Part 5 (2/2)

Patterns of Coverage Tell the Tale.

The special effort Fox made to build the Tea Party is evident from the hard data. We examined the frequency with which different media outlets referred to the Tea Party in its infancy. Figure 4.1 displays the trends in Tea Party coverage by Fox News and CNN from February to May 2009.36 As might be expected, CNN coverage spikes in April 2009 when Tea Party protests were held across the country. It is not that CNN ignored the early peak of Tea Party rallies; indeed, CNN coverage more than matches that of Fox News when Tea Party events are actually occurring. But coverage on Fox News has a strikingly different trajectory. Fox coverage antic.i.p.ates Tea Party events, building up to each set of synchronized rallies. And Fox maintains coverage between those events. Clearly, the efforts at Tea Party promotion we have cited from the Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck shows on Fox were not isolated anomalies. They are part of a larger pattern of antic.i.p.atory coverage, practiced systematically by Fox News. And Fox kept at it. Although Tea Party coverage receded somewhat after the April 15 crescendo, it continued to be a significant part of Fox News programming. A similar big buildup of Fox coverage occurs leading into the July 4, 2009 Tea Party rallies, and again leading into the August town hall protests.37 FIGURE 4.1. Tea Party Coverage by CNN and Fox News, February to May 2009. Data from CNN and Fox News transcripts via Lexis Nexis.

These data nail down our case. Fox was not just responding to Tea Party activism as it happened. Fox served as a kind of social movement orchestrator, during what is always a dicey early period for any new protest effort-the period when potential partic.i.p.ants have to hear about the effort and decide that it is likely to prove powerful. For weeks in advance of each early set of rallies, as the Tea Party grew from infancy to adolescence, Fox was pointing the way and cheering.

Given the loyal conservative viewers.h.i.+p that Fox already enjoyed before the Tea Party emerged, the network's a.s.siduous promotional and informational efforts surely made a big difference. Fox viewers are conservative Republicans who were already very upset about the election of Barack Obama. Watching Fox, they had repeated opportunities to learn about the Tea Party and partic.i.p.ate if they should so choose. Fox urged people on and conveyed the sense that something big was afoot. The network also joined many other conservative media outlets in offering guides to find local rallies on the Fox News website.

All of this must have been quite encouraging for older, conservative viewers-many of whom were inexperienced with public protest. The Fox News imprimatur surely helped people to feel more comfortable about taking part. Many Tea Partiers told us that they had been hesitant to attend their first Tea Party, unsure whom they would meet. But as we've already seen, conservatives have great faith in Fox News. To go to an angry political protest may have seemed out of character for most of them until it was framed as an opportunity to ”celebrate with Fox News.” Once people got to the rallies, they found others like themselves similarly inspired. As we learned in Chapter 3, many of those who became organizers and leaders of local Tea Parties met each other for the first time at rallies, or on the bus traveling to big protest events.

The Special Role of Glenn Beck.

Almost all Fox News hosts took some part in the ”celebration” of the first Tax Day Tea Parties-and engaged in ongoing favorable coverage thereafter.38 Nevertheless, flamboyant Fox host Glenn Beck deserves special credit for his role in building and shaping the Tea Party as an organized force. After taking the lead in April 2009, Beck regularly invited Tea Party organizers on-air in advance of ensuing spring and summer rallies. More than that, as the Tea Parties were getting off the ground in communities across the country, Beck was launching his own gra.s.sroots initiative, the ”9/12 Project.”39 Beck's purported goal was to ”bring us all back to the place we were on September 12, 2001,” when the country was unified in the wake of the September 11th attacks. This unity could be achieved, Beck claimed, via adherence to the ”9 Principles” and ”12 Values” he laid out on-air. Beck's principles include socioreligious conservative goals as well as the fiscal tenets emphasized by national Tea Party groups. The second Beck principle, for instance, reads, ”I believe in G.o.d and He is the center of my life.”40 Yet the tenor and message of the 9/12 Project overlaps strongly with that of the Tea Party. The 9/12 Project also claims to draw from the words of the Founding Fathers, and emphasizes personal responsibility and limited government.

