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The Press Ate The Tea Party
Friday morning early, the first full day of the Tea Party convention at Gaylord Opryland in Nashville, I’m inside the security perimeter trying to help myself to coffee at one of the long continental breakfast tables. But the urns are empty–only a bit of decaf left. A couple of Tea Partiers and I contemplate, all of us lugubriously, the spigots.
“You know,” first man says, “the press ate all our food last night. And now they got the coffee.” (Only Fox was up and running at this ungodly hour of 7:45 AM, waiting in the lair the guys had claimed at the end of the large foyer, but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.)
“Yeah, they got in first,” second man chimes in. He meant that the press had set up on the press riser at the back of the Tennessee ballroom before the attendees were admitted for the Thursday evening iced tea hour that opened the convention. “There was nothing by the time I got there.”
As the men nodded, exchanging the kind of conspiratorial glances we all recognize–worst suspicions confirmed–I piped up, raising my lanyard with its press badge for better examination. (The press badges and the convention badges were exactly alike except for the word “press” in tiny letters at the bottom of mine. This similarity led to some delicious misunderstandings–at least for me, since I look much more like a church lady from Paducah than a reporter–in a crowd of 250 press and 600 Tea Partiers.)
“The press most certainly did not eat the food last night,” I said. ”In their world, that’s unethical. Listen, NPR won’t even take a bottle of water.” I knew this for a fact, since at an Obama Victory Party (he had not actually won that night) an NPR reporter had regaled me with the NPR rule book while her husband regarded us sourly. His wife had not allowed him a bottle of Crystal Springs either.
I went on for a bit, defending my colleagues forcefully. But the “press ate the tea party” is probably an urban legend by now. Amused, I tweeted the comment right away. By Saturday, I was receiving a twitter stream on “ate”–and none of the tweets were re-tweets from me.
There’s some irony here, for just as I was standing at the coffee urn I did not hesitate to drink the convention iced tea (excellent and unsweetened) and eat the convention food. I had come to Nashville to find out who the Tea Partiers are and what they want. Not only was I curious. I suspected (and I was right) that they and their movement had not received fair press coverage. I was determined to write a long, considered piece about what I found. And how else would I get to know these people if I did not sit down and break bread with them?
Full disclosure: I did not get any of the canapes either. By the time Mark Skoda and I walked into the ballroom, we were both dismayed to see that the barbecue sliders had long since disappeared. Partly that was my fault, because I had waylaid Skoda (the go-to guy for the event) to talk him into granting me a press pass. When I said that I sometimes wrote for The Huffington Post but was covering the convention for my own blog, Skoda, eyes twinkling, exclaimed, “Arianna! Huff Baby!” and I was in.
And so I continued what is for now at least (shouldn’t brag, I know, that’s just asking for it) an unbroken record of talking my way into events and hearing a memorable expletive about Arianna Huffington from every conservative male politico I approach.
So thank you, Arianna. Although it would have been nice if Arianna and Roy had found the $500 to help cover my expenses. I had pitched the convention story to them but had received the usual reply: ”we are too poor.” Of course, maybe that’s politesse for “we no longer want your work.”
If you’re beginning to wonder why I’m delving here, it’s because the convention story was and is in so many ways a media story. If I had not written sometimes for The Huffington Post, I would not have received a press pass. On the other hand, I was and am the cuckoo in the press nest, one of the birds and yet not. Since I was representing myself, I felt free to eat and drink with the Tea Partiers. (If I had been working for Huff Post, I would not have done so. Or I would have limited myself to encounters in the Irish bar down the hall from the Tea Party convention, as a reporter from the Washington Post did.)
But the little world of media is changing, just like everything else these days–Obama won on “hope and change,” the Tea Party is working for change–change, change, change, and I am part of it. There are many forces at play other than new media like me who work from a different set of rules and assumptions.
One dynamic much on display at the Tea Party convention is the rise of conservative partisan journalism. Now you might think that the complete and utter dominance of the Fox network out in the heartland (what is that? forty states?) would be enough. But, no, the mainstream media continues to wedge itself in the craw of mogulites such as Andrew Breitbart, who on Tea Party Saturday sniped at “the progressive social justice-driven work of the Washington Post.”
