JournoLista Tumulty, now at WaPo, Keeps Her Bias Intact

I have written here several times recently about the all too visible partisanship of the Washington Post, but Karen Tumulty‘s lead article on Sunday (August 8), “In Va.’s 5th, incumbent Democrat Tom Perriello sees voter frustration firsthand,” takes the cake. Or perhaps it’s simply that as a resident and voter in Virginia’s 5th District I can see her slant more clearly and hence resent it more.

Her bias appears right away:

CHARLOTTE COURT HOUSE, VA. — The crowds that have been showing up for Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello’s town halls have been smaller and more polite than the angry throngs he saw during last August’s raucous congressional recess.

Catcalls about socialism and death panels have given way to substantive and pointed questions — about the intricacies of the new health-care law and financial regulations, finding alternative energy sources, and that most perennial of Virginia problems, traffic.

Gale-force outrage — both the real kind and the kind manufactured for television — has faded this August. There is still the occasional outburst: On Saturday, the Lynchburg Tea Party Patriots hastily called a rally outside a Perriello town hall in Fork Union to demand that he vote against $26 billion in aid to state and local governments when the House reconvenes briefly this week.

But when the shouting dies down, it becomes possible to hear something else, something Democrats know is an even greater threat to them this fall.

With polls consistently showing that dissatisfaction with Washington is at or near record levels, another word for what voters are feeling right now might be “frustration,” or “despair,” or “disgust.”

Tumulty — who was recently identified as a member of the infamous JournoList — argues, in short, that crazed, irrational anger has given way to polite expressions of frustration, an argument that marries bias to bad reporting. Democrats and mainstream media editorial writers (is there a difference?) are of course free to regard the angry opposition to Obamacare and massive deficits that was expressed in town halls across the district and nation last August as akin to the baying of mad dogs frothing at the mouth, but such anathema to tea partiers should at least be restrained in news articles.

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I attended a couple of those town halls in the 5th District last summer. Many of those who attended were certainly angry, but to dismiss them as “angry throngs” capable only of “catcalls” is to ignore their very well informed questions of a Congressman who had clearly made a choice to be an ambassador from Nancy Pelosi to the 5th District rather than vice versa.

Tumulty, a former writer for Time Magazine, does allow that not all of the “gale-force outrage” of last August was paranoid bile; some of it, she asserts, was simply political play-acting, “the kind manufactured for television.” Where, however, is her evidence that any of the anger expressed last summer was “manufactured”?

Tumulty believes the “outrage” has faded, but that’s because she’s only looking where the light’s good — in Perriello’s town hall meetings this summer, not where she might actually find it. Why should the “angry throngs” continue to attend his meetings when they can instead spend their time supporting his opponent in an election only a few months away?

And note how she describes an example of what she argues is residual and fading anger as an “occasional outburst” — a rally “hastily called” by the Lynchburg Tea Party “to demand that [Perriello] vote against $26 billion in aid to state and local governments when the House reconvenes briefly this week.” But why is expressed opposition to piling on more deficits to prop up more public employee union members an “outburst”? If a number of people showed up (she could have told us how many were there, but didn’t) even though the rally was “hastily called,” doesn’t that suggest that the tide of angry voters has not really receded very much?

Perhaps the mood of voters who still care enough about what Perriello has to say to attend his meetings “might be ‘frustration,’ or ‘despair,’ or ‘disgust,'” but if Tumulty had attended some of the rallies or meetings with voters of state senator Robert Hurt, Perriello’s Republican opponent, she would have seen that last summer’s anger has not “faded” at all.