STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Analyst: No Surprise Media Mainstays Ignore Tea Parties
By admin - April 14, 2009

Major traditional members of the media in the United States – television networks, major daily newspapers and the like – are ignoring the potentially nation-shaking story of the Tea Party protests because they attack President Barack Obama's massive tax-and-spend policies, according to a media analyst. "I don't think they like a nationwide protest they perceive as attacking their guy," said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Media Research Center's Business and Media Institute. "Yes, the mainstream media helped Obama get elected," he confirmed. Gainor's comments came in an interview with Greg Corombos of Radio America/WND. Gainor said the ethics of professional journalisms require that the "big news" of the day be covered. But on Feb. 27 when 30,000 gathered for Tea Party protests their events largely were ignored. "Now [on Wednesday] we're looking at hundreds of thousands of people potentially," he said. He said the Tea Party movement itself is remarkable. "What it shows here is that Barack Obama got elected by high-tech means … using new technology," Gainor said. "Not even 100 days into Obama, a conservative [movement] … managed to coalesce opposition to big spending in Washington." He said the movement was assembled using Twitter, talk radio and other high-tech methods. – World Net Daily

Dominant Social Theme: The world works as it does, so go ahead and blow off some steam.

Free-Market Analysis: The tea party protests taking place around the country in America are not merely a reaction to current events. They are part of a much larger movement that is anti-big-government and pro-freedom. It is fashionable to decry the possibilities for change in an era dominated by the huge corporate, military and governmental resources of the monetary elite. But little-commented-on by the mainstream press, the forces of freedom, educated by the Internet, are gathering strength every day.

Even 20 years ago, at the beginning of the 1990s, the fundaments of free-market economics were little known. The precepts of the Austrian school were not available in universities and the real history of the way the world worked was only to be found in publications out-of-the-mainstream. G Edward Griffin's great history of the Federal Reserve was one such book that told a good deal of the truth, but almost all of the material available about the evolution of free-markets in the Western world was buried in obscure publishing houses and available only through the mail.

How times have changed. Less than two decades later, Ludwig von Mises, the patron saint of free-market economics has more mentions on the Internet than the great government leveler John Maynard Keynes. The economic argument that Keynes was held to have won in the 1930s is now routinely on the Internet seen as a victory for Mises' pupil, FA Hayek.

More importantly, increasingly people know the true outline of this past century's economic history and have reassessed the reputations of the great men of the 20th century. They know that Keynes was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, dedicated to expanding socialism in Britain and the United States. They understand that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not the hero he was once made out to be in mainstream American history, but someone dedicated to expanding the might of the federal government. Even Western mainstream media itself is failing. The lodestars of the American establishment are dimming. Newsweek is gradually fading away in the US, and Time Magazine no longer serves as a referential guide for the American middle class.

The rise of free-market economics and the return of financial literacy has been so explosive that it will become apparent only in retrospect. Its heroes, obvious to those who have followed the growth of the movement, are still little known and little portrayed. Events like the upcoming tea parties themselves are still covered by the mainstream media in a linear fashion: they are said to be a reaction to the Obama administration and, internationally, an expression of disapproval aimed at big government.

Again, such analyses portray an inaccurate understanding of what is actually going on, in our humble opinion. This is ultimately a free-market movement that has broken through the constraints of the "right/left" paradigm that has contained such conversations in the past. In fact, both right and left seek to use the levers of government to gain advantages for certain programs and military expenditures. The free-market movement with its emphasis on trade over military force and marketplace rather than government solutions stands in opposition to both the right and left as they are politically constituted. This tension, currently unremarked upon, certainly in mainstream coverage of what is going on, will eventually be resolved.

It will not be resolved today or tomorrow, but eventually the tension itself will become so apparent that the current conversation will rupture. It will become apparent that the current paradigm is not so elastic that every point of view can fit under the "big tent" of Western politics. The Hegelian construct that seeks constantly to rearrange the conversation and then move it downfield toward more socialism will eventually become less and less effective.

To anyone who spends time looking at how things are evolving, it becomes clearer. Right now the tax protests, if they are covered in the West and especially in America or Britain (to the degree they penetrate there), will be portrayed as response to an overly expansive central government. The analysis in many cases will focus resolutely on the amount of taxes people are being asked to pay and whether this program and that stimulus is working as planned. The answer to the protests, then, is to change the amount of taxes and reconfigure the programs. In with the new and out with the old, as it were.

But the current sociopolitical movements are not ultimately containable by the current constructs. They are manifestly Libertarian (not Republic or Conservative) in nature and even those self-identifying as Republicans or Conservatives will eventually find it difficult to make intellectual distinctions between their current belief structure and the larger frame of reference within which the free-market philosophy resides. Conservatism, as has been pointed out, is more of a structured series of beliefs than the great and ancient free-market economic conversation. Say's Law, Marginal Utility, the Invisible Hand, these are all economic discoveries and pertain to the free-market not "Conservatism."

After Thoughts

What is fundamentally taking placed is an intellectual realignment of astonishing proportions. It is happening very quickly, as the Internet has sped up the integration and acceptance of free-market concepts. It probably cannot be stopped at this point. What exactly it presages is difficult to see, as is a timeline. But times are changing, and the upcoming tea parties are anything but a political protest. Even those organizing them may think they are, of course, but actually these tea parties represent a continual shift toward a viewpoint that emphasizes freedom and personal responsibility. You will not read such analysis in the mainstream press, nor even for the most part in the Conservative press. The Western power structure itself thinks in terms of containment and control but what is going on now is probably not amenable to such strategies. It will continue to grow.

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