drive-by media... UPDATED

this news piece irritates me.

first, the headline blares "Protesters angry about Obama's plan to help economy" which gives the impression that the people at this rally were a bunch of angry malcontents.

then the last line of the hit piece states:

"Most people at the capitol said they were at a loss about exactly what to do about the current crisis. Many said they simply were frustrated and afraid."

which furthers the idea that these were people just scared about the current economic situation and didn't really know where to direct their angst.

noone likes a malcontent who has no suggestions for how to make things better, and the "reporting" in this piece seems to play off that general feeling.

you are left with an impression that these people are a fringe group who just want to complain because they don't like president obama.

the problem is, i was there at that demonstration and i got a completely different feel than what is presented in that hit piece.

i was there for over an hour and i engaged in conversation with many of the people at the rally. i heard plenty of great ideas from the crowd about what should be done about our current economic crisis. the applause lines from the speakers all centered around having people, businesses and governments take personal responsibility for the mistakes they made and buckling down to pay the piper instead of begging for handouts. much like what we all have to do in our personal lives to show fiscal responsibility.

what most people seemed to be upset with was the fact that the administration is using the current fear of the economic crisis to allow the congress to fund all of the pet projects that the people have been rejecting for the past 50 years. you actually hear people justify the outlandish spending by saying "all spending is stimulous" which is like saying if your kids are hungry you should go buy them a nintendo. it's ridiculous on it's face, but the people are going for it because they are scared about potentially insolvent banks and are therefore willing to go into deep debt to assuage that fear.

and the obama administration and congress are all too happy to take advantage.

of course the ksl reporter wouldn't know about these viewpoints or the applause lines of the speakers because he left 5 minutes after the first speaker started speaking and didn't even stay to hear the 4 state representatives who offered remarks afterward.

he showed up for a few minutes, asked a few questions of a few people and then skedaddled out of there like he was late for his afternoon latte.

i was witness to an incident of what rush limbaugh refers to as "drive-by media". this reporter clearly had his own narrative about this demonstration and went there to get the video and sound bytes he could craft to fit that narrative and then left.

one thing that really struck me about the demonstrators was how diverse they seemed to be. a range of socio-economic classes, races and political ideology were represented. the organizer even commented at the end about how he understood that many of the demonstrators had various political views, but that we were united on this one issue. that was certainly the impression that i had from talking to people as well.

another thing that struck me about the demonstration was how deeply grassroots it was. these "tea-party" demonstrations started last week within several cities across the nation with attendance anywhere from 100 to 1000 people depending on the city.

i read several leftists trying to dismiss these demonstrations as being heavily funded by corporate interests in an effort to downplay the grassroots nature of them.

i can tell you if this demonstration had been "heavily funded" by anyone, we would have had a much larger turnout. as it happens, i heard about the demonstration last sunday by good ole fashioned word-of-mouth when a distant relative of my brother's wife told me about it in my brother's kitchen.

i went around the demonstration asking people where they had heard about it and everyone said they had heard about it from someone else. i asked if there was an email list i could get on to receive further notices and the response was that there was no email list, just people talking to people.

you can't get more grassroots than that.

in any case, the turnout was much larger than i expected (i half expected there to be 5, maybe 10 people show up) but i wanted to go anyway in hopes that this could be the start of a snowball that would get bigger and bigger. it has to start somewhere and i was glad to help start it.

next friday there is a "we surround them" demonstration organized by listeners to glenn beck's radio show. i don't listen to glenn beck, but i understand, from talking with people who do, that it will basically be about the same thing the tea party was about. i'm sure that event will be greater attended if anyone is interested (i'll be there).

UPDATE: here is an example of a real reporter getting the story. notice he has quotes from all the state reps that were there (i.e. he stayed for the whole thing instead of just driving by).

UPDATE2: after watching the video (instead of just reading the story) i notice the print report is slightly different than the video report. in particular in that last line where they claim the demonstrators were "afraid". the reporter didn't characterize that in the video report at all. instead he said "angry and frustrated".

knowing that editors usually write the headlines, it wouldn't surprise me if the anti-demonstration bias was slipped into the report, not by the reporter, but by an activist editor, so i might be being too harsh on the reporter.

but it remains true that he showed up briefly and bailed out well before the whole story could be aquired.