Authors: Mickey Huff
1
. Elliot D. Cohen, “Media Mum While Congress Considers Giving Telecoms Blank Check to Eavesdrop,”
Buzzflash
, October 11, 2007,
http://blog.buzzflash.com/contributors/1373
.
2
. 545 U.S. 967 (2005).
3
. Mark Cooper, “Building a Progressive and Democratic Media Sector,” in
News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democracy
, ed. Elliot D. Cohen (Amhert, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005).
4
. Elliot D. Cohen, “Web of Deceit: How Internet Freedom Got the Federal Ax, and
Why Corporate News Censored the Story,”
Buzzflash
, July 18, 2005,
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/05/07/con05238.html
.
5
. AT&T, et. al. v. City of Portland, U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit, Appeal No. 99-35609, Section C,
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-9th-circuit/1435844.html
(accessed May 13, 2011).
6
. Elliot D. Cohen, “The Great American Firewall: Why the Net is Poised to Become a Global Weapon of Mass Deception,”
Buzzflash
, May 1, 2006,
http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/05/con06169.html
.
7
. Elliot D. Cohen, “Web of Deceit.”
8
. Federal Communications Commission (FCC),
Report and Order: In the Matter of Preserving the Open Internet Broadband Internet Practices
, December 21, 2010, 2,
http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2010/db1223/FCC-10-201A1.pdf
.
9
. FCC,
Report and Order
, 137.
10
. Edward Wyatt, “U.S. Court Curbs F.C.C. Authority on Web Traffic,”
New York Times
, April 6, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/technology/07net.html
.
11
. Grant Gross, “FCC Chairman Defends Broadband Regulation Move,” PCWorld, May 6, 2010,
http://www.pcworld.com/article/195759/fcc_chairman_defends_broadband_regulation_move.html
.
12
. Elliot D. Cohen, “Help Stop Destruction of the Free Internet Now,”
Truthdig
, December 26, 2010,
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/help_stop_destruction_of_the_free_internet_now_20101226/
.
13
. Joelle Tessler, “Verizon challenges FCC’s net neutrality rules,”
Salon
, January 21, 2011,
www.salon.com/technology/feature/2011/01/21/verizon_net_neutrality_fcc
.
14
. Steve Augustino, “Court Dismisses Verizon Net Neutrality Appeal—for Now,”
Telecom Law Monitor
,
http://www.telecomlawmonitor.com/tags/court-of-appeals/
(accessed May 13, 2011).
15
. Kevin Drawbaugh, “UPDATE 2-U.S. House rejects FCC’s ‘open’ Internet rules,” Reuters, April 8, 2011,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/08/congress-internet-idUSN0825411720110408
.
16
. Elliot D. Cohen,
Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
17
. The Downing Street Memo(s),
http://downingstreetmemo.com/
(accessed May 14, 2011).
18
. Elliot D. Cohen,
Mass Surveillance and State Control
.
19
. Paul Davidson and David Lieberman, “FCC wants more access to affordable high-speed Internet,”
USA Today
, March 16, 2010,
http://www.ksdk.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=198055
.
20
. “Rural Activists: Treat Broadband as Basic Utility,” Public News Service, April 29, 2011,
http://www.publicnewsservice.org/index.php?/content/article/19808-1
.
21
. Elizabeth DiNovella, “US Slipping in Internet Access,”
The Progressive
, June 25, 2008,
http://www.progressive.org/mag_wxld062508
.
22
. 2010 Report on Internet Speeds in All States,
SpeedMatters.org
, November 2010,
http://cwa.3cdn.net/299ed94e144d5adeb1_mlblqoxe9.pdf
.
23
. Ryan Singel, “Investigate AT&T Broadband Caps, Interest Groups Tell FCC,”
Wired
, May 6, 2011,
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/investigate-broadband-caps/
.
24
. Ian Paul, “Google-Verizon Net Neutrality Pact: 5 Red Flags,”
PC World
, August 10, 2010,
http://www.pcworld.com/article/202970/googleverizon_net_neutrality_pact_5_red_flags.html
.
by Anthony DiMaggio
It was difficult to turn on the television in 2010 without seeing daily references to the Tea Party. As the darling “movement” of choice for the mass media, the Tea Party seemingly arose out of nowhere following the group’s April 15, 2010, “Tax Day” rally, and continued to attract media attention throughout the year and in the run-up to the 2010 midterm elections. By early 2011, however, the group was forced to share the spotlight with those revolting in Wisconsin against Governor Scott Walker’s draconian attacks on labor’s very existence. Without any warning, the Tea Party found itself cast into a national spotlight due to its support for long-standing Republican attacks on basic rights such as collective bargaining, pension benefits, and other worker-related protections.
While most Americans have a general idea of the politics behind the Tea Party, much less is understood about the group’s relationship with political and business power centers. Is the Tea Party a genuine manifestation of grassroots “movement” protest against a corrupt status quo? Are Tea Party officials a serious challenge to Wall Street and the “bailout” politics in Washington? Is the group independent of the Republican Party and elite business interests, as its members so often claim? Answers to these questions are badly needed at a time when mainstream journalists are consigning themselves primarily to a cheerleader role for the group, following its “grassroots uprising” leading up to the 2010 midterm and 2012 presidential elections.
Any effective study of the Tea Party phenomenon must first begin with
a general understanding of the workings of the American press. Claims that American media systematically engage in censorship and propaganda are met with suspicion by most journalists, academics, and political officials. Manipulation of the public by journalists and government is seen as something that only happens in authoritarian countries, not in the world’s most powerful democracy. To suggest otherwise is to engage in a conspiracy theory.
