Ignore them and maybe they’ll just go away

This, apparently, was the line of reasoning at the Santa Fe New Mexican, whose editorial staff elected not to cover the Tea Party held at the Capitol on Saturday, September 12.   This was Santa Fe’s second Tea Party.  The first one, which took place on April 15, was covered by the New Mexican.

This past weekend’s protest was completely ignored by the one and only daily print newspaper in Santa Fe.   Granted, it was also Fiesta weekend, so the front page was dominated by the Pet Parade.  Even if they did not want to bump the costumed children and chihuahuas from the front page, perhaps they could have squeezed in a report of a large-scale political demonstration somewhere?

The New Mexican did cover the national protest, running this Washington Post story on page A-3.  The Albuquerque Journal — which isn’t even a Santa Fe paper — covered the Santa Fe protest, but if all you read was the New Mexican, you’d have had no idea that hundreds of people right here in Santa Fe were having their own protest the same day.

This is an egregious example of biased journalism.  The staff of the New Mexican, whose editorials are uniformly left-leaning, decided that the second Santa Fe Tea Party wasn’t newsworthy, so they didn’t cover it.  Perhaps they thought few people would bother showing up on Fiesta weekend, but that was not the case.

I am notoriously bad at making estimates of crowds, but it was definitely in the hundreds.  The organizers of the event handed out stickers to everyone there, so that they could count the attendees, and organizer in chief Sheryl Bohlander informed me that they handed out at some 800 stickers, and saw more people there who were not wearing them.  The Albuquerque Journal reported estimated 400-500 in attendance.   Gubernatorial candidate Allen Weh estimated 750 on his Facebook page.   Whether there were 400 or 800 people at the protest, it was a newsworthy event — as newsworthy, anyway, as chihuahuas dressed up in clown suits.

Of course, much of the left-leaning journalistic establishment considers Tea Party protesters to be every bit as ridiculous and irrelevant as chihuahuas in clown suits.  Or at least that is the way many commentators on the left choose to depict them — bigots who oppose Obama because he is black, ignorant fools who call the president a socialist but do not even understand what the term means, slack-jawed minions of Glenn Beck.  Beck himself, of course, is a dangerous and uneducated demagogue who may well incite some stupid racist somewhere to try to assassinate the president.

Those are the talking points, anyway.  The truth is, as always, more complex.  There is in our country a deep divide between those who see an activist government as the best solution to most of society’s problems, and those who believe that believe it is not the role of government to engineer a utopian society.  The majority of Santa Fesinos fall into the former category, but those of us in the latter comprise a significant and politically active minority.  Our daily paper attempts to marginalize us at its own peril.

I wrote last month about the economic trouble the Santa Fe New Mexican, like so many daily print newspapers, is having.  Though I disagree with just about everything on its editorial page, I continue to subscribe to the New Mexican because I want a consistent and reliable source of local news.  If the paper’s leftist editorial stance begins coloring decisions about what news to report and what news to ignore, the New Mexican will no longer be a  consistent and reliable source of local news, and I will no longer subscribe to it.  Getting my daily dose of letters to the editor by readers still foaming at the mouth about Dick Cheney isn’t worth $12.95 a month to me.