But things never stay the same in politics, any more than in the rest of life. As we will see in the next two chapters, relationships have shifted over time between gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers and the national advocacy elites who maneuver to leverage and speak for the Tea Party as a whole. Once Republicans won big victories in the November 2010 elections, national actors, including in the media, wanted to see more coherence and organizational discipline in the Tea Party than there ever has truly been. Self-appointed Tea Party leaders and spokespersons attempted to fill the demand for information about what "the Tea Party wants" from Republicans in office and in U.S. politics as a whole. Leverage in the Tea Party has therefore shifted since November 2010-giving increased sway to national organizations at the expense of gra.s.sroots members.
Getting the Word Out.
The Media as Cheerleader and Megaphone.
Aired on April 6, 2009, the Glenn Beck show included a clarion call for viewers to "celebrate" the upcoming Tax Day on Wednesday, April 15. Viewers were urged either to attend a Tea Party rally or watch Fox News Channel coverage of the protests. As Beck spoke, a map of the USA splayed across the screen, highlighting the cities where Fox hosts would be present: Neil Cavuto in Sacramento, California; Greta Van Susteren in Washington DC; Sean Hannity in Atlanta, Georgia; and Beck himself in San Antonio, Texas. "FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES" declared the masthead across the top of the screen, unmistakably aligning Fox with the events it would cover in nine days.1 "Town Halls Gone Wild" screamed the headline on a July 31, 2009 article posted at Politico.2 The article spoke of town halls convened by Democratic Members of Congress who faced "angry, sign-carrying mobs and disruptive behavior" from citizens angry about health care reform and other pending legislation. Half a dozen instances were mentioned, with few details on how many protesters were present or how they got there. Subsequent reports suggested that rowdy town halls were the exception rather than the rule during that August Congressional recess, and doc.u.mented that protests were orchestrated and encouraged by elite advocacy organizations.3 But the early Politico piece set the frame for weeks of additional media reports about gra.s.sroots Tea Partiers challenging beleaguered Democrats.
Just a little over a week after the midterm 2010 election, CNN"s Deputy Political Director Paul Steinhauser-a member of the self-described "Best Political Team" on television-posted a piece on Political Ticker about a "two day retreat" hosted by the DC-based advocacy organization FreedomWorks at a posh hotel in Baltimore, at which newly elected GOP lawmakers would be advised on how to fulfill "the agenda of the Tea Party movement" in the soon-to-convene 112th Congress. In his article"s very first sentence, Steinhauser called FreedomWorks a "leading gra.s.sroots organization"-and he proceeded to offer a populist take on the advice to be handed out. Tea Partybacked legislators would be urged to fulfill promises of "bringing change to Washington" and given pointers on how to avoid setting aside "their campaign agenda in order to compromise and curry favor with Republican House leaders."4 Nowhere did Steinhauser mention that the advice-giver-in-chief, FreedomWorks Chairman d.i.c.k Armey, a former GOP House Majority Leader, is a longtime DC-based corporate lobbyist.
Politics depends on communication-to get messages out to potential supporters and set agendas for public discussion. When a new cause for protest is at issue, the challenges of spreading the story are especially daunting. An ongoing political party has routines for disseminating messages; corporations, advocacy groups, and universities have hefty public relations departments to craft press releases; and governments issue constant streams of official p.r.o.nouncements. Reporters will usually cover such statements. But protest organizers face an additional challenge-they must get the word out to potential partic.i.p.ants in order to draw wider public attention. People must hear that shared action is possible and that it could make a difference, or they will just stay home on their couches. If an already existing organizational network is not in place to help orchestrate protest, or if available organizations have only limited capacity, then the media"s response to a protest movement"s early organizing efforts becomes critical.
That is why organizers of nascent protest efforts go for dramatic, photogenic events. They have to capture the eyes and ears of the media. But would-be protest movements often fail at this undertaking because media directors have little incentive to pay sustained attention to something out of the mainstream. In recent years, for example, hundreds of thousands of Americans have mounted dramatic protests: to oppose U.S. war efforts, to call for an end to legal abortion, to support the right to organize unions, and to demand immigration reform. Most of these protests have attracted little coverage in the major media-and certainly not sustained coverage.
Even if protest events attract a day or two of attention, would-be movements usually end up a flash in the pan, as media outlets move on to the next new and controversial thing. For a protest movement to survive, it must do more. It must get leaders on television or in national and local newspapers, and garner other kinds of ongoing friendly media coverage. Again and again, protest themes must be injected into public debates to convey a sense of momentum and convince politicians and members of the general public to focus on the protestors" concerns.
