Remember last spring?
When leftybloggers and the local and national media were scouring behind every dandelion for “racist tea partiers? When the standard of “proof” was “suspicious ambiguity?”
As most of us who actually attended Tea Party rallies knew, it was all crap.
And now we have proof:
A new analysis of political signs displayed at a tea party rally in Washington last month reveals that the vast majority of activists expressed narrow concerns about the government’s economic and spending policies and steered clear of the racially charged anti-Obama messages that have helped define some media coverage of such events.
And there’s your thesis – the media has used whatever “racist” signs they did find to paint their entire coverage of the conservative revolution. The gullible and/or depraved lefty “alternative” media has run with that meme, naturally.
Ekins’s conclusion is not that the racially charged messages are unimportant but that media coverage of tea party rallies over the past year have focused so heavily on the more controversial signs that it has contributed to the perception that such content dominates the tea party movement more than it actually does.
“Really this is an issue of salience,” Ekins said. “Just because a couple of percentage points of signs have those messages doesn’t mean the other people don’t share those views, but it doesn’t mean they do, either. But when 25 percent of the coverage is devoted to those signs, it suggests that this is the issue that 25 percent of people think is so important that they’re going to put it on a sign, when it’s actually only a couple of people.”
Conservatives can expect the media to slander us. But it’s good to fight it.
Good one, Mitch!
I have attended three Tea Parties since the movement began, including Jason Lewis’ Anti Tax rally. As anyone that has actually attended one can attest, it was just “bitter old white men.” What you see is a group of American Patriots from all walks of life, standing shoulder to shoulder and calling out in one voice; ENOUGH!!”
The dominant media culture has such unique blinders on when it comes to rally’s. In the NY Governor’s race, Carl “Old Man” Paladino is running against Andrew ‘Prince’ Cuomo. Prince bragged about attending a gay pride parade with his young children. Old Man proclaimed that he saw a gay pride parade once and noted there were men in Speedo’s grinding against one another. He questioned Prince taking his child to such an event. Of course the media proclaimed Carl’s observations as homo-phobic (even though some acknowledged what Carl said was true – but it was just a small percentage of the parade simulating sex overall, wink, wink). Somehow, 1 nutcase with a sign at a TEA party rally = the whole TEA party movement. Groups of gays simulating sex and well, Dykes on Bikes, taints not at all the vast majority of gay people. Go figure.
Seflores-
I’ve heard that a researcher used the same techniques used to show that homosexuality was congenital to show that “homophobia”, too, was congenital.
Homophobia is learned. When you’ve watched the radical gay activists destroy a church you love, you’ll understand this.