Saturday, April 11, 2009

Covering the teabaggers

Digby at Hullabaloo notes that, yes, Virginia, National Teabagging Day is an astroturf operation being run by a couple of right-wing think tanks and heavily publicized by Fox News. She ends her post with the following plea to the media:

If any members of the press are reading this, I hope they can see that this is the story, not the sad little dupes who are voluntarily calling themselves tea-baggers.


I'm sure Digby is just being snarky here, because she knows as well as I do what sort of decision-making process is going to occur within the bowels of the corporate media.

Picture your typical frazzled, stressed-out producer at, say, CNN. This producer has a choice: 1) go to all the trouble of explaining to his dim-witted viewers (as he thinks of them) what political astroturf is and who the right-wing think tanks are and how they operate and what they want to accomplish with National Teabagging Day, or 2) run thirty seconds of videotape of people holding up signs and chanting anti-tax slogans.

Yeah, Digby and I both know which choice that producer is going to make.

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