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Politico: Conservatives Have a Point on MSM Cruz Coverage

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Dylan Byers, the media reporter for Politico, notes that Ted Cruz is portrayed in the MSM as some kind of screwball for spending the night on the Senate floor to talk about Obamacare while when Democratic Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis filibustered abortion restrictions earlier this year, she was elevated to National Hero Status.

From the piece:

You can forgive conservatives for being upset with the mainstream media’s coverage of the Cruz affair. When a Democrat like Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis filibusters against abortion restrictions, she is elevated to hero status, her tennis shoes become totems. When Cruz grandstands against Obamacare, he is a laughingstock in the eyes of many journalists on Twitter, an “embarrassment” in the eyes of The New York Times editorial board.

Part of the disparity in coverage is due to the fact that the mainstream media, generally speaking, don’t admire Cruz the way they admired Davis — or rather, they admire him only insofar as he makes for tragicomic theater, whereas they admired her on the merits.

I assure you, among journalists in Washington, you can’t say something like “The Tea Party has some great ideas” without having people excuse themselves and run to the rest room to explode into peals of laughter. When I started as a reporter in the 1990s, reporters casually spoke to each other about the “crazies” under Newt Gingrich in the House. Nothing’s changed.

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30 Responses to Politico: Conservatives Have a Point on MSM Cruz Coverage

  1. Unlike you who hear from people in Fly-over Country all the time, they have no experience of life outside of the D.C. to Boston corridor. The economy is doing great in D.C., ergo, the American economy is doing great. You have to wonder if they ever got stranded somewhere in the South or the West, they could cope.

    • While a famous NY female writer once commented on not knowing anyone who voted for Nixon, writer extraordinaire David Mamet in 2008 penned “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain- Dead Liberal,'” for the Village Voice, then wrote “The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture”, via which he admitted that he went some 60 years before interacting with anyone but liberals.

      Definitely some transformational transparent hypocrisy at play.

  3. Part of the problem is that many MSMers have degrees in journalism, which gives it the validity of having a degree of 98.6F, 37C, for people capable of thinking, i.e. non-journalists. I spent two semesters there before I realized none of my professors had ever actually worked in news broadcasting. I had already worked two years in radio and one year in television by the time I got to journalism school.
    My experience gave substance to what I was later told:those who can do; those who cannot teach, to which I add those who do neither consult.
    I switched my major to a vastly different discipline(there is nothing about journalism that involves discipline) but relapsed into broadcast news where I wasted 40 years. It beat working.

    • When I was studying communications, “Columbia School of Broadcasting” was sort of a joke.

      The Columbia School of Journalism (home of those “nonpartisan” Pulitzers looks to be headed in the same direction.

      Slightly O/T: Anybody else notice that the great Bryan Cranston was deprived of a well-earned Emmy for “Breaking Bad” so that the libs could stick it to the right by giving the award to Jeff Daniels (not a bad actor) of “The Newsroom”? (I haven’t seen this Aaron Sorkin show, but from what I read, it’s another chance to make conservatives look bad — much like last year’s Emmy winner – “Game Change”, an unvarnished hit piece on Palin. If I’ve misread the tone of the show, please let me know.)

    • I agree. Once people find out there’s not as much money left in their pockets at the end of the month because of ObamaCare, maybe, just maybe their eyes will open.

  6. The MSM, the establishment RINO’s, and the vicious Dems were willing to support something that they know, they really know, is ruining our economy.
    But.
    There was lot going on in that Texas show; an attractive, blonde woman making a pitch for one of the progressives favortie subject and to make it all the more special, it was in the red state of Texas. A two-fer for the lefties.
    SenCruz on the other hand, a tea party favorite supported by (of all people) SarahPalin, was drawing negative attention to their great leader’s signature legacy, Obamacare.

    What those of us in fly-over country can’t get our heads around is that this ACA is a bad law and everyone with more than a single brain cell knows it. And yet, the Dems are standing behind it as if this will be the savior of the middle class, will make American healthcare the envy of all the world.
    Ask anyone who has lost their job due to the Obamacare regulations if they support this law. Dem or Repub, union or not, there is no support out here for this law. So what is Congress thinking, do they really believe the unemployed will come to love it, or that it will be the miracle that gets our economy moving again?
    There must be bad air or something awful in the water in DC.

