BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

There is a lot of comparison being drawn between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. There are some similarities, but more differences between them, especially one: the coverage by news media.

The Occupy Wall Street protesters got their faces on ABC, CBS and NBC 33 times in the first eleven days of October. The Tea Party movement got coverage 13 times in all of 2009. The Media Research Center also found that the protesters got on camera delivering their message 87 percent of the time, compared to eight percent for their critics.

That was not the tea party’s experience, if I recall.

PEW research found that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) got more coverage quicker than the tea partiers. It took about three months for the media to pay attention to tea party demonstrations; it took less than a month with OWS, and OWS got its own acronym in no time.

I remember the coverage of the early tea party movement. After ignoring the demonstrations for months, the media changed their tune and began quoting unnamed critics who claimed it wasn’t a grassroots movement at all, but professionally produced theater financed by right-wing organizations. The participants were frequently referred to, or portrayed as, right-wingers, a fringe movement, extremists or radical conservatives. 

A year into the movement, those descriptions were pervasive. E. J. Dionne wrote in June that the reaction to Obama had “radicalized parts of the conservative movement, giving life to conspiracy theories and long-buried strains of thinking similar to those espoused by the John Birch Society and other right-wing groups in the 1950s and 60s… The rise of the tea party movement is a throwback to an old form of libertarianism that sees most of the domestic policies that government has undertaken since the New Deal as unconstitutional.” 

He went on to predict that the tea party movement would ruin GOP chances of electoral success in 2010. Then Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, leading a Democratic effort to brand the tea party as radical, was given voice by CBS in June saying “We’ve had a lot of serious disagreements….and I haven’t seen the level of, frankly, threats or anger or threatening of violent acts that I’ve seen recently.”

USA Today, on the other hand, was in the vanguard of media portraying the tea party as a legitimate grassroots movement with an extensive story in July 2010.

Not so with the OWS crowd. Business and Media Institute studied coverage in newspapers and television networks and in 44 newspaper stories only eight contained words such as liberal, left-wing, radical, extreme or even progressive, according to the Washington Times. The 25 broadcasts studied used no such language.

The media gave credence to charges tea party protests were racist because there weren’t many African-Americans participating. There have been no such analyses of OWS that I know of. The media demanded to know where the money was coming from. No such demands here. OWS funding is framed in positive sound bites about small donations raised in the parks and on the Internet. The estimates are so divergent, they aren’t credible. 

The media scoured early tea party gatherings for home-made signs with ugly messages on them and individuals willing to verbalize extremist provocation. 

I had to find out from news blogs and a paid TV advertisement the extent of the anti-semiticism, the popularity of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and the open advocacy of violence among the OWS protestors. I had to read on Daily Caller of email traffic among some leaders about “monetizing their movement” and seeking corporate contributions. In another email exchange, leaders were planning distribution of radical children’s literature. “I have a story book called Tales for Little Rebels:  A collection of Radical Children’s Literature, with stories ranging from Dr. Seuss to Bolshevik sponsored ‘Fairly Tales for Worker’s Children.’”

The Doug Schoen polling organization did the first random sample of protester opinions, interviewing 200 in New York and found that  they “reflect values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people.”  The survey found that 52 percent have participated in political movements and virtually all (98 percent) say they would support civil disobedience. They found that 31 percent would support violence to advance their agenda. Schoen’s interviewers found strong support for redistribution of wealth and guarantees to every citizen for health care, a college education and a secure retirement, regardless of the cost.

In another report in Mother Jones, the organizers of the movement who met in a New York apartment last summer included experienced international activists, some veterans of the Arab spring movement and others recently returned from Madrid’s Puerta del Sol protests.

Just last week there were reports of violence and civic unrest spawned by the movement in New York, Denver and Portland. Media have been slow to report on the violence as well. I read that during violent outbreaks in New York, the New York Times ran a photo of a policeman petting a cat.

Now, the question is what does this body of evidence tell you? I may have done what the media and liberal pundits did when they discovered the tea party movement had legs—assemble a body of evidence that painted tea party activists as radical, professionally-funded trouble-makers. Is the portrait I have just painted realism or expressionism? Is it a true picture of the movement or a distortion based on selective and subjective analysis of information?  

The answer is probably based more on what you want to believe about the movement than any vast warehouse of knowledge about it collected from the media. A CBS/New York Times poll concludes that most Americans are not sure what to make of it. The survey found that 53 percent are either undecided or haven’t heard enough about it.

The media have not done a good job of delving into the origins of the movement or the reasons for it, or what it stands for. They should. Soon.