A Tale of Two Protests: Media Cheer Wall Street Occupiers But Jeered Tea Partiers
The Occupy Wall Street protestors have received overwhelmingly positive coverage from the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) news networks, as they used their airtime to publicize and promote the aggressively leftist movement. In just the first eleven days of October, ABC, CBS and NBC flooded their morning and evening newscasts with a whopping 33 full stories or interview segments on the protesters. This was a far cry from the greeting the Tea Party received from the Big Three as that conservative protest movement was initially ignored (only 13 total stories in all of 2009) and then reviled. Where the Tea Party was met with skeptical claims of their motivations — with some reporters claiming they were merely corporate backed puppets and others implying they were spurred on by their racist opposition to the first black president – the Occupy Wall Street crowd was depicted as an almost genial “grassroots” movement. While network reporters weren’t hesitant to describe the Tea Party as conservative, only once did a reporter attach even the “liberal” label to the overtly leftist Wall Street protestors. Network anchors like Brian Williams couldn’t be bothered with ideological labeling of the occupiers as he was, on the October 5 NBC Nightly News , too busy celebrating the arrival of the “massive protest movement” that “could well turn out to be the protest of this current era.” ABC’s Diane Sawyer was so excited she tripped herself up in hyperbole as she proclaimed, on the October 10 World News , that the movement had “spread to more than 250 American cities, more than a thousand countries – every continent but Antarctica.” Sawyer would have to correct herself on a later edition of the program as she clarified it was “more than a thousand cities around the world – every continent but Antarctica.” – still a tremendous exaggeration. Most astoundingly, the networks’ Occupy Wall Street (OWS) stories were overwhelmingly sympathetic: Protesters and supporters of the movement dominated the soundbites, with 109 (87%) to just 8 critics (6%), with another 8 soundbites from neutral sources. Five of the eight soundbites unsympathetic to the protesters were brief clips of GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain blasting the occupiers. In addition to the 109 pro-OWS soundbites, seven times guests on the Big Three network morning shows expressed sympathy for the protestors. No guests opposed the protests. MRC analysts tracked all the stories on the Big Three broadcast networks’ evening and morning news programs (ABC’s World News and Good Morning America , CBS’s Evening News and The Early Show , NBC’s Nightly News and Today show) and found that from October 1 through October 11 network anchors, and reporters, in addition to the 33 full stories, delivered 15 brief items and 14 mentions in other stories not devoted strictly to the Wall Street protest. Very Few Liberal Labels for Lefty Protestors In 2009 Tea Partiers were repeatedly but accurately described as conservative. Back on the April 15, 2009 Today show, NBC’s Chuck Todd’s labeling was typical when he introduced the Tea Party movement to viewers this way: “There’s been some grassroots conservatives who have organized so-called Tea Parties around the country, hoping the historical reference will help galvanize Americans against the President’s economic ideas. But, I tell you, the idea hasn’t really caught on.” However, when it came to appropriately labeling the OWS crowd as leftist or liberals, it happened exactly one time, when on the October 11 edition of ABC’s Good Morning America , co-anchor George Stephanopoulous asked Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe if he thought the OWS protestors were the “liberal version of the Tea Party?” and wondered if that was a “good thing for the White House?” The only other usage of the world “liberal” came when Columbia University's Dorian Warren, on the October 1 NBC Nightly News asserted that the protesters were “a liberal version of the Tea Party” and obligingly offered: “I think this could potentially carry over into the 2012 elections and get people to the polls.” Then, on the October 9 edition of Sunday Morning , Rebecca Jarvis pegged Columbia University professor Todd Gitlin as “a liberal observer of the politics of the protest.” In fact, as the MRC’s Business & Media’s Julia Seymour documented, not one network report has called the protesters “radical,” “extreme,” “left-wing,” or “socialist.”
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on October 13, 2011. Filed under