Grasping the structure and dynamics of U.S. communications media will help us understand the special advantages Tea Party organizers enjoyed when so many other would-be protest efforts have fallen short of getting the publicity and media access they needed to flourish and have a major impact on governance. As we will see, the challenge of spreading and germinating the Tea Party idea was surmounted with impressive ease because a major sector of the U.S. media today is openly partisan-including Fox News Channel, the right-wing "blogosphere," and a nationwide network of right-wing talk radio programs. This aptly named conservative media "echo chamber" reaches into the homes of many Americans, buffets as well as boosts the Republican Party, and has considerable ability to set the agenda of issues that other media outlets also take up.5 Crucially, the conservative media quickly joined and helped to orchestrate the Tea Party, breaking down the barriers between media and movement that have usually been so challenging for protestors to navigate. In this book, for good reason, we have designated the conservative media complex as one of the three main interacting forces that make up the Tea Party and give it oomph.
Still, the Tea Party impact on broader U.S. political debates depended on more than colorful rallies touted by Fox News. Tea Partiers might noisily a.s.semble on Tax Day and Independence Day, or send dozens of people to shout at Congressional town hall meetings during the health reform debate. But how much coverage would they get-in what range of news outlets-and how would the coverage frame who Tea Partiers were and what they were doing? How quickly and accurately would news outlets get a fix on ordinary Tea Partiers themselves, their social characteristics and partisan proclivities, and what would media say about the role of elite organizations in the Tea Party universe? Would outlets check the facts of grand claims by self-appointed Tea Party spokespersons about federal spending and deficits? The media beyond the conservative echo chamber were a bit slow to leap into the Tea Party story, but once they did, the answers to these questions turned out largely as elite sponsors of the Tea Party wanted. The Tea Party eventually became the darling of a wide range of U.S. media, with reporters portraying it as a ma.s.sive movement of regular Americans disgruntled with President Obama and government spending. Tea Party framings of issues were injected into the very center of U.S. public debates.
FOX AND COMPEt.i.tORS-THE MEDIA CONTEXT.
Many observers of the role of U.S. media in politics as of the early twenty-first century are alarmed that partisanship has crept in. This rarely bothers very conservative pundits, of course, because (even if they constantly complain about "liberal media bias") they know that the elephants in the room are on their side. Liberals and self-styled nonpartisan critics engage in constant tut-tutting about the horrors of partisan media. They forget that American democracy was born and flourished through the nineteenth century in an environment where major newspapers, the ma.s.s media of the day, were all closely aligned with political parties. "Objective news" was not to be found; nineteenth-century editors and reporters alike presented highly selective versions of the facts, often in luridly emotional ways. Only in the twentieth century, as sociologist Michael Schudson explained in his groundbreaking book Discovering the News, did professional journalists gain a degree of autonomy. Journalists developed norms of objectivity and "balance," which leading newspapers and, later, television networks tried to follow, more or less.6 Norms of objective journalism led to the convention of looking for quotes from sources on "both sides of the issue"-a practice more reflective of the fact that there were two major parties roaming the U.S. political tundra than of any law that major questions have only two possible answers. Social movements and protest efforts outside the two major parties found it harder to get a hearing in the objective-and-balanced media regime.
Today, certain major inst.i.tutions-such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and National Public Radio-still follow twentieth-century norms of objectivity and balance in their coverage of politics and policy-making. They also try to cite neutral experts or authoritative sources, though often there is insufficient time to check facts thoroughly. Newsroom resources are tight and the tempo of news faster in the era of the Internet and cable news. What is more, inst.i.tutions trying to practice objective journalism coexist with other kinds of outlets in a larger, raucous, and fragmented media universe.
Lots of today"s outlets are frankly partisan and present news through an interpretive lens. Talk radio blares out partisan talking points, usually on the right.7 There are influential news aggregators, such as the Drudge Report, and news blogs, such as Red State on the right and Talking Points Memo on the left. Towering above all others is the Fox News empire, the loudest voice in conservative media. Despite its claim to be "fair and balanced," multiple studies have doc.u.mented Fox"s conservative stance.8 Even Fox News host Bill O"Reilly agrees that his station does "tilt right."9 When Fox departs from the official GOP line, its anchors and commentators take overtly conservative stands, pressuring the official Republican Party from the right. Tensions between Fox and the Republicans do exist, but that is not because Fox anchors or hosts deviate to help Democrats, or to engage in objective or balanced coverage. Both the news and the interpretive programs on Fox are frankly and visibly on the side of Republicans and activists to the GOP right.
