NewsBusters senior editor Tim Graham appeared on the October 14 "O'Reilly Factor" to discuss the Media Research Center's (MRC) latest study entitled "A Tale of Two Protests: Media Cheer Wall Street Occupiers But Jeered Tea Partiers."
The MRC's director of media analysis noted that there were only "13 stories in the entire year of 2009" about the Tea Party movement while the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has received "a dramatic amount of early coverage" with 33 network stories in the first 11 days of the protests. [MP3 audio available here; video follows page break]
What's more, the coverage of OWS has been largely favorable as the liberal media are "trying to inject some energy on the Left," Graham noted. This of course was even as the media shielded the OWS movement from ideological labeling. By contrast, much of the early Tea Party coverage by the media predicted the Tea Party movement would have a short shelf life and that it was "corporate astroturf" and not motivated by grassroots frustration among the American people.