Week after week and month after month, Glenn Beck encouraged his viewers to get together in groups and watch his show, discuss books he had recommended, and hold their elected leaders accountable for living up to the 9/12 Project's conservative aims. Though nominally a distinct formation, Beck's ”9/12 Project” overlaps heavily with Tea Party activism. In August 2010, at least 115 Tea Parties of those registered on the Tea Party Patriots website had a name including some variation of 9/12, such as the ”Wyoming 912 Coalition” or ”Daytona 912.” And in the nationwide survey of local Tea Parties we completed in the spring of 2011, over 400 groups referred to the 9/12 Project on their site.

Beck's trademark ”9/12 Project” worked with FreedomWorks and other Tea Party groups to co-sponsor the first unified national manifestation of Tea Party enthusiasm-the September 12, 2009, rally that brought tens of thousands of activists to the Mall in Was.h.i.+ngton DC.41 Arguably, this was the moment when the Tea Party s.h.i.+fted into national gear, moving beyond synchronized regional rallies. Across the board, mainstream media began to agree that Tea Partiers were proving themselves to be a big deal politically, less than a year into Obama's presidency.

Beck's influence among Tea Partiers permeates far beyond people who have joined groups formally aligned with the 9/12 Project. Either deliberately or unconsciously, the people we interviewed often used phrases and arguments from the Beck show. Stella Fisher explained her concern with American politics in terms of a spectrum from anarchy to tyranny, as Beck often did on his show. Stanley Ames referred to various Was.h.i.+ngton liberals as ”spooky,” one of Beck's pet words; and his wife Gloria spoke knowledgeably about the turn-of-the-century Progressive movement, a bete noir of the Glenn Beck show.

Although some Tea Party leaders have tried to distance themselves from Beck, and a few people we spoke with expressed some doubts about him, the relations.h.i.+p between Beck and Tea Party organizations was eventually solidified.42 During 2010 and 2011, FreedomWorks conducted members.h.i.+p drives featuring a picture of Glenn Beck and a ”special offer for Glenn Beck listeners.” This formalized the link between the controversial Fox personality and the national advocacy organization and pro-business lobby that has been closely allied with Tea Party Patriots and involved in spurring Tea Party protests from the start. Glenn Beck became ”the cable news poster child for these tea parties,” as his fellow Fox host Greta Van Susteren aptly put it.43

Fox and Tea Partiers Forge a Community of Meaning.

After the Tea Party was up and running, Fox News as a whole moved away from direct promotion and began to integrate the Tea Party seamlessly into its ongoing conservative narratives. Along the way, the network offered a distinctive framing of what the Tea Party was all about. A community of Fox-viewing Tea Partiers came to share a powerful, widely shared political ident.i.ty, and the Fox News framing, in due course, shaped national perceptions of the Tea Party phenomenon.

Of course, Fox News also continued to provide the kind of political coverage and interpretive discussion that mobilizes conservatives with information and misinformation, as the network had been doing for years before the Tea Party came into existence. Fox gave a soapbox to Tea Party politicians who, like other conservative Republicans, found a place for gentle interviews in the lead-up to the 2010 midterm elections.44 Not only were the questions friendly, Fox programs allowed Tea Party politicians to solicit online monetary contributions.45 Fox News's conservative slant encourages a particular worldview. ”The more we learn ... the more we pay attention, the more disturbed we get,” Stanley Ames explains. ”If you watch the networks, you aren't informed about how bad off we are.” Fox News provides a constant drumbeat of news that shapes the American conservative worldview and keeps people on edge.46 This effect was true during the height of the Tea Party, as it was in the years before the Obama Administration came to office.

