It's a favorite target because it's an example of a social injustice that doesn't seem to be of much concern to those, many of whom are themselves in the media, who otherwise so earnestly voice their passionate desire for social justice, and because poking fun at media hypocrisies and fatuities is such easy sport that it's irresistible.
Mary Katherine Ham is a kindred spirit. She highlights in a piece at Hot Air, for example, the disparity between the picture the media often paints of Tea Party protests and their depictions of protests conducted by the left. Here's her lede:
I mentioned yesterday the ongoing liberal protests in North Carolina dubbed “Moral Mondays.” Protesters are self-consciously modeling their efforts on Wisconsin’s, which as I noted, doesn’t necessarily bode well for them. But it does give us a chance to witness, once again, the breathtaking double standard in media coverage for protests populated by liberals vs. protests populated by conservatives.As Ham goes on to recount the Times' coverage of these "Moral Monday" protests one marvels at the sympathetic tone and the almost heroic portrayals of the demonstrators, especially when compared to the history of demonization of the Tea Partiers. You can read more of what Ham says about it at the link.
You’ll remember back in 2009, conservatives packed health care town halls to object to Obamacare. There was pointed questioning, occasional yelling, and rare cases (nonetheless very well publicized) of physical altercations of some sort. Back in 2009, in my post-mortem on the August town halls, which had inspired national media to openly fret about the impending doom of the Republic, I calculated that there were about 11 incidents of documented violence at more than 500 health care town halls, and that the majority of them were perpetrated by liberals on conservatives.
This, of course, was not the narrative that emerged from that month or what most people remember from it because the media was busy freaking out about how all these peaceful demonstrators and pointed question-askers were bringing the nation to the brink of collapse.
Since then, we’ve seen the destruction of public parks, total disregard for permitting rules, frequent violent eruptions, and occasional sexual assaults or mysterious deaths [at] Occupy Wall Street glossed over by media in their fervor to continue a national dialogue about inequality and stuff. Had a Tea Party ever resulted in mass arrests, defecating on cop cars, or sexual assaults of attendees, the public policy concerns of the protest’s participants would have been quickly dismissed and the group demonized. For Tea Partiers, those things happened despite holding actual peaceful protests in which public lands were left often better than they were found.
Now, we have “Moral Mondays.” Check out the L.A. Times’ coverage and imagine this kind of press release ever appearing on a Tea Party gathering in national news. Now, imagine that Tea Party protest had included hundreds of arrests. Laugh with me, people.
The media may profess a certain disapprobation of the treatment meted out to conservatives by the IRS - which was an attempt to limit their effectiveness in the political arena by treating them in ways that liberal groups were not treated - but, other than the fact that the media is not a government entity, how is their behavior significantly different? What the IRS did was done for political reasons and was unethical, unjust, and dishonest. The distorted portrayals of Tea Party groups by the media is no less so.
In fact, it could be argued that it was these very misrepresentations that convinced the IRS in the first place that conservative groups needed special scrutiny and even needed to be thwarted.