Conservative news reaches millions of Americans every day. Fox News averages more viewers than its chief cable television compet.i.tors CNN and MSNBC combined. In prime time, over 2 million viewers watch Fox, which carries all of the top ten most watched cable news programs.10 All in all, a quarter of Americans report regularly watching Fox News.11 As for radio, Rush Limbaugh, and fellow conservative radio hosts Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, and Laura Ingraham, each reach tens of millions of radio listeners across the country.12 Viewers and listeners respond to the partisan slant Fox and other conservative outlets present. More than half of Fox News watchers identify as politically conservative, with higher levels of conservatism among viewers of Fox News"s top programs.13 Fully 80% of Rush Limbaugh listeners identify themselves as conservatives, compared to 35% of Americans as a whole.14 Demographics track what one would expect from the partisan skew. The average age of a Fox News Channel viewer is over 65 years, while conservative talk radio listeners average 67 years of age.15 Less than 2% of Fox viewers are African-American.16 All in all, right-wing media have an impressive reach into the homes of America"s aging conservatives, and their audience share is unmatched by their rivals.
Given the impressive scope of conservative media, American democracy is, in an important sense, caught betwixt and between in the new media world. The frank, exuberant, all-around partisanship of the nineteenth century is not quite what we now have. True, there are both liberal and conservative bloggers, and on the tube, the Fox political slant is weakly countered by liberal-slanted shows on MSNBC. But mostly what America has right now is a thousand-pound-gorilla media juggernaut on the right, operating nineteenth-century style, coexisting with other news outlets trying to keep up while making fitful efforts, twentieth-century style, to check facts and cover "both sides of the story." Many of the outlets maneuvering for eyes and ears are commercially hard-pressed. Newspapers in particular are struggling to devise new business models, cutting news operations to the bone in the process. Most television and radio outlets are scrambling, too, trying to be colorful and fast-moving enough to attract or keep their audience. With twenty-four hours of time to fill in cable news, CNN is engaged in a losing battle with Fox to attract some of the same older, conservative viewers-the sort of people who still watch a lot of television.
Commercial compet.i.tion means that issue-mongers can fan a supposedly scandalous sound bite into an uproar of intense coverage across many channels.17 Flamboyant critics have an advantage, especially when a Democrat is in office and they operate from the right. It is easier, after all, to proclaim problems or incite controversy than to offer solutions or seek accord-just as it is easier to start fires than it is to put them out. With Democrat Barack Obama in the White House, Fox settles each day on a critical message-ideally ill.u.s.trated by some controversy or scandal-certain to resonate with its viewers and listeners. Then other cable networks with 24/7 news operations try to compete with Fox-either through imitation, as CNN often does, or through a degree of partisan differentiation, which MSNBC has recently attempted. Either way, the premium is placed on magnifying or arguing with the provocative voices that first appear on Fox (or in right-wing blogs en route to Fox). In due course, even the proudest old-line media outlets allow much of their agenda to be taken up by topics launched from the right-wing noise and echo machine. The brouhaha over fake "death panels" during the health reform debate is a case in point.
Magnifying the routine dynamics that spread stories, news media sponsor incessant polls that reinforce controversial narratives by repeating hot-b.u.t.ton phrases and turning them into questions. Citizens may be asked about nonfactual matters such as the "controversy" over Obama"s birth certificate. Or they may be asked to weigh in on something they are just beginning to hear about-such as "the Tea Party" at an early stage when, truth be told, the majority of Americans had never heard of it. No matter how shaky the poll results may be, newspapers and television stations publicize results and use them to set the agendas for yet more polls, and for stories about the supposed conflicts revealed in the polls. This cycle-stories to set up polls, and polls to set up more stories-is a relatively inexpensive way to do "news" coverage because it does not require reporters to do research or travel across the country looking at actual developments.
Another critical feature of today"s media is the exploding menu of options. Alongside struggling newspapers and network television channels are hundreds of cable channels and websites, all competing for the attention of media consumers. In his influential book Post-Broadcast Democracy, political scientist Markus Prior shows that, after the advent of widespread access to cable television, American media consumers got the power to make so many choices that many of them stopped watching any news at all.18 Back in the pre-cable era of the Big Three networks-CBS, ABC, and NBC-there was nothing else on at dinnertime except "balanced" news, so even the least interested people saw some of it and got roughly the same version of the political facts as all other citizens. Now, uninterested people can and do flip channels, avoiding news altogether in favor of entertainment or sports.