But in its role as Tea Party promoter, Fox News deserves special mention. So successful was the Fox News cheerleading that Fox viewers and Tea Party partic.i.p.ants became heavily overlapping categories. According to the CBS/ New York Times national poll taken in April 2010, 63% of Tea Party supporters watched Fox News, compared to 11% of all respondents. Among Tea Partiers, the diet of Fox News coverage was only occasionally supplemented by other television news sources. Only one in nine Tea Party supporters reported getting their news from one of the cla.s.sic Big Three networks, while among all U.S. respondents, more than a quarter reported watching network news.47 From our encounters, the rate of Fox News watching seemed even higher among true activists as opposed to mere sympathizers with the Tea Party. In Virginia, every single Tea Party member we spoke to mentioned Fox News as a prime news source. Similarly, when we asked one Arizona activist where she gets her information, she laughed and said, ”where do you think?” before telling us that ”of course” she watches Fox News. An Arizona couple we met reported watching at least six hours of Fox News a day. In Boston, too, thenFox News host Glenn Beck was regularly cited by Tea Party partic.i.p.ants-in the same matter-of-course way that the New York Times comes up in Cambridge liberal circles-as both a common currency and a cultural touchstone. Fox News's national coverage was far more popular than even local conservative media. Most Ma.s.sachusetts Tea Partiers do not even bother with the generally conservative Boston Herald, let alone the Boston Globe.48 As Tea Party activists worked to build a major political force, Fox News played a unique role in giving their undertakings special meaning, not only among all conservatives, but for Tea Partiers themselves. Throughout 2009 and 2010, Fox News viewers were informed that the Tea Party was ”gra.s.sroots,” ”genuine,” ”organic,” ”spontaneous,” ”independent,” and ”mainstream.”49 Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch himself said of the Tea Party, ”They're not extremist. They're moderate centrists.”50 Fox News viewers were also regularly told that the Tea Party represented people like themselves. As Glenn Beck put it, ”This is the tea party. This is you and me.”51 Tea Party activism was a source of hope, Beck concluded. ”You're not alone, America. You are the majority. A year ago, you didn't know that.”52 Though they touted the Tea Party as a ma.s.sive and independent force, Fox News commentators also insisted that Tea Party groups would be most effective operating within the Republican Party, not outside of it. The electoral power of the Tea Party was a frequent subject of discussion on Fox, long before a slew of Tea Party candidates emerged. Between major events, viewers were reminded that the Tea Party ”is far from over,” and that the phenomenon had the capacity to kick ”the establishment's rear end.”53 Yet emphasis on the Tea Party as independent and powerful did not mean that the phenomenon should operate outside of the established two-party system. Fox anchors and commentators persistently emphasized the dangers of ”disunity” and the political impracticality of becoming an actually independent third party.54 Instead, the Tea Party was quickly framed as a challenge to the Republican establishment that would also boost the GOP- or as Bill Kristol described it, ”the best thing that has happened to the Republican Party in recent times.”55 The Fox News audience that included the vast majority of Tea Party partic.i.p.ants was regularly encouraged to engage in the electoral process in ways that would prod the Republican Party rightward but not undercut its ability to win elections.

In Fox and affiliated conservative outlets, the Tea Party took on meaning not only as a political grouping, but also as a vital cultural force. Fox News a.s.signed the Tea Party a starring role in what conservatives understand as a long-running culture war between coastal elites and middle Americans. As we saw earlier, Tea Party members think of the elite not primarily as an economic category but as a cultural stratum, a coterie of liberal intellectuals and bureaucrats who wish to impose ideas and schemes about matters such as economic redistribution and environmental regulation on unwitting regular Americans. Fox News coverage of the Tea Party both draws upon and fuels this potent interpretation.

