Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics

Crashing the Tea Party challenges conventional dogmas related to the most recent “movement” of choice of conservative America and the mass media. This book undertakes a critical journalistic and scholarly examination of the Tea Party at the national and local level. Through firsthand observation of local Tea Party chapters, Street and DiMaggio uncover details about the Tea Party that have remained largely unexplored. Is the Tea Party a genuine social movement or a top-down interest group created largely by the mass media, Republican Party, and corporate funding? Street and DiMaggio explore this question systematically, closely documenting their results. They show how mass media reporting and commentary affect public opinion of the Tea Party and its preferred policy whipping boy, health care reform, in particular. This book fills the gap in public understanding of how social movements fit within the larger political ideologies on the left and right, and the growing role of media in influencing public opinion on major issues of the day. Street and DiMaggio cover the Tea Party from the inside out, and in the context of the 2010 Midterm elections, the Wisconsin Worker Movement, and the Arab Spring.