Tea Parties - The Latest Mainstream Media Concoction

The reason we read blogs and stopped taking the corporate media seriously is they keep spinning fiction to sell papers. From Alternet:

Four years ago, when millions of Americans took to the streets to support the human and civil rights of immigrants and, by association in the public mind, Latinos, the news media scarcely covered the marches -- even though they drew larger crowds than any other marches in the history of the nation, including the oft-dramatized culture-changing protests over the Vietnam War.

Fast-forward four years, to the Tea Party Convention, which boasted all of 600 registrants and [Sarah Palin] and the contrast in news coverage is astonishing. The news media, including progressive talk radio and blogs, have been crowing about the big Tea Party "movement" for days now. USA Today has taken a poll about a Tea Party candidate’s viability in presidential elections.

In short, what we are seeing is a mind-boggling double standard, and a wholehearted swallowing of right-wing propaganda as fact, in an American news media whose mathematics deem one Tea Party member to be greater than 4,000 human rights marchers.

This seems completely self-evident, but there's the New York Times this morning with a photo of teabaggers on its web site front page. The same paper that "reported" on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction but managed to underplay the size of the antiwar rallies in the streets of its own city.