Breitbart was quite the playa’ at Tea Party. Its Mad Hatter, if you will. It was he and not Sarah Palin who caught the fancy of the Teas. (If you want to wade into the weeds, go to my serious piece on the main blog.) Saturday morning Breitbart plucked the strings of resentment among the Teas towards the press.
“Get with the program, mainstream media, or you guys are going to be the victims!” Hyperbole as threat? Yawn. By this point, Breitbart was well schtick-ified, and we press (including cuckoo) on our press riser at the back of the ballroom had had to sit and take it, including what I am sure was for the Teas a sweet libation when Breitbart spit at the press riser, “You suck.” The crowd, applauding and ovating, turned to stare at us, politely but meaningfully.
It was one of those vastly entertaining moments that make my forays into journalism worthwhile. But then Breitbart got too personal. You press paint this cause as “racist, sexist and homophobic, instead of [being about] fiscal responsibility”–you don’t understand these people at all because your only problem is when you’re working late and “you can’t get out to the Hamptons that night.”
Now I was a little ticked. Afterwards, I shanghaied Breitbart. ”You know this isn’t a Hamptons crowd. I sold my car to have the money to cover the presidential election.” So there, Mr. B! Well, he is a very charming (and therefore dangerous) man, and although I was mollified I couldn’t resist adding, “You know you have the lips of a Cabbage Patch doll.” And on a more serious note: ”You have a whiff of demagogue”–the WaPo reporter standing next to us says, “you write that Mayhill!” because I can in my reporting where she cannot–”so don’t go too conspiracy on us.”
Of course, Breitbart has a point about the media’s portrayal of the Teas as “racist, sexist and homophobic.” Here is a bit o’ Glenn Greenwald screed: ”It’s all the same nationalistic militarism and warmongering, Wall-Street subservient economics, and religion-based policy-making that has defined the GOP forever.”
Never mind that the Teas are defiantly non-GOP (they call elected officials “Rhinos”) and have risen up against Wall Street. Never mind that a surprising number are against the war in Afghanistan and are very worried about our involvement in Yemen.
What happens in the media when bloggers like Glenn Greenwald, who probably has never met a Tea Partier, wax large on a subject about which they know less is that the hard-working boots-on-the-ground like Pam Sellers, who produced CNN’s coverage of the convention, take the heat. CNN (of all networks) was the whipping boy in Nashville, both in the break-out sessions, where soccer moms worried about CNN indoctrinating their children through the CNN school news program, and in Sarah Palin’s keynote speech, where she abused staid old C-SPAN when she meant CNN.
If CNN and the Washington Post take a lot of unwarranted criticism (take a look at WaPo’s coverage of the convention and convince me otherwise), there is indeed a lot going on out there in media world that is just plain wrong. Watching my confreres at work in Opryland, I couldn’t help but see (although thank god not consistently) that journalism has become too cynical and profoundly corrupt. Peggy Noonan’s comment on This Week several weeks ago was never far from the front of my thoughts. In trying to explain why our society and its governance are broken, Noonan pointed out that we have lost that faith in our great institutions–Congress, the Church, the media–that once sustained us.
A cuckoo didn’t have to hop far along the halls of the convention center to see why. As they cornered Tea specimens to interview, every media outlet wanted one Tea Partier in particular. And indeed William Temple of Georgia, ham re-enactor extraordinaire, performed for videographers from Sweden to Japan. But here’s the thing. William Temple was an outlier at the convention. Faux eighteenth-century patriotic speeches delivered with an upper-class modern British accent were not what the Tea Party Convention was about. And there were only two re-enactors doing their thing. How many news outlets provided this context?
