The BBC Does Not Understand The Tea Party

Jillian Bandes | September 08, 2010 8:16 AM

Janet Daley claims that the BBC has no idea how to understand the tea party because they have no foundation on which to comprehend states rights, or the concept of federalism. That kind of short-sightedness is just what you get when you're a state-owned media organization.

The British generally and the BBC in particular have a real problem understanding the obsessive suspicion in which the power of central government is held in the US. This is not some funny redneck eccentricity: it is fundamental to the Constitution which gives individual states much greater sovereignty than the countries of the European Union enjoy.

...The BBC obviously finds it impossible to believe that ordinary people could actually take issues like this seriously. (They can only be racists or hillibilly know-nothings.) The Corporation really ought to encourage its correspondents to get out more and talk to some of the articulate Americans who don’t spend their lives in liberal salons.