For anyone needing proof of the media’s scandalously biased coverage, the Media Research Center has released a Special Report, “TV's Tea Party Travesty: How ABC, CBS and NBC Have Dismissed and Disparaged the Tea Party Movement.” Author Rich Noyes notes that the networks ran only 19 stories on the Tea Party movement in all of 2009, with coverage increasing only after Scott Brown’s surprising U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts in January 2010.
Noyes compares that with 41 network stories devoted to the liberal Million Moms anti-gun march in 2000, and to the Nation of Islam’s 1995 Million Man March, which got 21 stories on just the evening of that march alone—more than the Tea Parties drew in all of 2009. The report chronicles the media’s use of terms such as “nasty” and “fringe” and “racial” and “violent” to portray the Tea Party movement as its influence grew.
Other speakers at the April 15 rally included former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, whose group FreedomWorks sponsored the event; Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX); Steve King (R-IA); Louie Gohmert (R-TX); Dailycaller.com co-founder Tucker Carlson; Rep. Tom
Price (R-GA); Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform; Andrew Moylan of the National Taxpayers Union and several others. Country-comedy singer Ray Stevens performed several of his new (and funny) anti-government songs, and former “Saturday Night Live” comedienne Victoria Jackson sang a rousing rendition of her ukulele song “There’s a Communist in the White House.”
Before the evening was over at 9 p.m., the crowd had sung “God Bless America” three times, and several speakers, notably Dick Armey, Gay Hart Gaines of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association, and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN), invoked God as the author of America’s unalienable constitutional rights.
The speakers who most fired up the crowd were Bachmann, who described the current regime in Washington as “gangster government,” Breitbart, anti-global warming advocate Lord Christopher Monckton of Great Britain, and Rev. C. L. Bryant of Louisiana, who capped the evening with a powerful call to arms reminiscent in style to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech.
He would have brought the crowd to its feet except that by then, everybody was standing.