On twitter, I called out Ed Pilkington of the Guardian for tweeting that he was surrounded by people in fancy dress. And I thought about not doing it because Pilkington once wrote a very nice article about me. And I mention this fact because my hesitation demonstrates how incestuous, even for a cuckoo, press life can become. Whereas Pilkington only tweeted, some of the video guys created what they wanted. ”Mr. Temple, Mr. Patriot, do it again for me, please. And this time put your hand on the teapot at your belt.”
If staging dead bodies in Gaza is unethical journalism, isn’t staging William Temple unethical, too? I’m just asking. The New York Times was superbly crafty, filming a Netherlands film group filming Temple–and thereby not engaging directly in nefariousness.
Lots of everybody had to have the photogenic Temple–great visual, amusing story–easy and quick–saved a deal of bother in getting something out of the cautious, polite and often inarticulate conventioneers.
If the media is a broken world (its ethics and its finances; the chaos that ensues when people like me wiggle through the cracks), hatchlings are everywhere if you know where to look. Andrew Breitbart got the lion’s share of new media attention in Nashville. But the real story belonged to Graycen Colbert and her cub reporters Mindy Shafer and Malsie Morat reporting for Flinn Broadcasting (a consortium of Memphis radio stations). Although she is a recent graduate of the University of Arkansas, Ms. Colbert asked the best question and follow-up at the convention press conference. (If you go in the video room, you can catch a priceless moment or two during Mark Skoda’s PAC announcement where Colbert slaps down a cub wrist. One of the girls–I had taken them both for representatives of Scholastic News–had been fiddling with her bracelet.) I mention Colbert, Shafer and Morat not because they were charming or because Colbert was unusually mature. It is their reason for being there. Shafer’s father is running for local office, and Flinn has a contract to cover his campaign. (Like a few other Tennessee hopefuls, Shafer made an appearance at the convention.)
As the Obama Administration goes around the old ways of media to get out its message, the heartland is quickly learning the strategy. Think the media are elites and set against you? Create your own media. As Andrew Breitbart urged the Teas, “You can do it, too. You have cameras, you have ingenuity.”
Of course, the best-laid plans aft do go awry. Breitbart learned that when James O’Keefe, the young gonzo would-be journalist who provided him with the ACORN tapes, was arrested during a cockamamie breaking-and-entering. Arianna Huffington almost had her own breaky-gate Saturday night when two young people claiming to be from The Huffington Post tried to get into the Tennessee ballroom while Sarah Palin was speaking.
If security, who gave chase, had caught the pair, then Arianna would have had to deal with the mess. Instead I had to deal when a reporter pointed me out as “Huffington Post” to the director of public relations for Gaylord Opryland, a woman aggrieved–the pair had gotten under her skin–”they were both on meth, he had a large camera, you must’ve seen him,” “the girl was definitely under-age,” “the girl was on drugs.”
The previous week I had known that the steady stream of tweets from Huff Post’s Adam Clark Estes, urging people (and on twitter that would be young people) to investigate the convention, was a really bad idea. I thought about shooting Estes an email, pointing out that Opryland is the size of Liechtenstein and that security was almost surely going to be very tight. But I did not. And so here I was near-midnight on Saturday, a strange woman in my ear going on and on about The Huffington Post.
That’s irony for you. It’s also now-media, where everything that used to be stratified and clearly-demarcated is now mashed-up and fluid. Hopefully, a brave new world will grow from the ruins.
Oh, you had me and you lost me. Greenwald was referring to the contents of Palin’s speech, which is the same tired GOP rhetoric, not to the Tea-Party movement. He said the movement had been completely co-opted by Fox News and it’s hard to argue otherwise.
You’re a good writer, however.
Thanks for the insight.
I’d point out that the policies the GOP espouses do favor the rich and powerful. The Tea Partiers favor tax cuts almost mindlessly, and most of that, one suspects, is income tax cuts (or corporate tax cuts), both of which mostly help five groups of people, rock stars, sports stars, movie stars, CEOs and investment bankers. Giving rich people more money also means they need more investment advice (more help for Wall St.)