In framing the social conflict between elites and middle America, Fox News adopts the rhetorical style of Richard Nixon, who, as Rick Perlstein says, ”so brilliantly co-opted the liberals' populism, channeling it into a white middle-cla.s.s rage at the sophisticates.”56 Speaking on Fox, Newt Gingrich announced that ”the Tea Parties were a direct threat to the elite left and the elite left is going berserk.”57 In the world of Fox News, the coastal elite maneuvers in partners.h.i.+p with poor minority groups, and they work together through the mainstream media to denigrate ordinary Americans, including Tea Partiers. Using this map of the political world, the Tea Party is said to be reviled precisely because it is the representative of middle-cla.s.s whites, the true Americans. As regular Fox News contributor Jim Pinker-ton put it, ”There has never been a poor minority that the mainstream media didn't gush over. [...] What is left out is the white, middle, and working cla.s.s. To them [in the mainstream media], they're a bunch of Archie Bunkers.”58 For the many middle-cla.s.s white conservatives in the Fox News audience, such rhetoric hits home. But in case any viewers should fail to take things personally enough, Fox News hosts regularly remind them. When it comes to specifying who is targeted in criticisms of the Tea Party, the Fox News answer is always ”you,” the viewer at home. ”The American media will never embrace the Tea Party. Why?” asked Fox host Bill O'Reilly, who had the answer ready to hand. ”Generally speaking, they look down on the folks, they think you are dumb.”59 Glenn Beck, too, promised an expose of mainstream media Tea Party coverage, telling viewers that they would learn ”what the media said about you or people that think like you.”60 In another episode, Beck told his audience that Tea Party critics are ”trying to belittle and dismiss you, the viewer.”61 At Fox News, criticism of the Tea Party is never presented dispa.s.sionately or in the abstract. It is framed as a personal attack on the audience.

Both the constant refrain of ”us versus them” and the everyday flow of political information and misinformation reinforce the sense of an embattled community of conservatives-whose latest effort to fight back valiantly is embodied in the Tea Party. With such coverage, Fox and other conservative media outlets not only touted a heartening brand to help the Tea Party get off the ground; they also helped to establish and sustain it as a national political force into 2010 and beyond.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA JOIN THE PARTY.

As the Tea Party gained traction and political definition with crucial a.s.sistance from right-wing media, it gradually attracted the sorts of across-the-board media fascination necessary to influence public discussions during and after the critical elections of 2010. At first, the mainstream media's coverage tracked public protests and reacted to the level of attention being paid by conservative news outlets. But by 2010, most media outlets decided that the Tea Party was a major ongoing story-the next big thing in U.S. politics. Reporters spent months parsing polls and field reports to figure out who Tea Partiers were and where they fit in the overall political spectrum. Intense and often misleading media coverage provided an enormous boost in publicity for what was portrayed as a ma.s.s movement. After the November 2010 elections, yet another media-influenced dynamic took hold, as coverage s.h.i.+fted to featuring national elites who claimed to speak for ”the Tea Party” as a whole. Suddenly, the gra.s.sroots faded and the likes of Representative Michele Bachmann, Senator Jim DeMint, and d.i.c.k Armey appeared even more front and center.

Initial Wariness.

In the early months of the Tea Party, Fox News's wall-to-wall coverage, more than the protests themselves, caught the attention of the mainstream press. Outlets covered the most spectacular public events. But eyebrows were also raised, with some editors and commentators wondering if the whole thing was a Fox-manufactured chimera. In the days before the April rallies, CNN contributor Howard Kurtz concluded that Fox News ”practically seems to be a co-sponsor” of the planned Tea Party events, and asked, ”Is it OK for the gang at Fox News to join those April 15th tea party protests?”62 As David Carr commented in the New York Times, ”the news media are supplying both the pictures and the war.”63 Ironically, this coverage of Fox's coverage was at least tangentially a source of publicity for the Tea Party protests themselves. But it also suggests that many in the media were at first suspicious of the Tea Party phenomenon and alert to the role of the conservative media in its development.

