgen had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day!” quipped self-described “Queer Conservative” Kevin.

In a famous clip that CNN has being trying to scrub from the Internet on copyright grounds, Ms. Roesgen asked a man holding his toddler why he was protesting, interrupted him with “what does that have to do with taxes?” and told him that Illinois will get billions from President Obama’s stimulus bill (the taxes will come from other states, obviously).

She signed off with, “I think you get the general tenor of this, uh, it’s anti-government, anti-CNN, since this is highly promoted by the rightwing conservative network Fox and since I can’t really hear much more, I think this is not really family viewing, toss it back to you, Kera.”

“Unreal,” muttered Allahpundit at Hot Air.

“The title of the clip is ‘CNN Reporter Roughed Up at Chicago Tea-Party,’ which, as youll see, is a transparent lie unless you consider the crowd yelling at her to stop cutting off the people shes interviewing as ‘rough.’ But that’s par for the course for the narrative being organized here: A nasty, violent, ignorant crowd, all doing the bidding of CNNs sinister competitor. Stay classy, Turnerites,” he said.

Ace of Spades asks, “Is she there as a representative of CNN or of the Obama Administration? And is there a meaningful distinction between the two?”

Nor, Ace pointed out, was this Ms. Roesgen’s first run-in in recent days with protesters whom she doesn’t get. “Earlier, she couldn’t believe that pious Catholics at Notre Dame would object to the nation’s top constitutional abortionist speaking at that Catholic school,” Ace wrote, referring to an exchange that ended with her saying: “Can you believe that, Wolf, theyre actually praying that God will change the heart and mind of President Obama to make him pro-life?”

Tea reporting

Reports of crowds are notoriously unreliable, but given the large numbers of tax day “tea parties,” the total number of protesters nationwide certainly numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

But coverage by the mainstream media was either hostile (see above) or scant, noted Doug Ross at his eponymous journal, reporting that the New York Times and the Boston Globe had no first-day, live-news coverage.

“ABC and CBS reporters were nowhere to be found. NBC, on the other hand, simply made obscene references — using a tea-related colloquialism,” Mr. Ross noted before honing in for the compare-and-contrast kill with the coverage of another demonstration.

“Compare and contrast that mainstream media coverage with that afforded Cindy Sheehan and her cohorts at the radical antiwar group Code Pink. Cindy Sheehan’s protests near President Bush’s Crawford, Texas ranch drew but a few dozen protesters. These tiny gatherings garnered more than a hundred mentions in The New York Times and ‘reporting’ that could have been mistaken for a Code Pink infomercial,” he scoffed, citing the following passage:

“How one 48-year-old woman from Vacaville, Calif., invigorated the antiwar movement, altered the landscape of the president’s vacation town and drew a Hollywood celebrity out into the Texas heat may be as much the result of external factors as Ms. Sheehan’s compelling tale.”

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