The exploding menu not only has an impact on people willing to avoid news; it also allows Americans who care about news to select outlets that fit their partisan and value preferences. Liberals gravitate toward MSNBC while the most conservative-minded faithfully follow Fox News.19 Because media consumers are sorting themselves out, they no longer get shared information about the world. Subgroups of American citizens can end up not just getting different slants on the same reality, but living in very different realities, believing very different things about the world.20 This is not just a problem afflicting those with relatively little political information. The highly educated are particularly p.r.o.ne to misperceptions resulting from media bias since they are the people who most avidly read and watch and listen for political news.
Armed with a better sense of how U.S. news media work, we can return to the Tea Party saga. At the start, in early 2009, major outlets not only reported on events as they unfolded; a major sector of the media helped to orchestrate protests and build them into a credible political force.
THE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA HOST A TEA PARTY.
As President Obama and a Democratic Congress took office and started churning out legislation, most of the ultra-free-market advocacy and political action groups that would in due course be a.s.sociated with the Tea Party did not possess the communications capacities necessary to reach millions of angry and disenchanted conservatives. Try as they might to capitalize on the mid-February Santelli rant, Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks, and their like would not have been able to get the word out on their own. Their contact lists and field networks were far too spa.r.s.e. Conservative media outlets were thus vital to the rapid launch of Tea Party activism across communities and regions.
How Messages Circulate.
To trace the activity and the effects of conservative media, we focus much of our attention on Fox News because of its ma.s.sive reach. But while Fox News may be the "biggest fish" in the conservative media sea, this cable channel fills only one niche in the ecosystem. Many outlets feed off one another, echoing the same messages day by day. And gra.s.sroots activists spread the messages, too. American conservatives have a powerful capacity to cycle messages between national and local sources, thereby influencing topics of public discussion every day and every week.
Ideas and news stories often pop up on conservative talk radio or on influential websites such as the Drudge Report or Andrew Breitbart"s site before getting picked up by conservative newspapers and television. Indeed, some Fox News personalities, such as Sean Hannity, have successful radio programs where they can test and hone material that will later appear on their television programs. Once a story is up and running, hosts on local conservative radio talk shows play a pivotal role in keeping discussions going and spreading issues or controversies to every community across the land. These well-known figures are everywhere, and they don"t just talk on the radio; they serve on organizing committees for public events and speak at local gatherings.
Gra.s.sroots conservatives play their part, too. Across the partisan spectrum, politically engaged Americans can gather and synthesize information, and then use the blogs, email, and social media to spread stories or action alerts. Active relaying of this sort is par for the course among U.S. conservatives. New York Times reporter David Barstow tells the story of the president of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots, a woman who was "happily retired" but is now a virtual communications whirlwind: Stout wakes each morning, turns on Fox News, grabs coffee and an Atkins bar, and hits the computer. She is the hub of a rapidly expanding and highly viral political network, keeping a running correspondence with her 400 members in Sandpoint, state and national Tea Party leaders and other conservative activists.... Stout forwards along pet.i.tions to impeach Mr. Obama; pet.i.tions to audit the Federal Reserve; pet.i.tions to support Sarah Palin; appeals urging defiance of any federal law requiring health insurance; and on and on.21 As this glimpse suggests, conservatives need not be pa.s.sive recipients of media output. They can also fire up their computers to talk back and spread information (or misinformation) to many others. From what we have seen, Tea Partiers are remarkably active on the Internet; indeed, we are tempted to say that the past couple of years may have brought a huge leap in computer savvy among the mostly older men and women active in the Tea Party, allowing them to use and navigate the Internet with ease, without constantly phoning their children or grandkids for advice!
On a more serious note, cla.s.sic sociological work doc.u.mented decades ago that citizens find news more credible if trusted people vouch for its veracity and relevance. Communications technologies and the structure of politically relevant communities may have changed since Paul Lazersfeld and his colleagues published The People"s Choice back in 1944.22 But the principle of "two-step communication" still has relevance. When Pam Stout contacts fellow conservatives about matters she sees or hears, that reinforces the messages others may also receive from Fox and other conservative outlets.
In at the Start.
A few weeks after the Santelli rant on CNBC, Fox News was hard at work publicizing Tea Party rallies. But Fox News was not the first to grab and spread the Tea Party idea. Bloggers and talk radio hosts were first off the mark.
