Media coverage of Tea Party vs Occupy Wall Street

Activists affiliated with the tea party movement say they’re witnessing a double standard in the way the media is covering the “Occupy Wall Street” protests compared to the tea party.

“It’s almost laughable,” said Sal Russo, a strategist with the California-based group Tea Party Express, in an interview.

While reporters at first didn’t always cover tea party rallies, Russo said, a California newspaper has recently been putting stories about the Occupy Wall Street on its front page.

“The Sacramento Bee actually had a front-page story before the rally, telling people where it was and what time it was,” Russo said.

An official at FreedomWorks, the Washington, D.C.-based group that has organized tea party rallies since the movement burst onto the scene in 2009, said the media has been ignoring negative features of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests while it played up dubious charges against conservative activists last year.

“I think it’s kind of funny that the media talked about alleged things that the tea party guys did that were never proven,” spokesman Adam Brandon told The Daily Caller. “Then you have pictures of these guys getting arrested and confronting officers and now they’re being celebrated.”

Mark Meckler, the co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, struck a similar note, saying that when the tea party protests first began, “we were ignored, mocked, and then attacked by the media” and “called ‘Astroturf,’ ‘fringe,’ ‘racists’ and ‘Nazis.’”

“Yet today, the leftist media seemingly cheers for a group of lawbreaking miscreants who have openly committed a variety of illegal acts,” Meckler said. ...

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