The problem with the conventional narrative as described above is that it ignores the American media’s thorough reliance on the state as
the
leading agenda setter for the news. Journalists’ dependence on officialdom to determine the parameters of public discourse resides at the heart of any propaganda state. Noted media critic and scholar Noam Chomsky argues that “propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
1
This statement cuts to the core of the modern democratic propaganda state.
Business and government officials do not need to conspire behind closed doors to determine media content. Political leaders already accomplish this goal incidentally by way of the prestige they enjoy from American journalists, who rely on their regular statements to fill the daily news hole and to set the tone for discussions of Washington-related politics and business issues. Business elites, by virtue of their ownership of the mass media and their reliance on advertising dollars, also exert a structural influence over media content in favor of pro-corporate perspectives, and against potential criticisms.
2
Media propaganda, simply understood, entails two major components. First, it includes a systematic bias in favor of official government sources. Journalists accept as standard operating procedure that the spectrum of views dominating the mass media should be determined by Democrats and Republicans holding power in Washington, DC. These officials provide the moral compass for journalists, who claim to objectively mirror in their reporting the policy debates and opinions raging among political officialdom. Objectivity, in their lexicon, is not defined by reflecting the full spectrum of views that exist throughout a society on major policy issues.
3
Quite the contrary, any consistent coverage of those opinions that reside outside of the bi-partisan spectrum of agreement and conflict is greeted by political elites, conservative media monitors, and business representatives with
screams of “bias!” These elite actors have never shown much interest in sharing the national megaphone with those who offer substantive challenges to their communicative and ideological monopolies over the public sphere.
The second major component of media propaganda includes a reliance on the manipulation of public emotions. Any effective propaganda state must master the art of fear mongering if it is to force an often unwilling public to go along with unpopular public policies. In an insightful study of political and media propaganda, Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills argue that “propaganda is not concerned with disseminating information, but with rallying emotion … propaganda must be pure, distilled, and unpolluted by contaminants such as complexity and subtlety.”
4
This definition of propaganda, as I found throughout my study, proved an effective description of the politics of the Tea Party. The Tea Party’s embrace by the mass media, Republican operatives, and business elites is marked by precisely the kind of propaganda that make it difficult, if not impossible, for the public to engage in careful or reasoned discussion of the full implications of health care reform, or any other policy issues in question.
Perhaps the most censored news story throughout 2009 and 2010 was the revelation that the Tea Party is not, in fact, a social movement. This conclusion will no doubt jar those who share the group’s ideology, although no other conclusion is possible following a systematic analysis of the group and its politics. I had assumed that the Tea Party was a mass movement before starting my study of the group, which began immediately prior to the April 15, 2010, “Tax Day” protests and culminated one year later between the midterm elections in 2010 and the 2012 presidential election season. I had little reason to think the Tea Party was not a movement at a time when reporters and news outlets were reflexively assuming that the group was a product of decentralized, grassroots, and community forces. My assessment of the group would change radically, however, over the course of my examination in light of the discovery of numerous inconvenient realities.
In assessing the Tea Party, I engaged in a multipronged approach. My national analysis of the Party’s participation levels and membership was buttressed by intensive case study analysis of the group, as it operated throughout the Chicago and Madison metropolitan areas. Aside from my observational study, I also looked at the group with regard to its media coverage, most specifically in terms of how they were framed by journalists as a social movement and the reports on the Tea Party’s most important issue: health care reform. Finally, I undertook an extensive analysis of the effects of Tea Party-related messages emanating from the mass media, as reflected in public opinion surveys. In the end, my examination concluded that the Tea Party is largely a mass-mediated phenomenon, drawing most of its power not from grassroots, decentralized forces, but from sympathetic patrons operating in the mass media, Republican Party, and business community. I dedicate the rest of this essay to exploring these findings in greater detail.
In spite of its nearly endless media coverage, any serious analysis of the Tea Party phenomenon is bound to conclude that the “movement” is a mile wide and an inch deep. It contains few of the basic prerequisites of a social movement, as laid out by scholars. At the national level, the group is unrecognizable as a mass uprising. Most problematically, few local chapters in the run-up to and aftermath of the April 15, 2010, rallies displayed any evidence of engaging in regular organizational meetings. Of the 150 cities in which Tea Party rallies were held on April 15, I found that just 8 percent provided any information through their local website or the national
Tea Party Patriots
website of regular meetings (defined as at least one meeting per month, for at least two consecutive months). My findings were further reinforced by a national study by Patchwork Nation, which found that registration with Tea Party chapters across the country was incredibly small. Searching through online directories of local Tea Party organizations, Patchwork Nation analyzed records for “the overwhelming majority of registered members” throughout the country. The group’s study concluded that the Tea Party consisted (as of April 2010) of “roughly
67,000 members in counties across America.” When broken down, this total translated into less than three Tea Party members per 10,000 people in cities across the country, or just .03 percent of the adult population. These numbers are a far cry from the 4 to 5 percent of adults who claimed to be attending Tea Party rallies or meetings in 2010. My study of various national-umbrella groups produced similar data, as documented in a recently released book on the Tea Party.
5
Additional problems quickly emerged for the mass media’s dominant “social movement” narrative. In my Chicago metropolitan area case study, active Tea Party organizing was meager. Of all the metropolitan Tea Party groups, less than 15 percent posted any information about regular meetings on their websites or through the national website. In the spring of 2010, there were only twenty local Tea Party groups listed on the national
Tea Party Patriots
website for a metropolitan area claiming more than 250 jurisdictions. This presence was incredibly small, translating into just 7.5 percent of all municipalities containing a Tea Party chapter. The percent of cities and towns with regular meetings was even smaller, representing a miniscule one percent of all municipalities. When rallies and organizational meetings did take place in cities I observed, attendance was usually low, and willingness to organize beyond meetings was nearly nonexistent.
6