  7. Yep, state-run media will put a Democrat abortion queen over a constitutional conservative any day of the week. I’ll never forget those Wendy Davis acolytes, with their bags of feces and used tampons that were confiscated by the police before they were able to throw them from the visitor galley of the State House. Then there was the time they started chanting “hail satan” in an attempt to drown out pro-lifers singing Amazing Grace in front of the Austin capitol. Yep, state-run media sure knows how to pick ’em.

  8. I found many instances where the MSM tried to make Cruz seem crazy while expressing a predetermined outcome for the Senate vote on the House bill. A reporter is not supposed to inject his or her opinion into a serious news article. The difference between real news and editorializing is not nonexistent, from what I can see.

  9. I voted for McCain/Palin in 2008, mainly because of the Governor. McCain has been in the sun too long and can no longer think coherently.
    I also have voted for Sen. John Cornyn (R) Texas for as long as I remember, but no more, He closed, no slammed the door on me today by not supporting the junior Senator from Texas. Mr. Cruz has more sense in his little finger than McCain and Cornyn have in their entire feeble little minds,

    • I’m with you, NNTK. I think it was Michael Berry who had a great analogy about John Cornyn. He’d be the Texian traitor sneaking over the walls of the Alamo to give Santa Anna water for the big fight.

    • So come 2015 is Cruz the senior Senator from Texas? Anyone set up to primary Cornyn next year. As angry as I am at him for what he did to Cruz I just don’t see him getting beat at such a late time, politically speaking.

      • He has a couple of declared primary opponents, but don’t know much about them yet. You’re right, it is near impossible to defeat an incumbent. I certainly won’t be pulling the lever for Cornyn under any circumstances. Better to have a Democrat in the seat rather than a back-stabbing RINO who conspires with the Democrats.

          • That’s true, Julie. I voted three times for Ted Cruz – primary, run-off, and general. The important thing is to keep Cornyn under 50% of the primary vote. He’d lose the runoff if we have a constitutional conservative running against him.

  10. this kind of hypocrisy only works if the sheeple aren’t paying attention. but then, we’re talking about a population that reelected Barack Obama, so…

  11. Senator Cruz knows the real reason why state-run media loves to trash conservatives. They’re just “Hollywood gossip columnists” who would rather write stories about the political “horse race” than tell the American people the truth about Preezy’s disastrous policies. Obamacare will destroy America.

    RUSH: Well, wait. “Theater” is what you were accused of doing. Michael Barone, as soon as you finished, accused you of engaging in theater, and that you knew it, and that you knew there’s no way you had any prayer of accomplishing what you want to accomplish. Others have said that you’re just fundraising and you’re making it look like you’re doing something substantive, but it’s just theater.

    CRUZ: Well, you know, one of the approaches that those who want to maintain the status quo — who want to make sure Obamacare stays funded, who wanted to avoid any risks, one of the approaches they do — is they try to make this all about people. They try to make it all about personalities. And listen: Most Americans could not care less about any politician in Washington. They don’t care about me; they don’t care about anybody else either. And what is utterly maddening about all of these reporters is what do they write about all day long? They write about the process. They write about the horse race. They write about this personality or the other. They act like Hollywood gossip columnists writing about bickering. I mean, how many times have you and I both read the words “Republican civil war” in the past week? ‘Cause that’s what they like to write about.

    http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/09/25/senator_cruz_continues_the_filibuster_on_eib

    • You are correct! Broadcast news wants the :10-12 bite, the quick trick, the quick good-bye. Thought-provoking discourse has yielded to the cheap trick. It is due, in no small part, to the American condition; make it quick and clean. The problem is it is rarely clean.
      American broadcast journalism is not. Colleges offer degrees in mass communications. That is the way they extract federally backed college money from foolish young people who often do not repay those loans, but receive degrees worth nothing. Just watch your local news and then network news and disagree.

  13. Ah yes, these crazies in the House who handed Clinton what he later claimed as his own great achievements. Dems still love to claim that Clinton “balanced the budget,” forgetting that he fiercely resisted doing so and even shut down the government because Gingrich and those other crazies didn’t want to spend enough.