“What have you heard about tea parties,” I recently asked about a dozen people.
“Huh?”
“Like the one I had with my grandkids last week?”
“Is this a trick question?”
“Nothing, in particular.”
These are just a few of the responses my informal survey yielded. Statistically speaking it hardly comprises a representative sample but is instructive nonetheless. In short, the media are depriving Americans of all the news that’s fit to print.
This is scarcely a surprise to conservatives, but for those who are not aware of this phenomenon, take heed.
It is rudimentary that the press serves as an unofficial check on all three branches of the government. It is supposed to function independently from the government ensuring that the public receives news in its purest, most unadulterated, objective form. Our history books are replete with examples of societies in which the press functioned as an arm of the government and the havoc that came to bear on the governed as a result. While I do not claim that today’s press is an extension of the government, I’m afraid, my blissfully unaware friends, that we have journeyed to a time when our press functions as a de facto arm of the government. By failing to report newsworthy events simply because they do not comport with the collective viewpoints within a media organization, the press becomes complicit in the promotion of one ideology over another. The tyranny of the majority, which was anathema to our founding fathers, has finally found a foothold in our media and threatens all we hold dear (and by “we” I mean all of us regardless of political affiliation).
While the media knowingly and repeatedly fail to inform millions of Americans of newsworthy events, millions of Americans are also guilty for failing to demand more of their print and electronic media outlets.
Today, millions of Americans are exercising their constitutional right to dissent by staging tea parties all across the land and yet millions of Americans have not read a word about it in the papers, heard any mention of it on the radio or seen a single image about it on TV (excepting, of course, Fox News, conservative Talk Radio and conservative publications). This neglect is not accidental. The press is intentionally holding back news from you, the people.
The tea party story you are not being told has nothing to do with doilies and crumpets. It hearkens back to a time in 1773 when the Sons of Liberty dressed as Mohawk Indians and emptied tea into the
How else to explain the fact that something big is brewing all across the land and you know nothing about it?
Since the press won’t tell you about the tea parties, I will. Over half the people who voted in this last election are fuming mad and do not agree with the economic policies of the current Administration and Congress. They have reached a tipping point and, in uncharacteristic fashion, are taking to the streets on April 15th in close to 300 cities across the nation, with thousands expected to protest the wasteful and profligate spending in Washington; the pork-laden, so-called Stimulus Package; the trillion dollar, record breaking Budget; and proposed Health Care Plans that are sure to bankrupt the American people.
No one stood in the way of the anti-war protesters or Code Pink when they took center stage and most credible news outlets (right, left and center) reported these acts of dissent. Did you know that the conservative media also reported on these protests as well as anti-torture rallies, anti-trade demonstrations and the ubiquitous anti-Bush protests? Yet, non-conservative media outlets have neglected to inform the public that tea parties have not only already taken place, but hundreds will occur on April 15th! We know the press is not allergic to this kind of reporting because just last week, local TV crews covered the tepid protest in front of the Marine recruitment office in the East Bay on the 6th anniversary of the Iraq War—they didn’t miss a beat.
But when it comes to dissent from the right and center, they’ve missed an entire concerto of beats. This blatant shunning of news should worry all of us: once the press filters the news through their own lenses, the news becomes tainted and questionable and the individual is at the mercy of those in control.
Is that the news you want?
A skewed media hurts us all and whittles away at our fundamental freedoms. Whether you have actually lived in a society where the press is controlled by political forces or merely read 1984 in high school and can envision this reality through the power of fiction, you know that a free and fair press in bed with a party or an ideology flies in the face of all we value and, by definition, cannot be free and fair.
Speaking of 1984, during the Two Minute hate when viewers robotically spew hate towards Emmanuel Goldstein, Winston directs his hate against Big Brother, the Party and the Ministry of Truth. Realizing that Goldstein is just another prop in the party’s propaganda machine (funneled by a complicit media and individuals reluctant to think for themselves), Winston feels affection for Goldstein as the “sole guardian of truth and sanity in a world of lies,” a world in which he and the people around him play just as big a part as the Party and Ministry.
I challenge the Marin IJ, the San Francisco Chronicle and every local television and radio station in the Bay Area to report on the Tea Party taking place on April 15th from 11:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m. at
