Corporate media double standard for town hall protests

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The corporate media had a love affair with the Koch brothers' corporate-funded Astroturf Tea Party front groups (Americans For Prosperity, FreedomWorks, Tea Party Express) in 2009-2010. They couldn't get enough of angry old white people calling an African-American president all kinds of racist names and questioning his birth, disrupting town hall meetings with their boorish behavior, and carrying signs saying "keep your government hands off my Medicare!" Oh, the silly hats and sillier costumes and misspelled signs were such fun! That's entertainment for the media villagers and Beltway bloviators in the corporate media.

It may be the first time in history that the corporate media conspired with corporate-funded Astroturf to create a "populist" movement. They kept using that word; I do not think it means what they think it means. Well, there were all those political ads bought by the corporate front groups of the Tea Party that increased the profits and bottom-line of the corporate media. It was a clear case of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours." What, you believed there are ethical standards in the media? What part of "corporate" and "profits" did you not understand? Ethics shmethics!

So what happens when regular Americans not funded by the Astroturf corporate front groups of the billionaire bastard Koch brothers show up at town hall meetings angrily protesting the Tea-Publican members of Congress that the corporate media helped to elect in 2010? For the media villagers and Beltway bloviators in the national media, it was the sound of crickets chirping. Protests? What protests? Where? I don't see anything!

How could they miss thousands of people at over 400 protests during the August recess? If regular Americans just had the good sense to take up a collection to buy a few ads, then the corporate media would have shown them some attention. It's not news unless the corporate media can profit from it.

Local news media, however, did a slightly better job of covering these angry constituent protests at the town hall meetings of Tea-Publican members of Congress. And local media is still what most members of Congress are most concerned about. This eight-minute video from rebuildthedream shows just a few dozen of the hundreds of local television reports on the actions: