Post-Dispatch Covers 200 Person Tea Party in Washington D.C.

Three weeks after the St. Louis Post-Dispatch provided no coverage of a 4,300 person rally in support of unions in St. Louis and offered an incredibly lame excuse for doing so, they have now posted an AP article on their website about a puny tea party rally in Washington D.C.

According to reporters at the event, only about 200 people showed up. In D.C.! Think about that: if the American Society of Left-Handed Ninjas held a rally in D.C., they could probably get at least 400 people! Yet the Post-Dispatch gives coverage to this pathetic P.R. stunt while ignoring a 4,300+ person rally in their backyard.

Shameful.

Update: Also worth noting is the misleading framing in the AP article about the tea party, which claimed that their popularity has remained the same since the elections. Actually, if you look at the monthly CNN polls, you'll see that the tea party's unfavorables have increased dramatically since November, even as the 30% fringe supporters number stays the same (the same %, by the way, as the birthers and people who think the moon is made of swiss cheese).

Update #2: The Post-Dispatch Weatherbird suggests that AP articles automatically feed into the site:

It would be a little strange to me if there was no selection process whatsoever for which articles appear on their national news section, but perhaps this is accurate. However, this clearly would not be a good excuse for them deciding to run the story in the print edition tomorrow.

Post-Dispatch Reports on Protest Without Saying *Why* There Was a Protest

Almost one week after completely ignoring a 4,300 person pro-union rally in Kiener Plaza and then offering a lame excuse, the Post-Dispatch today reported on Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) protesting at a "100 Most Influential St. Louisans" event." The only problem? They didn't even bother to explain why MORE was protesting. Jake Wagman titled his post "Polite Protesters Interrupt Nixon at SLU" and only provided this as an explanation:

An appearance by Gov. Jay Nixon at St. Louis University was briefly interrupted Friday morning by a group protesting foreclosures and bank bailouts.

How exactly are readers supposed to know anything about the group's motivations based on that description?

For those would who like to know the actual statement of the group, Damien Johnson grabbed some video of the actual speech:


What they were asking for is that foreclosures be stopped until a just system be put in place, in contrast to the shameful actions currently being practiced by Bank of America and other bad banks.

Again, compare this to their coverage of the tea party. Would the Post-Dispatch ever even dream of covering a tea party event without passing on the tea party explanation of what the event was about? Why is it so hard for the Post-Dispatch to give fair coverage to anyone who opposes the abuse of power by corporate America?

Christopher Ave's Inadequate Explanation of the Post-Dispatch Ignoring a 4,300 Person Labor Rally

I received an email response from Chrisopher Ave with a purported explanation of why the St. Louis Post-Dispatch shamefully ignored a pro-union rally of over 4,300 people last Friday in Kiener Plaza:

Thanks for taking the time to email. I'm sorry that we failed to cover Friday's rally. As you know, Friday was a very busy news day with two local court sentencings and the tragedy in Japan. We had a reporter at the rally, but he was called away to help cover local reactions to the tsunami. Our photographers were engaged covering the court developments that unfortunately were scheduled at the same time.

Again, thanks for expressing your views. While we don't cover every rally, this is one we should have covered. I'm sorry that we let you down in this case.

Sincerely,

Christopher Ave
Political Editor
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
STLtoday.com

While I agree that the Tsunami was an shockingly tragic story and one well worth covering in the paper, this response strikes me as incredibly odd and stands in contradiction of previous comments. First of all, when the Post-Dispatch was criticized earlier for completely ignoring the protests in Wisconsin, their response was that they are a "local paper" focused on local news. This confirms what former columnist Sylvester Brown reported at the online organizing training in December, where he said he was continually told not to write about national issues at the Post. Yet when there's a huge pro-worker rally in St. Louis, all of a sudden they need all hands on deck to get local reactions to a story from across the world. Don't get me wrong: there's no question Tsunami coverage needed to be in the paper, but why send a reporter away from a rally in progress with 4,300 people? Also, Ave's response claimed that the reporter was called away "to help" get local reactions, which implied that there were already other reporters working on that story. Did they really need multiple people working on a nonlocal story? Shouldn't the main daily be prepared and able to cover multiple events? How hard would it have been for them simply to have included a photograph or a short paragraph that noted that 4,300 people rallied in downtown St. Louis?

Furthermore, compare this non-coverage to the fact that the Post-Dispatch bends over backwards to write a 600 word article about a tea party rally with 1/8 as many people last April. Would they even dream of ignoring a 1,000 person rally from the tea party, let alone a 4,000 person rally, in St. Louis? Of course not.

I don't think Ave's response is adequate. If Ave and the Post-Dispatch were really concerned, they could still find ways of writing about this story and informing their readers. But if they keep this shoddy coverage up, they're not going to have many readers left.

A Tale of Two Rallies

Hotflash at Show Me Progress wrote yesterday about how the St. Louis Post-Dispatch shamefully ignored a 4,300+ person Rally Against Corporate Greed at Kiener Plaza in downtown St. Louis on Friday.

As a point of reference, compare this to a 500 person rally in downtown Clayton last April by the tea party. For the tea party rally:

• The Post-Dispatch wrote a 600 word article about the rally.
• The article was accompanies by a photograph.
• The article contained absolutely no opposing voices or criticisms of the tea party, but instead just shared their unfiltered message.

On the other hand, for a rally with 4300 (8 times more) people who support the middle class we had:

• No story.
• No photographs.
• Nothing.

It's becoming increasingly clear that the political reporting of the Post-Dispatch completely fails to fairly report on the issues that the citizens of St. Louis care about. One thing we can do is contact their political director Chistopher Ave (cave@post-dispatch.com ) and tell him to stop ignoring everyone to the left of Michelle Bachman. But the most important thing is that we need to start building our own media. We need our own people to cover, record, and photograph events, and our own ways of distributing the content. Relying on corporate media like Lee Enterprises will be a losing propositions in the long-term, and one only needs to glance at how they treat their workers to know that their loyalties lie far away from Joseph Pulitzer's.

Corporate Media Versus Working People

Yesterday, 4,300+ people rallied in Kiener Plaza against corporate greed and the recent attacks against working people by the right wing. We know that when the tea party attracted crowds of 1/2 or even 1/10th that size, they would reliably get the equivalent of front page coverage from the local media. However, for this rally for the basic rights of working Americans, many of the news outlets barely made a peep.

Before getting into that, however, I want to focus on some good coverage. Jo Mannies at the Beacon did a nice job covering the union rally and the story was featured on the Beacon's front page. KSDK had a report about it during their 5 and 10 O'clock broadcasts. And KMOX and the St. Louis Business Journal both covered this important story. Charles Jaco was at the event so I'm guessing that he will talk about it for one of his special reports, but Fox 2 News did not provide regular coverage.

But the two outlets I really want to focus my ire on are KMOV and the Post-Dispatch. As we have seen, KMOV has had a string of pathetic right-wing coverage in recent weeks, which really is nothing new for them. In the past, they breathlessly reported on rallies where the tea party only had 700 people present. If the tea party had gotten 4,000 people to this rally, you know they would have been all over it. Instead, they completely ignored a rally of 4,300 union members on an issue that's related to a national story. And they ignored it at a time where a battle for the very soul of America is taking place, with the right wing trying to destroy the last group capable of pushing back against corporate power grabs.

And the Post-Dispatch ignoring this story? Ahhh, where do I start? Perhaps Post-Dispatch political director Christopher Ave needs to meet with some union members just like he invited Dana Loesch to coach him on how to cover the tea party. Of course, we don't need to ask how the Post-Dispatch owners feel about workers: they quite clearly do not care at all about them, to the point where they're willing to break written agreements and drop health care coverage for people with cancer in order to save a few pennies.

Apparently, the corporate media is not neutral in this dispute over whether corporations should be able to run completely rampant over everyone else. They have lost their last vestiges of objectivity.

Fortunately, we have awesome bloggers like Hotflash at Show Me Progress who can provide real coverage.

Updated-Loesch At Center of New Smear Campaign Against Media

Dana Loesch, the new editor of Big Journalism, has been pushing a story claiming that reporters in Alaska were "conspiring" against Sarah Palin endorsed Senate candidate Joe Miller. Palin claimed that the media were "corrupt bastards" while talking about the tapes.

However, the tapes themselves are largely incoherent and seem to be obviously devoid of context that would allow someone to know exactly what they were talking about. Here's the transcript of the tapes:


Audio KTVA -

Unsurprisingly, given Loesch and Andrew Breitbart's history, the story they are pushing appears to be false. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post posted a response from the general manager of KTVA, the media outlet accused of trying to "sabotage" Miller:

It's unfortunate that this recording has happened. It's unfortunate because it does not accurately reflect the journalistic standards of our newsroom and the garbled context will no doubt leave more questions than answers. The Miller campaign's analysis of the recording is incorrect in many material ways ranging from personnel involved in the conversation, the interpretation of conversation snippets and the reported transcript of the perceived garbled conversation.

"While the recording is real, the allegations are untrue. The recording was the result of a cell phone not being hung up after a call was placed to Randy DeSoto, Joe Miller campaign spokesperson, Thursday afternoon to discuss Joe Miller's appearance on that evening's newscast. That phone call was placed near the end of a coverage planning meeting in our newsroom regarding that evening's Miller rally in downtown Anchorage. The group of KTVA news personnel was reviewing potential "what-if" scenarios, discussing the likelihood of events at the rally and how KTVA might logistically disseminate any breaking news.

"The perception that this garbled, out of context recording may leave is unfortunate, but to allege that our staff was discussing or planning to create or fabricate stories regarding candidate Miller is absurd. The complete conversation was about what others might be able to do to cause disruption within the Miller campaign, not what KTVA could do."

Sargent also added:

The full audio is only on the cell phone of Miller's campaign manager. Will the campaign release it? Also: Who edited the audio that Big Journalism posted?

In fact, even a Fox News reporter told Megyn Kelly that they had reviewed KTVAs record and could find no evidence of any bias against Joe Miller.

Naturally, Breitbart and Loesch don't care and are still busy ranting on Twitter about how biased the media is. In fact, Breitbart's gone completely off the deep end:

“George Soros, in his plane, a private jet, a global warming jet, flew and dropped money on Alaska on a series of left-wing bloggers and infested it, the Alaska media, with an anti-reformist agenda,” Breitbart said. “The Republican Party up there is corrupt, the media up there is corrupt, the Democratic Party up there is corrupt and George Soros has helped to sully it. This is why Sarah Palin had to step down – because they were trying to assault her using fake journalism in order to assassinate her character because they saw that she was a threat, a huge potential juggernaut.”

Anyway, just goes to show that Loesch and Breitbart will shriek and attack any news outlet without any shed of genuine evidence because that fits with their narrative and their agenda. Yet somehow, outlets like the Post-Dispatch, in spite of all available evidence, naively think that by pandering to people like Loesch they will someone win some respect from them.

Update: Media Matters nails it. If Breitbart and Loesch had the slightest concern for the truth, why wouldn't they have contacted KTVA before pushing their stories?

Lesson: Always Lie and Smear the Media (if you're a tea partier)

Dana Loesch lies and smears the Post-Dispatch, so Post-Dispatch Political Editor Christopher Ave invites her to a conference to coach journalists in how to cover the tea party.

Andrew Breitbart, a professional media manipulator, lies and smears ABC news with quotes like this:

Hacks ‘R’ Us: ABC ‘Newsman’ Stephanopoulos Shills for Obama"

And:

Fact that a partisan hack like Stephanopoulos is actually employed by ABC News is a disgrace in itself.

So naturally, Breitbart is invited by ABC News to do election night coverage.

Dana Loesch tells Anderson Cooper to "shut up" and says that he's "riding his Vanderbilt coattails," so of course she is now a regular guest on his show.

It seems like the message from the media is pretty clear: if you want favorable coverage, always lie, whine and smear us as much as possible. Unfortunately, though, this tactic only works for the Right. Because as cowardly and sad as the mainstream media is, they do have their standards: they only allow themselves to be pushed around by genuine bullies. Lefties trying to pretend to be as big of jerks as the other side just won't cut it. Those darned nuanced criticisms and respect for humanity always give us away!

More Evidence that the Tea Party is Coaching the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

I wrote a while ago about how St. Louis Post-Dispatch Political Editor Christopher Ave invited Dana Loesch to coach journalists in how they should cover the tea party. This strategy appears to be paying off quite well for the tea party, as they've gotten the Post-Dispatch to edit embarrassing tweets from Lt. Peter Kinder out of their stories. But even more importantly, the Post-Dispatch is flatly refusing to cover stories that seem to me to be obviously relevant political material. Here's a small sample of some of the questions reporter Jake Wagman refuses to ask about the tea party and the Right:

Wagman won't ask what tea party and American Majority employee John Burns' role was in James O'Keefe's plan to sexually humiliate a CNN reporter, despite the fact that Burns was among a small group of people included in the planning emails, as reported by CNN.

Wagman won't ask who is funding the tea party's office, billboards, and Get Out the Vote operation, even though the tea party could only raise $1,000 from local membership in previous campaigns.

And now Wagman, while writing an 800-word press release for the Ed Martin/Tea Party campaign, won't ask Ed Martin the simple question, "what did you know about allegations of sexual abuse in the church?"

The Post-Dispatch is going out of its way to pander to the tea party. But they are doing so at the expense of alienating liberal and moderates. You know, the people who actual read newspapers.

Dana Loesch Cheerleads for Post-Dispatch Censorship

Dana Loesch wrote an article today attacking FiredUp Missouri for criticizing the Post-Dispatch's decision to edit out crazy tweets from Lt. Governor Peter Kinder. Loesch, being continually scared to death of someone revealing to her followers how shallow her arguments are, was of course afraid to name FiredUp, but she does amazingly manage to link to this article. Here's what Loesch had to say:

What’s with these reporters? They think their byline is more important than the fact of the story they’re supposed to report. No one cares what Messenger or any other journalist thinks, they want the story. Period. MSM’s inability to give the people what they want has resulted in both citizen journalism (people creating a product they’re unable to find elsewhere) and drop in support for media overall.

Of course, even if you thought Messenger was editorializing when he said that Kinder tweeted "far right Republican conspiracy theories' (which Kinder does), there's no explanation for why the specific content of Kinder's tweets needed to be edited out. Why did the following factual and true sentence need to be edited out:

Kinder has compared liberals to Hitler, politicized a hostage crisis and repeated false claims about “death panels” in the new federal health care law. He even speculated on the worst “tramp stamp” tattoos on women.

As I wrote yesterday, after Loesch attacked the Post-Dispatch with a claim that had no merit, and which Post-Dispatch Political Editor Christopher Ave knew had no merit, Ave nevertheless invited Loesch to a journalism conference to tell reporters how to cover the tea party. I suggested that the Post's decision to censor content critical of the Right shortly after that conference looks pretty bad. The fact that Loesch is now engaged in actively cheerleading for the Post-Dispatch adds credence to that suggestion.

The Squeaky Wheel: Post-Dispatch Reporting Pandering to the Right

I've argued many times on this blog that local media outlets have given tea parties overly favorable coverage and refused to do in-depth research about the tea party's claims. However, I'm not sure I've ever before seen a case that illustrates so perfectly the basic problem in the relationship between the tea party and the mainstream media. Basically, the problem is this: when the tea party complains loudly enough, the mainstream media caves in to them, regardless of whether the complaints have any merit. The mainstream media interacts with the tea party in the same way a bad parent interacts with a spoiled child: by always giving in if the child holds his breath long enough, or screams loudly enough.

To make the case, recall that back on August 17, someone broke the back window of Russ Carnahan's campaign office and threw in an incendiary device. Jake Wagman at the Post-Dispatch included the following passage in his story:

Apart from Martin, Carnahan is weathering a tumultuous political environment. A year ago, several people were arrested at a Carnahan town hall forum after a fracas broke out between protesters and Carnahan supporters.

Loesch freaked out about this throwaway comment, claiming that Wagman "misrepresented" the August incident and was blaming the tea party for the firebombing. Here's what Loesch wrote in response to Wagman's passage:

No. Protesters were harassed by people who identified themselves as Carnahan volunteers and people not even of the 3rd district, OFA bussed people in who were loud and disruptive at the meeting (I know, because they assumed me and the veteran who attended the townhall with me were with OFA and snuck us through the side door), and Carnahan supporters attacked a man they profiled as being a conservative. I and others have endless video and photographic footage of the evening. The “fracas” came from Carnahan supporters and there isn’t a police report or eyewitness that has stated otherwise. To report otherwise is disingenuous and the omission of the above implies that those targeted at the townhall contributed to the “fracas” and whether Wagman intended it or not, further implies that the “fracas” could be linked to the firebombing and that the perpetrator could be a tea partier. Also not cool.

She also later made the following criticism :

Does reporter Jake Wagman know what a “firebomb” is? From what I’ve seen of the carefully controlled photos in circulation, this looks nothing like the damage caused by such incendiary devices.

Moreover, on Twitter she said the following about the Post-Dispatch:

And later, she called on Wagman to apologize:

In a blog post, she wrote the following:

Why didn’t the Russ Carnahan campaign correct the narrative of the local alternative weekly and Jake Wagman’s subtle suggestion that it was a tea partier?

Even worse, she sent her toady Jimi971 out to harrass Wagman, as well as myself:

Think that old Jimi's tweets don't have anything to do with Loesch? Think again. Anyone who's followed his feed knows that he's basically her lacky: when he first started on Twitter all he did was attack anyone who was critical of her. And, of course, she made sure to include him in her select "follow Friday" group the following Friday:

Anyway, regardless of whether you see Jimi's actions as an extension of Loesch's, it's very clear that she was repeatedly attacking the Post-Dispatch by claiming that they had "blamed the tea party" for the firebombing. But, of course, the Post-Dispatch did nothing of the sort. Wagman merely said that it was a tumultuous political environment without saying anything about the tea party. Now I pointed out (and still believe) that the tea party's absurd behavior of burning photos of Russ Carnahan while chanting "death to the dictator" and carrying a coffin to his house are actions that are likely to encourage people to violence, and Chad Garrison made a joke by saying that the original suspect (who has not been charged) was middle-aged, white, and "bat-shit crazy" and hence fit the demographic for the tea party. But Wagman didn't even mention the tea party in his post. Yet Loesch and her followers targeted Wagman and demanded that he apologize.

As Loesch continued attacking the Post-Dispatch for nothing, finally their Political Editor Chris Ave was a guest on her show. And after weeks of posturing and attacking the Post-Dispatch, do you know what Loesch said to Ave? Nothing. She said nothing. Because there really was nothing she could criticize about Wagman's article. Instead, she spent much of the time trying to get Ave to criticize Chad Garrison's story on the subject. You can listen to the audio here if you are so inclined:

So Loesch attacked the Post-Dispatch for nothing, and when push came to shove, she really had nothing to say to Ave. This should have been the end of the story. Unfortunately, it wasn't.

As part of her "welcome" post as the new editor of the right-wing smear rag, Big Journalism, Loesch announced the following:

This past Saturday I sat in a hotel ballroom facing a host of journalists from across the Midwest as part of a panel which discussed reporting on the Tea Party movement. I told them what I believed was wrong with corporate media’s approach, “teabagging” notwithstanding. I was invited by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Political Editor, Christopher Ave, whose attention I caught when I railed against a particular piece the paper published involving a fire at Rep. Russ Carnahan’s office (which the alternative media implied was perpetrated by the Tea Party). He guested on my show after the piece published and we had a healthy discourse on journalism and its objectives. I trust him to deliver fair pieces on the movement, on conservatism – not coddling, kittens-and-sunshine hand-holding and kid gloves, but actual objective pieces designed to inform, not persuade. Perhaps in my lifetime there will be more exceptions to the rule like this

"Not coddling" said Loesch. How incredibly ironic. Because how else would you describe a situation where Loesch baselessly attacked the Post-Dispatch, and then was invited to a journalism conference by him in order to coach the media in how to cover the tea party? As I wrote previously, I sure as hell don't remember the media inviting the anti-war movement to come coach them in how to cover their rallies. Yet this is the principle we see again and again. The tea party, even when they are completely wrong, screams as loud as they can, and the media caters to their demands rather than showing some resolve. And after it happens, the tea party continues to whine about how biased the media is against them anyway.

It's hard for me not to see this in light of the shameful editing by the Post-Dispatch reported on today by FiredUp Missouri. The following passages from Tony Messenger's article about Republican Lieutenant Governor Peter Kinder were cut online and then ultimately completely removed from the print edition:

The lieutenant governor's Twitter feed is filled with the most far-right Republican conspiracy theories of the day. Kinder has compared liberals to Hitler, politicized a hostage crisis and repeated false claims about "death panels" in the new federal health care law. He even speculated on the worst "tramp stamp" tattoos on women.

It's tough to take Kinder seriously when his daily communication with the public is either purely politically motivated or just plain unprofessional.

Was the removal of these passages a result of the "coaching" from Loesch about how to cover tea party tweets? As someone with no inside knowledge of what happened, I can't say, but I do think it looks bad.

I'll further note that no St. Louis reporters have yet gotten a quote from the tea party's John Burns, reported by CNN to be included in planning emails for James O'Keefe's plots to sexually humiliate a CNN reporter. Similarly, none have inquired, so far as I know, how the St. Louis tea party is paying for office space and billboards when they were only able to raise $900 in three months for their anti-transit campaign. Are they getting outside funding? If so, from whom? These are the types of questions reporters should be asking, especially in light of the fact that tea partiers were orchestrated by right-wing billionaires.

Anyway, the lesson for tea partiers is clear: scream as loud as you can and always claim that the media is biased against you, and they will bend over backwards to make sure to express whatever you want, regardless of whether it's true. The lesson for everyone else? Well, that's a little more difficult to ascertain.

Media Being Coached In How to Cover the Tea Party...BY the Tea Party

Dana Loesch tweeted the following yesterday:



A google search didn't tell me much about the Midwest Media Institute, but Christopher Ave is the Political Editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, so clearly the event had some high-level people in the media in attendance.

I think an important point of comparison in media coverage for the tea party is the anti-war movement that arose in response to the U.S. decision to invade Iraq. The initial rallies for the anti-war movement drew hundreds of thousands of people in Washington D.C., New York, and San Francisco. They also were in coordination will rallies across the world that drew tens of millions of people. And, in addition to these huge rallies, there was a huge amount of local organizing and activism that took place. Yet despite the fact that this movement drew far more people than the tea party, and despite the fact that the protesters' skepticism about Bush's rationale for war was completely vindicated, the anti-war movement received nowhere near the same level of media coverage as the recent tea parties.

But more to the point, I'd be willing to bet money that there were very few "media panels" that invited members of the peace movement to come coach journalists in how they are supposed to cover the movement. Yet, according to the tweets of Loesch, this is exactly what we have in the case of the tea party. As with most issues, a cursory glance at the facts completely undermines the ridiculous claims of a "liberal media." And note that even while being invited to come tell journalists how they should cover the tea party movement, Dana Loesch is still whining about how unfairly they are treated.

So why does the Right still whine about a "liberal media" and why do journalists continually bend over backwards to pander to the Right? The reason for the whining is obvious: the squeaky wheel gets the grease. By continuously complaining, no matter how favorable the coverage, the Right has successfully gamed the system such that their ideology is consistently expressed better in the mainstream media than that of the Left. As for the media, it's true of most of them that they're "socially liberal," meaning that they're not bigots against the LGBT community, that they're not religious fanatics, and that they probably don't think that science and/or higher education are evil liberal conspiracies. But because most of the media outlets are ultimately owned by wealthy Republicans, and because many of the journalists overcompensate in trying to make up for their social liberalism, we have a system where the media goes out of their way to provide positive coverage to the Right but not to the Left. Fringe views from the Right are accepted into the mainstream discourse: views to the Left of center are regularly excluded from discourse.