Don’t fret. That’s the headline for taxpayers who didn’t like how the media covered the 750 rallies against runaway government spending.
So you resent being labeled racists and rednecks. You’re offended by the juvenile sexual jokes. You don’t appreciate being brushed off.
You’re still so appalled by the paucity and snide tone of news stories on the Tax Day “tea parties” attended by 200,000 Americans, you’re beside yourself.
But that’s all beside the point. Wake up and smell the fishwrap: Most traditional newspapers are dead or dying. So are network TV newscasts.
Too late for old-school media. They can’t expect to win back an audience while disputing or making fun of what matters to regular folks. Self-styled newsmen who abandon the basics have no business whining.
ABC’s Dan Harris actually parroted the White House line that President Obama was “unaware” tea parties were brewing. (Sounds like a deficiency in national security briefings, given how darkly allies depicted the protesters.)
Serious journalists, as your mother would know, provide serious coverage of taxpayer unease and disgust with pork, bailouts and deficit spending. They recognize signs of discontent over the prospect of steep tax increases:
Read my lipstick: No more pork! Give me liberty — not debt. You are not entitled … to what I have earned.
But the lack of serious coverage of the rallies by such agenda-setting papers as USA Today, The New York Times and The Washington Post – or surviving newsweeklies Time and Newsweek – encouraged Obama to dismiss Americans who disagree.
The president took a gratuitous if clumsy swipe at tea partiers, and top-rated Fox News Channel, when asked about fiscal discipline and the entitlement crisis during a St. Louis forum celebrating his 100th day.
“Those of you who are watching certain news channels on which I’m not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around,” he said with a smirk, “let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security.”
Mr. President, perhaps you need the reminder: A good news operation understands its audience is taxpayers, parents and voters with a stake in their community. They want to know when public servants waste tax dollars, undermine their freedoms or belittle their values.
More and more Americans know from Congressional Budget Office projections that Obama and Congress will double the national debt and have to raise taxes because of a flood of spending for nationalized education, energy and health care. That’s why tea partiers, connecting by Facebook and other Internet tools, gathered in town squares:
Don’t tax me, bro. My piggybank is not your pork barrel. Don’t stimulate. Liberate.
The bottom-up effort wasn’t as fashionable as the Community Organizer-in- Chief’s top-down campaign to reorganize the country. But the rallies were snapshots of where a significant portion of folks stand.
“People from all walks of life are fed up with the way government is working,” The Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore told Fox’s Greta van Susteren.
A USA Today/Gallup Poll found 55 percent of adults say Obama has proposed too much spending; 33 percent call it the right amount. By the same margin, they worry more about Big Government than Big Business.
Rasmussen found 84 percent of 1,000 voters surveyed identify economic issues as “very important” and 64 percent — a two-year high — put taxation in that category. Separately, 81 percent say it’s important for Obama to deliver on tax cuts for the middle class.
So why did old mainstream media choke when Americans took to the streets over how fast the government is blowing through the grandkids’ inheritance? It doesn’t matter anymore. Interest abounds online from social, specialty and niche media.
Fret not, tea partiers. You’ve shown that you are – or can be — the media. Now get out your message.
Ken McIntyre, a newspaperman for 25 years, is the Marilyn and Fred Guardabassi Fellow in Media and Public Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation (heritage.org).
