Tea Party vs. U.S. Social Forum

	Mass movements that matter for media-Round 2

By Julie Hollar
Extra! September 2010
Fair and Accuracy in Reporting

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4143

When it comes to covering activist gatherings,
corporate media have established clear standards:
Numbers don't count nearly as much as politics do.

Last fall, when tens of thousands of lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender activists and their allies
marched on Washington in a grassroots rally for
equality, media gave it far less coverage than the
similarly sized, largely corporate-funded Tea Party
protest in Washington just a month earlier (Extra!,
12/09).

So it came as little surprise that the Tea Party
Convention this February would get more coverage than
the June U.S. Social Forum, five days of strategizing,
organizing and activism inspired by the World Social
Forum launched in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001. What
was a little shocking, though, was just how stark the
difference was. . The Social Forum, in Detroit, drew an
estimated 15,000-20,000 progressive activists from
around the country, while the Tea Party Convention in
Nashville hosted a meager 600 attendees. Two activist
gatherings striving for political and social change,
one at least 25 times larger than the other-but the
smaller one got all the media coverage. Across 10 major
national outlets in the two weeks surrounding each
event, the Tea Party got 177 mentions to the Social
Forum's three. (Per participant, the Tea Party got
1,500 times as many mentions.)

It was almost a total blackout for the USSF. Aside from
local coverage, the only corporate media mentions found
in the Nexis database came from Glenn Beck (Fox News,
6/29/10, 6/30/10)-warning viewers about "socialists and
communists coming out of the woodwork to co-opt the
youth and spread a dangerous disease"-and Democracy
Now! host Amy Goodman, a guest on John King's CNN show
(6/30/10).

Not one major newspaper outside of Michigan covered the
story. Time and Newsweek ignored it. The Associated
Press didn't run a single story on its newswire.

Of course, many alternative journalists did cover the
huge event, including prominent reporting from Inter
Press Service (e.g., 6/25/10).

By contrast, in the two weeks surrounding the February
Tea Party Convention, the right-wing gathering got 12
mentions in the Washington Post, eight in the New York
Times, seven in the L.A. Times and four in USA Today.
CNN mentioned the convention 71 times, Fox News 27,
MSNBC 19, ABC 21, and CBS and NBC four. Politico
(2/12/10) reported that CNN sent a crew of 11 to cover
it; soon after the convention, the Washington Post
assigned a reporter to "make sure the movement's
covered fully in its pages" (Politico, 3/12/10).

In Detroit, the USSF was too big to ignore; the local
alt-weekly, the Metro Times (6/23/10), even dedicated a
front cover to it. The two daily papers, the Detroit
Free Press (e.g., 6/20/10) and Detroit News (e.g.,
6/23/10), for the most part offered respectful coverage
of an event that brought a boost to the decimated
Detroit economy. But Nolan Finley, editorial page
editor of the News, mocked the gathering (6/20/10):
"This ain't no tea party. The forum is a hootenanny of
pinkos, environuts, peaceniks, Luddites, old hippies,
Robin Hoods and urban hunters and gatherers. In other
words, a microcosm of the Obama administration."

Finley seemed only to be giving colorful voice to the
unspoken thoughts of most corporate journalists. The
Social Forum certainly wasn't the Tea Party; it was a
gathering of people whose voices are routinely
discounted by the media gatekeepers, no matter how big
a hootenanny they can muster. When one side has 600
people (and one Sarah Palin) pushing the fiscal
conservatism beloved by corporate media bigwigs, and
the other has 20,000 challenging the neoliberal status
quo and highlighting the struggles of the working class
and people of color, journalists don't need to be told
how to do the math.

_______________________

Sidebar: The Spurning of Atlanta

The non-coverage was essentially a repeat of the first
U.S. Social Forum in 2007, which drew some 12,000
activists and not a single major newspaper or
television reporter outside its host city of Atlanta.
(Two local AP reporters did file stories on the wire
that year-7/27/07.)

The Boston Banner, Boston's African-American weekly
paper, published two in-depth pieces (6/28/07, 7/5/07),
and other smaller papers like the Albuquerque Journal
(6/21/07) and the Miami Times (7/4/07) also ran
articles. The local Augusta Chronicle (7/2/07) declared
that the "Forum Shows Far Left's Faults," concluding:
"Until those on the far left begin to sacrifice their
priorities for the sake of gaining power as a group,
the republic seems safe. The revolution barely
sputters."

_____________________________________________

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