To “Oh you had me and you lost me” — Greenwald was indeed talking about the Teas, in the middle of a long rant about Sarah Palin and her speech at the end of the Tea Party Convention. And yes you are right about Fox–in the sense that Fox News would like very miuch to co-opt the TP movement. Interestingly, the woman for whom I sometimes write, Arianna Huffington, is also co-opting the Tea Party message. When you are on a roll (as the Teas are for the moment), everybody wants a piece of you. Believe me, I know that dynamic from personal experience. But, the Teas are libertarian and hyper-local in spirit and are suspicious of/resentful of/dislking of/pushing back against the Republican Party and its offcials, elected and otherwise. Interestingly, at least to me, is Sarah Palin here. She seems to “get” the Tea Party movement and its relationship to the Rep Party just right–not that she won’t try to co-opt the movement, too.
Today, Jane Hamsher sums this up pretty well, I think:
http://fdlaction.firedoglake.com/2010/02/10/will-the-ron-paul-libertarians-throw-the-neocons-out-of-the-tea-parties/
Sarah Palin is a shill and a pawn for the neocons. You don’t seem to see that, if I read your response correctly.
I’m a member of Campaign For Liberty, so I’m well aware of how the Tea Party has been co-opted.
Jane Hamsher is a friend, and everything I’ve ever read from her shows thoughtfulness. However, she is misguided about a few things. First of all, she was misinformed that ConAgra had a booth/table at the Tea Party Convention. ConAgra was part of a group meeting in the space adjacent to the space rented out by the Tea Party. Over the weekend, at least four different groups used that adjacent space, including a mommyblogger convention.
Secondly (is that a word?)–anyway–farm subsidies are a complicated topic in Southern politics, not to mention Midwestern and Californian. My own personal opinion is that the U.S. should do away with all agricultural subsidies, because they are directly related to poverty in the third world. That being said, just as in the rest of the country, Tennessee voters increasingly are urban and vote on those issues close to them. Fincher’s campaign contributions would have to be measured against those other candidates receive, by the end of the election season, for the numbers to have context.
Third, this is a very different election season, and I am skeptical about the power of money beyond a certain point. Look at the rise of the tea party candidate for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in Texas.
Finally, Jane’s misapprehensions are exactly why I went to Nashville, on my own dime, when Arianna H refused to pay even a few of my expenses in exchange for stories.
The Tea Partiers cannot be pigeonholed–both a strength and a weakness for them. At least half the people with whom I spoke want us out of Afghanistan PDQ (what are we doing there? not in our national interest? we don’t have the money to wage war in South Asia. a lot of worry about going into Yemen). There was also trash talk about the neo-cons.
The libertarian impulse is playing out in interesting ways for the movement. It is fueling, empowering if you will, the jockeying for attention and power going on right now among the natural leaders who have risen to the fore. And the press, loving conflict, is all too willing to play this up for more than what I judge it to be worth. Guys always engage in turf battles–what do you expect?
Many players, in politics and in the media, are trying to co-opt the Tea Party energy and grassroots. Certainly, Sarah Palin is–and she is a force to be reckoned with, because she is the one pol-player who really “gets” the Tea Party movement. But, most of the Tea Party conventioneers did not stay to hear Palin. They had come to network and figure out how to get people elected. Not all of them in Nashville were/are ready to vote for Palin for President. Not all of them are fans.
As I said in my piece, fiscal responsibility is what the Tea Party is about. That is the common denominator among a disparate group of folks who believe differently on, say, social issues. They believe, to a person, that the fix is in between government in Washington and Wall Street–and that those “elites” will do okay no matter what while the average American out in the heartland will pay the piper. They are disgusted equally with Democrats and Republicans. They hate the Wall Street bailout as much as Arianna Huffington does.
The Tea Partiers to be taken seriously are the ones, like many at the convention, who have gone home to work on the hyper-local level to get new people into local government and, in some localities where the movement has organization and money, into Congress.
[...] about a variety of tea party issues, including racism. Mark and I became acquainted last February when I convinced him in Nashville to grant me a press pass for the Tea Party Convention there. It did not take me (or any other reporter) long to figure out that Memphian Mark Skoda and not [...]