Even as they voiced concerns about Fox's coverage, journalists on CNN became defensive about their own coverage-and significantly upped attention to the Tea Party. On April 13th, still two days before the protests, CNN not only reported on the upcoming protests but discussed whether their coverage was adequate, and promised that there would be more coverage to come ”as the protests draw closer.”64 They kept their word, featuring the Chicago-based Tea Party organizer Eric Odom on April 14th and providing extensive coverage of the spring and summer Tea Party rallies. CNN also moved toward what would become an increasingly close relations.h.i.+p to Tea Party Express, the Republican-led political action committee that relabeled its activities to cater to the Tea Party. Starting in the fall of 2009, CNN sent reporters to travel along on Tea Party Express bus tours, sending periodic dispatches from the road. CNN would later work out an arrangement with Tea Party Express to co-sponsor an early GOP presidential primary debate.65 Spectacular coverage of protests happened again around the time of the August 2009 Congressional recess, when gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers were portrayed as expressing widespread popular anger about health reform and other legislation pushed by President Obama and the Congressional Democrats. The July 31, 2009 article by Politico on ”Town Halls Gone Wild” was influential in keying reporters to that angle.66 Angry protestors yelling at Congressmen and Congresswomen made for great theater, and a few dramatic town hall episodes got a lot of television time.67 But the coverage was at best partial. The roles of elite GOP operatives and free-market advocacy organizations in facilitating town hall protests did not get much play in early mainstream media portrayals of the Tea Party.

In late 2009, Fox News explicitly goaded other major networks to increase their coverage. Following the September 12th 2009 Taxpayer's March on Was.h.i.+ngton, Fox News ran a full-page color ad in the Was.h.i.+ngton Post, with an aerial picture of the rally and the headline ”How did ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN miss this?”68 CNN reporters responded angrily on air, running a montage of various reporters covering the September 12th event. CNN anchor Rick Sanchez concluded: ”Here's the fact. We did cover the event. What we didn't do is promote the event.... That's not what real news organizations are supposed to do.”69 Wolf Blitzer went so far as to call Fox's allegation ”false”-a rarity on a show that tends to cus.h.i.+on factual a.s.sertions with phrases like ”some people say.”70 But the ad may have had an impact, prodding CNN and other outlets to cover the Tea Party more a.s.siduously. As Jeffrey Toobin put it, ”when FOX News decides that the tea parties and the rally in Was.h.i.+ngton by the tea party people is a big story, some people followed that.”71 There certainly have been many instances when stories leap from conservative media circles to mainstream news outlets. Political scientists and media scholars have found that Fox News and other conservative media outlets have significant power to amplify conservative viewpoints and reshape public debate.72 Whatever the impact of Fox's goading, coverage of the Tea Party was comparatively judicious in 2009-at least, as we will see, compared to the lavish attention paid in the following year. CNN featured extensive coverage of eye-catching events, but also skepticism of the Tea Party phenomenon as a whole. The network also offered relatively clear-eyed a.s.sessments of the partic.i.p.ants' conservative leanings, pointed to the involvement of conservative media as event promoters, and raised occasional questions about the funding behind the phenomenon. In print and online media, less able to take advantage of flashy imagery, the first Tea Parties pa.s.sed largely unnoticed. The very first Tea Party protests received only very marginal coverage in the New York Times, a mention in an article about CNBC's place in the cable news standings.73 Rick Klein, writing for ABC News's The Note, cited the support of major funders on the right and cautioned ”not to read too much” into the protests, but argued that the ”populist anger” the protests unleashed was a significant political phenomenon.74 When attention was paid to Tea Partiers, it often focused on the Tea Party's extremism. Gail Collins described the town hall protestors as ”people who appear to have been sitting in their attics ... listening for signs of alien aircraft.”75 Even when articles aimed to provide a balanced view of Tea Party partic.i.p.ants, the a.s.sumption was often that the Tea Party was dominated by crackpots. An article in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, for instance, commented that, though a local rally was scheduled to feature local Texas secessionists, ”not all Tea Party events are run by cultists and conspiracy hobbyists.”76 In late 2009, the mainstream media's almost universal a.s.sumption was that extremist views hold a significant place in the Tea Party. In the following year, however, that a.s.sessment was turned on its head.

The Next Big Political Thing.