Once CNBC"s editors posted the Santelli video to their website, the Drudge Report immediately linked to it, with a siren flashing alongside- Matt Drudge"s code for a particularly important event.23 Right-wing pundit Mich.e.l.le Malkin responded by connecting Santelli"s rant to earlier protests against Obama"s economic stimulus proposals, and was soon exchanging ideas with Tea Party organizers over Twitter.24 By the next day, the Santelli rant was enough of a story that White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs was asked a question about it during his regular briefing.
Working alongside conservative bloggers in promoting the Tea Party idea were local talk radio hosts. Eric Von Haessler, one of the hosts on Atlanta"s FM 100.5 morning show, "The Regular Guys," kicked off the February 27th Tea Party on Georgia"s state capitol steps, decrying "the phalanx of academics and community organizers" in the Obama Administration and asking whether the president would represent America"s "producers," "landowners," and "small business owners."25 Mike Gallagher and his radio affiliate, News Radio 1330/950 WORD, sponsored the Tea Party in Greenville, South Carolina. "The left has to listen to us whether they like it or not, right?" this fiery radio host told the cheering crowd. "We"re fed up with Barack Obama!" he continued, only weeks into the new administration.26 So clear was the conservative media"s involvement in producing the very first Tea Parties that one of CNN"s earliest reports on the Tea Parties began, "Talk radio hosts are staging Boston Tea Partystyle rallies across the country."27 Fox News soon recognized a major conservative phenomenon in the making and moved to become cheerleader in chief. Fox began to cover the April 15th rallies six weeks in advance, starting with a March 5, 2009 appearance by Newt Gingrich to talk up the protests on Greta Van Susteren"s show. Scarcely a trickle of Tea Party events occurred over ensuing weeks, but that did not prevent Fox News hosts and guests from speculating wildly about the likely huge size and impact of the forthcoming rallies. Viewers watching Fox News in early 2009 were told that "Tea Party protests are erupting across the country" and a.s.sured that "these tea parties are starting to really take off."28 Newt Gingrich went on air to make the confident prediction that the April 15th rallies would have "over 300,000" attendees.29 By late March, Glenn Beck had not only attended a rally in Orlando, Florida. He had interviewed Tea Party activists from Houston and Indianapolis days before rallies occurred in those cities, featuring their plans and pitching their events. For the Tea Party in its vulnerable infancy, the mobilizing impact of such advance coverage in national prime time was invaluable. The Tea Party idea was presented as the "coming thing" to an audience primed for the message. Conservative Fox viewers across America heard that people like them were ready to stand up to Obama and the Democrats-and they were told when and where.
A week before the first annual April 15th Tea Party rallies in 2009, Fox News promotions kicked into an even higher gear. Glenn Beck told his viewers, "We"re getting ready for next week"s Tax Day tea parties. All across the country, people coming together to let the politicians know, OK, enough spending."30 Sean Hannity was even more explicit: "And, of course, April 15th, our big show coming out of Atlanta. It"s Tax Day, our Tax Day tea party show. Don"t forget, we"re going to have "Joe the Plumber."31 At times, Fox anchors adopted an almost cajoling tone. On Sean Hannity"s show, viewers were told, "Anybody can come, it"s free," while Beck fans were warned, "You don"t want to miss it."32 In an ironic moment, Arthur Laffer (inventor of the Laffer Curve that was used to justify Reagan"s supply-side economic theories) congratulated Beck on air for the success of the Tea Parties. "I"m just attending," Beck quickly demurred, before continuing his promotion of the upcoming San Antonio Tea Party.33 Indeed, during the first weeks of the Tea Party, Fox News directly linked the network"s brand to these protests and allowed members of the "Fox Nation" to see the Tea Parties as a natural outgrowth of their ident.i.ty as Fox News viewers. Megyn Kelly directed viewers to "join the TEA party action from your home" by going to Fox"s website, which allowed viewers to find Tea Party events in their area, and the events were dubbed "FNC [Fox News Channel] Tea Parties."34 As Glenn Beck put it on his April 6th show: "This year, Americans across the country are holding tea parties to let politicians know that we have had enough. Celebrate with Fox News. This is what we"re doing next Wednesday."35 Beck"s comment was certainly an apt description since on April 15, Fox News hosts Beck, Hannity, Van Susteren, and Cavuto all broadcast their shows from Tea Party events, as promised.
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 viewership 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 Washington DC.41 Arguably, this was the moment when the Tea Party shifted 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 Washington 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 relationship between Beck and Tea Party organizations was eventually solidified.42 During 2010 and 2011, FreedomWorks conducted membership 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 partnership 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 shifted 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 relationship 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 Washington, Fox News ran a full-page color ad in the Washington 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 cushion 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 Washington 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 fashionable 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 shift, 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.