“Kenneth P. Vogel” - Videos a Weapon in Wisconsin Fight

By KENNETH P. VOGEL | 3/3/11 4:24 AM EST Updated: 3/3/11 12:00 PM EST

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/50566.html#ixzz1FZIW6ga7

Stung by allegations of incendiary, racist and homophobic rhetoric at tea party rallies last year, conservative activists with flipcams and camera phones have circulated at the union protests sprouting up across the country in hopes of catching violent or abusive behavior by their liberal adversaries.

The resulting photos and videos have ricocheted around the conservative blogosphere in recent days, prompting mounting outrage on the right.

Union Hate Rally in Wisconsin: Protests Rife With Hitler, Gun Targets, Death Threats,” blared a headline on Fox News’s opinion site Fox Nation over a video taken at a union rally in Madison by the state Republican Party that showed protestors’ signs including one in which crosshairs were superimposed on a photograph of Republican Gov. Scott Walker next to the words, “Don’t Retreat, Reload,” and others in which Walker is compared to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Hosni Mubarak.

Breitbart.tv posted a video billed as “The Latest Foaming at the Mouth (Literally) Union Protester,” featuring a man at a Chicago union rally with a sign that read, “KKK ? GOP,” ranting to the two conservatives filming him that he was “looking for a fight with the tea baggers.”

It’s no coincidence that conservative corners of the Web seem inundated with videos and photos of Democrats and union supporters using offensive or violent rhetoric, and even physically engaging with tea partiers. Conservative leaders have been encouraging activists to try to record their pro-union opponents, and to use the kind of confrontational tactics that liberals say are meant to provoke.

The goals of the video offensive are two-fold: marginalizing liberals in ongoing battles, such as the raging debate over collective bargaining and government salaries, and trying to reverse a media narrative blaming heated political rhetoric from the right for poisoning the political discourse. 

“The left did that effectively with the tea party movement with very little evidence of what they argued. Well, we have all the evidence in the world, so let’s go gather it, get it out there and use it,” said Brendan Steinhauser, lead organizer for the tea party group FreedomWorks.

FreedomWorks urged its members to head out to pro-union rallies last weekend and “to take their flipcams, take their IPhones, get down there, get pictures, get video, upload it to their local blogs, tweet about it and get it back to us,” said Steinhauser, who plans to take a highlight reel “and then go to reporters and editors — particularly people who covered the tea party and wrote stories about racism in the rallies — and say to them: ‘Look at this stuff. Why aren’t you guys covering this?’”

The aggressive attempt by conservatives to use video to support their own story line about the union protests is their latest attempt to counter what they regard as a deep-seated media bias against the right, generally, and specifically against the grass-roots populist tea party movement. In their view, media coverage all too often highlighted extremist sentiments on the periphery of the movement and liberal allegations that the movement’s rhetoric was violent or racist.

A case in point for them was the tea party rally outside the U.S. Capitol last March before a pivotal House vote on the Democratic health care overhaul, at which Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is gay, was called a homophobic slur, and two African-American House Democrats said they were called the N-word, and another, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), said he someone spit on him.

Though tea partiers denounced the alleged incivility, some conservatives also challenged the allegations.

“The mainstream media and the organized left has accused us, absent any evidence, of being extremists and racists, of using uncivil rhetoric,” said Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Internet entrepreneur who offered to contribute $10,000 to the United Negro College Fund if Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), a civil rights hero, produced video evidence or took a lie detector test to prove his claim that he was the object of a racial slur.

Breitbart’s Big Government website previously hosted other video campaigns intended to sully liberals or their institutions, including an undercover project targeting the community organizing organization ACORN and a video of an Agriculture Department official appearing to express racial bias — both of which were subsequently challenged as misleading. 

Breitbart’s websites have featured many videos taken at union rallies staged in state capitals in recent weeks to protest efforts by Republican governors to reduce unionized government workers’ salary, pensions and bargaining power. “The very second that the organized left puts its boots on the ground and behaves as a caricature of what it accused the tea party of being, of course we’re going to film it,” he said. “Of course, we’re going to highlight it as a means to expose the grotesque double standard that the media has created for tea party grandmothers, grandfathers and great aunts and little league coaches.”

Yet, the mainstream media hasn’t devoted much attention to the storyline, save for Fox News, whose reporter covering the showdown in Wisconsin has claimed that union protesters threatened and even hit him.

“The mainstream media’s professed concern with uncivil engages only when it is practiced by conservatives,” asserted The Washington Post’s conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin. 

And conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, who has made her blog something of a clearinghouse of alleged union misdeeds, boasts she is doing “the reporting the tea party-bashing national media won’t do on the rabid outbreak of progressive incivility and violence at Big Labor protests across the country.”

Malkin in recent days has posted widely viewed videos showing a union supporter at an Ohio rally, declaring tea partiers “a bunch of d—- sucking corporate butt-lickers who want to crush the working people of this country,” another one telling a Rhode Island tea party activist “I’ll f—- you in the a—,” and a rowdy crowd of Wisconsin union backers serenading a Republican state senator with chants of “f—- you” and “shame” as he tried to enter the state capitol building.

“Barack Obama’s new era of civility was over before it began,” Malkin wrote, adding, “You wouldn’t know it from reading The New York Times, watching Katie Couric or listening to the Democratic manners police.”

In fact, The New York Times’ Michael Shear did write a blog post about the Wisconsin GOP’s slickly produced video, calling it “striking” for its juxtaposition of incendiary rhetoric from union protestors with liberal accusations about angry conservative rhetoric.

The mainstream media might be reluctant to give wider coverage to the videos and photos being circulated by the right because the extreme rhetoric of some union supporters isn’t being echoed by high-profile liberals, suggested Mark Crispin Miller, a media studies professor at New York University.

 “There’s a difference between grass-roots anger and profanity, on the one hand, and extremely prominent public figures making violent remarks on the other,” he said. “Most of the Democratic criticism of inflammatory speech was aimed at prominent public figures in the Republican Party or the right-wing media. Sarah Palin was the one who urged people to reload. Glenn Beck has made several incendiary remarks.” 

(Conservatives have seized on Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Michael Capuano’s exhortation to a union crowd that sometimes it’s necessary “to get out on the streets and get a little bloody” to defend union rights, though he has since apologized for the remark.)

Liberals have charged that at least some of the recorded confrontations were provoked or are being exaggerated to score political points, including a video of a union demonstrator in Washington, batting away the camera phone of a female FreedomWorks employee who was filming her colleagues arguing with the man.

Malkin and others blasted the video as evidence of a union thug attacking a young conservative woman. But in a post entitled, “Right wing goes nuts for ‘union thug’ video,” Salon’s Alex Pareene charged “everyone on the right was simply waiting for one of their content suppliers to produce the requisite ‘violence from a union thug’ video, and here it is.”

“Pushing a camera away from one’s face seems less “thuggish” to me than it does … defensive. And purposefully picking fights with people in order to provoke an angry response does not really prove much of anything.”

But Steinhauser asserted that’s not FreedomWorks’s modus operandi.

“We don’t think that (provocation) is useful, and we don’t think that it works. We don’t think that you’re going to convince them if you’re provoking them,” he said, though he added that sometimes it doesn’t take much to get a rise out of union protesters.

At the union protest last week at which the confrontation occurred, a FreedomWorks intern dressed in a panda bear outfit carried a sign that read, “Stop Pandering 2 Big Labor” as he wandered through the crowd.

“Literally, walking through with a video camera and asking questions or holding up a sign with a dissenting point of view is enough to get these guys to just go unhinged,” Steinhauser said.