Well, we wondered why the "Tea Party Express" was bothering to advertise so heavily on Fox, when the network was certain to give them all the free advertising in the form of "reportage" from the likes of Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. And sure enough, Neil Cavuto came through Friday with the first of what will certainly be many Fox News "reports" on the exciting cross-country tour.
But CNN did the real honors Friday, featuring a couple of segments on the tour. The first was a fluff piece about what a cool bus the people on the tour get to ride in. Awesome, dood.
Then Tony Harris did an interview with Mark Williams, the chief spokesman for Our Country Deserves Better PAC, the organization behind the "Tea Party Express." And while Harris did try to ask Williams some skeptical questions, it was a very congenial segment.
Most of all, Williams was able to flatly deceive the CNN audience about their purpose and intent. Harris asked him whether or not the entire thrust of the "tea parties" was to attack President Obama's policies -- a reasonable point, since these "partiers" were nowhere to be found when George W. Bush was busily busting budgets and running up massive deficits in the name of tax cuts for the wealthy.
Harris, though, pretended throughout the segment that they were purely a nonpartisan outfit only angry about overtaxation. Which is a large wagonload of hooey.
The "Our Country Deserves Better" PAC, in fact, was founded in August 2008 -- before the election -- specifically to oppose Barack Obama and his policies. (They called it "drawing contrasts between Senator Barack Obama and John McCain".) In October 2008, for instance, Williams was out on the stump campaigning against Obama as a "socialist" on a previous bus tour called the "Stop Obama Express". They've also runs ads comparing Obama to Hitler.
That's a nice bit of track-covering. Too bad none of these cable anchors are sharp enough to catch on to it.