Starting in early 2010, the Tea Party became a fas.h.i.+onable subject deemed deserving of rapt and continual media attention. As one indication of more general trends, Figure 4.2 shows the same kind of data we presented earlier on the frequency of the phrase ”Tea Party” in CNN's transcripts. In this figure, we have ”zoomed out” to show the rhythms of CNN's attention to the Tea Party over the entire eighteen-month span from the birth of the Tea Party through the summer of 2010. Clearly, coverage boomed starting in early 2010, about a year into the Tea Party phenomenon.

FIGURE 4.2. Tea Party Coverage by CNN in 2009 and 2010. Data from CNN transcripts via Lexis-Nexis.

Why did early 2010 mark a sea change in the quant.i.ty and quality of coverage a.s.sociated with the Tea Party? Electoral politics certainly helped to spur the s.h.i.+ft, as two somewhat surprising electoral challenges by GOP politicians were attributed in large part to Tea Party influence.77 In mid-January 2010, in a Ma.s.sachusetts special election to fill the Senate seat of the recently deceased Edward Kennedy, previously little-known Republican Scott Brown surged to victory; and in the Florida GOP contest for nomination to the Senate, conservative Marco Rubio's campaign overtook the candidate originally backed by the establishment, Governor Charlie Crist. Although both Brown and Rubio were to the right of the norm in their respective states and enjoyed significant contributions from national Tea Party funders, their ties to actual local Tea Party groups were tenuous. During the Florida Senate primary, local Tea Party members expressed concerns about Rubio, alleging that he ignored their requests to meet with him.78 As for Scott Brown in Ma.s.sachusetts, he partic.i.p.ated in a fundraiser with local Tea Party members in the last weeks of his campaign, yet claimed eleven days later to be ”unfamiliar” with the Tea Party.79 Such ambiguities got lost in the media translation, however, as both Brown and Rubio were touted as ”Tea Party candidates” who won their respective elections with gra.s.sroots support against long odds. On February 1st, a New Yorker profile described the Tea Party as ”the social movement that helped take Ted Kennedy's Ma.s.sachusetts Senate seat away from the Democrats.”80 Whenever a movement or interest group seems to have big clout in elections, journalists sit up and take notice-and this is what clearly happened for the Tea Party in 2010. With newfound credentials as an electoral force and kingmaker, the Tea Party was suddenly something all sorts of media outlets felt they had to probe, characterize, and feature.81 Investigative reporters were dispatched, some of them far into the hinterlands to do virtually anthropological investigations.82 Mainly, though, media-funded pollsters were set to work devising ways to characterize Tea Partiers and get a fix on what Americans in general thought about them. Simultaneously, political writers and pundits geared up to report survey findings and speculate about the impact of the Tea Party on primary and general election contests throughout 2010. In previous electoral cycles, ”Reagan Democrats” or ”Soccer Moms” were the big story. This time it was going to be ”the Tea Party.”

As media outlets rushed to respond to the apparently underreported Tea Party, journalists moved away from early mainstream a.s.sessments, which had rightly pegged the Tea Party as a conservative anti-tax, anti-Obama force within the Republican Party. In the spring of 2010, the mainstream media began to portray the Tea Party as a full-fledged independent political movement, and speculated about whether it might even be an alternative to the two major parties. That storyline depended heavily on interpretations of polling that we dissect below-and it was eventually overtaken by events, as the alignment of Tea Partiers with Republican goals and their engagement in Republican primaries became unmistakable.

The Use and Misuse of Surveys.

A sure sign that the Tea Party was not at first taken very seriously by the mainstream media is the paucity of poll questions asked during early months. Many national political polls are commissioned by media outlets, and even those that run independently tend to set agendas in close tandem with national political coverage. Tellingly, a search of the database at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research-the world's largest repository of survey data-finds fewer than ten poll questions asked about the Tea Party in 2009. Reporters were not yet obsessed with pinpointing Tea Party supporters. Although outlets like CNN took advantage of the Tea Party's TV-friendly spectacles-not only covering nationally synchronized rallies, but also sending a reporter to travel with the Tea Party Express bus tour in the fall of 2009-the hoopla was seen more as a sideshow than as central to serious politics.

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