Mark Levin Reads From MRC's 'TV's Tea Party Travesty' Study On Air

April 16th, 2010 3:23 PM

On Thursday evening our good friend Mark Levin cited and read from the latest Media Research Center special report, "TV's Tea Party Travesty: How ABC, CBS and NBC Have Dismissed and Disparaged the Tea Party Movement."

You can hear that segment by clicking here for the MP3 audio file (courtesy of Levin's producer Richard Semanta).

Here's the transcript by MRC intern Alex Fitzsimmons:

Where are all the big taxers and spenders today? You heard from any of them? But the Tea Party protestors are out there and that's a good thing. All over the country-and the media hate them. And we know this is a matter of empirical fact now thanks to our friends at the Media Research Center. Hat tip to Drudge Report who links to them: MRC.org. And they've done an analysis that reviewed every mention of the Tea Party on ABC, CBS, and NBC morning and evening newscasts, the Sunday talk shows, ABC's "Nightline," from February 19, 2009 through March 31, 2010.

Now here among their major findings is how our "news outlets" our big news outlets, our liberal news outlets, treat the American people who attend these rallies. They write:

"Given its demonstrated influence, network coverage of the Tea Party has been minuscule. Across all of their major programs, ABC, CBS and NBC aired a mere 61 stories or segments over a twelve month period, while another 141 items included brief references to the movement. Most of that coverage is recent; the networks virtually refused to recognize the Tea Party in 2009 (just 19 stories), with the level of coverage increasing only after Scott Brown's election in Massachusetts.

"Most of the networks' 2009 coverage was limited to individual Tea Party rallies: six reports on the April 15, 2009 "tax day" protests, along with five other brief mentions; just one report on the July 4 rallies; and six full reports on the September 12 rally on Capitol Hill, plus eight brief mentions." 

And they point out that:

"Such coverage is piddling compared to that lavished on protests serving liberal objectives. The Nation of Islam's "Million Man March" in 1995, for example, was featured in 21 evening news stories on just the night of that march - more than the Tea Party received in all of 2009. The anti-gun "Million Mom March" in 2000 was preceded by 41 broadcast network reports (morning, evening, and Sunday shows) heralding its message, including a dozen positive pre-march interviews with organizers and participants, a favor the networks never granted the Tea Party."

Network reporters were dismissive of the first Tea Party events in 2009:

"There's been some grassroots conservatives who have organized so-called Tea Parties around the country,' NBC's Chuck Todd noted on the April 15, 2009 Today, but ‘the idea hasn't really caught on,'" he said.

Now by the Fall of 2009, the networks had shifted to disparaging the Tea Party:

"After the September 12, 2009 rallies, the networks suggested the Tea Party was an extreme or racist movement. On CBS, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer [he's still alive?] decried the ‘angry' and ‘nasty' Capitol Hill rally, while ABC's Dan Harris [who's that?] scorned protesters who ‘waved signs likening President Obama to Hitler and the devil....Some prominent Obama supporters are now saying that it paints a picture of an opposition driven, in part, by a refusal to accept a black President.

"Overall, 44 percent of network stories on the Tea Party (27 out of 61) suggested the movement reflected a fringe or dangerous quality. ABC's John Berman [who's that?] was distressed by ‘a tone of anger and confrontation' he claimed to find at the Tea Party convention in early February. In September, NBC's Brian Williams trumpeted Jimmy Carter's charge that the Tea Party was motivated by race: ‘Signs and images at last weekend's big Tea Party march in Washington and at other recent events have featured racial and other violent themes, and President Carter today said he is extremely worried by it.'

"While network reporters have strained to protect left-wing causes (such as the anti-war movement) with the outrageous acts of individual protesters, they were quick to smear the entire Tea Party based on isolated reports of poor behavior. On the night of the final vote on ObamaCare in March, for example, ABC's Diane Sawyer cast Tea Partiers as out-of-control marauders, ‘roaming Washington, some of them increasingly emotional, yelling slurs and epithets.' CBS's Bob Schieffer [is he still alive?] also cast a wide net, accusing ‘demonstrators' of hurling ‘racial epithets' and ‘sexual slurs,' and even conjured images of civil-rights era brutality: ‘One lawmaker said it was like a page out of a time machine.'"

Oh, they hate us. But you know what? We detest them. The difference is they pretend to be reporters; we are outspoken and proud conservatives. Now it's been actually pretty funny hearing some of the liberals talk about how Obama has actually cut taxes. And when we come back, I will once again prove that is a bald-faced lie. And it's counterintuitive. We have the biggest Marxist ever to be President of the United States, who spends and spends, and taxes and taxes, and spends some more. And the notion that he's been cutting taxes across the board for most people is a joke. He's been redistributing wealth, and destroying wealth.