Topic: WorldNetDaily
An April 15 WorldNetDaily article by Chelsea Schilling and Alyssa Farah provided fawning coverage of one of the anti-Obama tea parties in Sacramento, Calif., treating organizer Mark Meckler with the reverence normally provided by state-run media to socialist dictators:
"It's unreal. It's beyond my imagination," Meckler told WND with a dazed look. "I can't imagine anything better than this."
Some protesters shouted at the Capitol building with megaphones: "Hey, tell Gov. Schwarzenegger to come out here!"
"We are leading a revolution, and this is the first day of that revolution," Meckler said. "Politicians will no longer be able to divide our nation. They are taking our money, and we aren't going to stand here and take it anymore."
With booming enthusiasm, the crowd recited the Pledge of Allegiance and began wildly chanting, "USA, USA, USA!"
What you won't get from WND, of course, is the full truth about the Sacramento rally and the kind of people it attracted. For that, we must turn to Salon.com:
Tea bags dotted the ground and dangled from ears, protest signs and baby strollers, but the real star of Wednesday's tea party at California's State Capitol building was Fox News. The network's live broadcasting tent threatened to steal the thunder of the main stage, the news event it was covering, as "Your World" host Neil Cavuto waved to excited fans. A group of middle-aged women with a taste for American flag accessories gushed over photos they had taken of Cavuto getting his makeup done. At one point, there was a gasp from the crowd: Someone had caught an in-person glimpse of one of Cavuto's on-air guests, conservative blogger/Fox contributor Michelle Malkin. "Well, that little lady is brilliant," a gray-haired man enthused to his wife. "She and Ann Coulter."
On the steps of the Capitol building, the Fox News fan fest gave way to angry fist-pumping. A wholesome family of eight, ranging from infancy to middle-age, took turns shouting. Kim, a 43-year-old homemaker, bellowed: "You hurt my family!" She argued that, thank to taxes and the stimulus package, "We've had to cut our long distance and caller ID." Her 22-year-old daughter, Ashley, with her baby sister strapped to her chest, cut in: "We even got rid of Netflix!" Nearby lurked a man wearing sunglasses, a baseball cap with the brim pulled low and a fake black goatee and elaborately curled mustache. It was a disguise, he explained. "There's radicals on my job," said the 50-year-old, who declined to give his name. "If they see me on TV we could get in a fist fight."
The San Francisco Chronicle, meanwhile, noted the anti-Obama tenor of the rally, complete with a sign that read, "Obama: Hitler gave good speeches, too." (Of course, smearing Obama as a Nazi is something WND is very much down with.) The Chronicle added:
Jim and Suzanne DuMolin of Tiburon were equally passionate, jointly holding a sign calling for Obama's impeachment. That move, said Jim DuMolin, was justified - despite Obama's current popularity and his democratic election by U.S. voters. "It does not give him the right to transcend" the boundaries of presidential powers, DuMolin said. "He has promised a socialistic approach to government. That's really very little difference from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela."
The Obama-hate at the Sacramento rally is something Farah and Schilling didn't touch on at all -- in fact, nowhere in the article is Obama even mentioned, even though Obama-bashing was a major component of these rallies. WND has proudly displayed its obsessive hatred of Obama in the past; why hide it now?
Perhaps because there was a ConWeb meeting somewhere, and it was decided that it would discredit the rallies among the mainstream if it was perceived as anti-Obama -- after all, Obama remains popular with Americans as a whole -- so the word went out to downplay anything that might be considered too extreme.
WND's tea party-related Obama-bashing coverage is largely confined to a separate article by Joe Kovacs, who highlights a banner at a Palm Beach rally "with President Obama's logo stating, 'Chains we can believe in'" and "a simple cardboard sign equating Obama, socialism and evil." Now, that's the WND Obama-hate we all know and love.
