Having worked with journalists at NHK while living in Japan 20 years ago, I was excited to see a crew from the Japanese television network at Kiener Plaza in downtown St. Louis Saturday afternoon. My first thought: "The local tea party movement had finally earned a spot on the world stage." But I was wrong.
In the conversation that followed with Chief Correspondent Miki Ebara, I learned she and her NHK crew had flown in from New York City to interview St. Louisans for a story she was working on about climate change. For her, Kiener Plaza was a target-rich environment, full of 2,500 mostly-articulate and very-opinionated Americans from which to choose.
Among those media outlets who came to Kiener Plaza to cover the tea party, about half seemed intent on minimizing the importance of the event.
FIRST, THE BAD
St. Louis Post-Dispatch science and environmental reporter Kim McGuire, whose work appears frequently at the newspaper's EcoSpeak blog, appears to have exerted minimal effort in her coverage of the rally.Not only did she McGuire fail to note the important contextual matter of registered nurse and event speaker Stephanie Rubach being a black conservative, she also misidentified Dr. Kim Wiele as being male. I know, because I interviewed both Kim and her physician-husband Robert Wiele at the Million Med March in downtown Clayton, Mo., Nov. 21. [FYI: Their faces are the first two that appear in this video published in this post after the event.]
I didn't hear any newscasts about the rally, but an article published on the KMOX radio web site included a description of the event as having drawn "several hundred."
Based on the fact that I've been criticized by several people for having estimated the crowd at only 2,500, I can only imagine the grief Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit must be hearing. After all, he gave an estimate of 4,000 in a post yesterday. Of one thing, I can be certain: Neither Hoft nor I got our estimates from SEIU officials whose numbers would have meshed more closely with those used by "50,000-watt blowtorch."
NOW, THE GOOD
Though Fox 2 News, the local Fox affiliate, led its coverage with the anchor giving the same crowd-size description (i.e., "hundreds") used by KMOX, the remainder of reporter Shirley Washington's report (below) seemed fair and accurate.Only KMOV-TV's Ray Preston offered what I can describe as a completely fair and objective report about the rally. The local CBS affiliate also published raw video on their site.
For more coverage of Saturday’s Tea Party and other related news, click here.