Those Tiny Little Minds Who Bring You the News

This is another one of my favorite posts of the year. In this article I try to understand how do the Mainstream Media get so much about the tea parties so wrong. The only thing I could come up with is that they have tiny cranial capacities. 


Trying to write eight-ten articles a day makes one something of a news junkie. Between 7 a.m. and 1 a.m., whole days are spent reading one of the 607 news feeds I have input into my feed reader, following up stories on the phone and maneuvering the TV remote between CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and when I can find it, even the BBC. Thanks to an agile thumb, at times I can follow the same story on all the networks at the same time.

Watching that mostly distorted coverage can drive a blogger crazy. And worse it makes one think really nasty things about the media. But no longer, no more negative thoughts.  I’ve had an epiphany. Now I feel nothing but sympathy for these reporters who used to be the object of my scorn. You see they can’t help themselves. The mainstream media is not biased, they have tiny brains. That’s why the tunnel vision.  These reporters are taught to categorize things into neat little boxes and do not have the capacity to think beyond those categories.

Take a look at the coverage of Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor Rally.  The press could not comprehend that people would actually travel to Washington, D.C., and attend a rally that was about concepts such as Honor and Faith, so they had to put the event into their little Tea Party or Conservative box. Despite the fact that Beck has never been part of the Tea Party movement, or the host’s declaration that the rally would not be political, reporters still got all tied up in their underwear looking for a way to stuff the rally into the boxes they know:

• ABC News: “The Tea Party’s grassroots momentum will be on display Saturday as the conservative movement converges in Washington, D.C. for Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, an event that has come under fire from some civil rights leaders for being held on the same day as the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic freedom march.”
• CBS News:“Al Sharpton Leads Activists Near Tea Partiers…The Rev. Al Sharpton was leading a march Saturday to commemorate the 47th anniversary of the March on Washington. During the march his group briefly encountered participants from a rally on the National Mall being headlined by Sarah Palin and conservative commentator Glenn Beck.”
• N.Y. Times: “Something like this took place early Sunday – actually it was more of a Tea Party than a brunch. On the morning after Glenn Beck’s massive “Restoring Honor” rally drew conservative throngs to the Lincoln Memorial and National Mall, 200 or so rally stragglers gathered on a hardtop between the Capitol and Union Station.”

Speaking of the term Tea Party, the mainstream media throws around the term, but don’t understand what the Tea Party movement is all about. Their single-focused minds hear the word party and need to put Tea Party into that political party box. Therefore instead of understanding the Tea Party as a grass roots, bottom-up movement, reporters in the mainstream media believe it is one homogeneous party lead by a single figure who determines party policy, sort of like the Democratic Party and George Soros. It’s the only framework their midget brains can understand.

But understand it is not their fault, explaining what the Tea Party is to most of the mainstream reporters is like teaching quantum physics to a two-year-old; they simply do not have the mental capacity.

The limited perspicacity of the mainstream media is also shown in their foreign policy coverage. How many times have you seen the press call a terrorist attack on a bus in Israel and an Israeli retaliation against a terrorist base “tit for tat,” as if there was a moral equivalence between an attack on civilians and one on the forces that attacked civilians? It’s not bias or a lack of morality, it’s just a lack of cerebral power.

For those of you who believe that it is bias behind the mis-reporting by mainstream media reporters I say, “Shame on you!” That is the problem with this country; everyone believes the worst in people.

My epiphany that the reporters bringing us the news are not biased but simply cerebrally challenged makes it much easier to watch and/or read the news during the day. It even explains why they seem so arrogant all of the time… over-compensation. No longer do I throw shoes at my TV during Katie Couric, Brian Williams or even the likes of Mr. Tingle Up His Leg, Chris Matthews.  No longer do I have to feel like throwing my PC away because it has been contaminated by the latest venom from Paul Krugman or Frank Rich. I feel sorry for their diminished mental capacity but now get to explore the news with peace in my heart.