[Article first appeared at Red County.]

Fulfilling one of the primary responsibilities of the press in a free society – to alert the people to threats of all sorts – the mainstream media has jumped on the back of the ladder truck to fight the universally-recognized evil of fused racism and political extremism. Left-wing pundits and Democratic operatives enthusiastically call out directions as journalists race to find the blaze, assuring them that having seen the smoke and heard the alarm there must certainly be fire.

Such has been the behavior of the establishment press, by and large, in response to accusations made by Democratic lawmakers that protests by tea partiers on the Capitol steps two Sundays ago against Obamacare legislation included the hurling of racial slurs (the N-word) at members of Congress. Married with anecdotal “field reports” that tea parties feature signs with depictions of President Obama as a Hitler-esque or totalitarian figure and violent seditionist rhetoric, the briefing to the corps of journalists was a call to action.

Axes in hand, hungry reporters in a starving industry arrive on the scene to find no smoke, no fire, and a sprung fire alarm with Democratic Party fingerprints all over it. The screamed epithets can’t be heard on any of the recordings made during the time of the alleged incident. If any evidence has remained undisclosed, certainly Andrew Breitbart’s offer to give $100,000 to the United Negro Scholarship Fund in exchange for proof should have been sufficient incentive, and yet no documentary evidence has been brought forward.

Unlike real firefighters, truly brave men and women, when the supposed pursuers of truth in our press stumbled upon the false alarm instead of vindicating the betrayal by their agitators they chose to protect their reputations, or egos, or both. Why? Because none of us like to be duped, but when being duped carries professional consequences revealing the truth is to be avoided.

In the pure Chicago-style, left-wing attack politics begins with identifying fringe elements clinging to the edges of a group and exaggerating their influence over the group as a whole. For months since the tea parties began in February of 2009 in reaction to the $787 billion stimulus package, operatives of the Left have been methodically stitching scraps and bits of decaying humanity to the tea party’s image in an attempt to turn the movement into a Frankenstein’s monster that will frighten voters and disrupt the dampening effect tea parties have had on the Democrat’s agenda of European socialization and putting American individualism into terminal decline.

One pernicious example of media laziness has been the frequent attribution to tea partiers for creating the poster of President Obama with a square, Hitler-like moustache by major media outlets. The poster is the creation of Lyndon Larouche’s political action committee, a very radical group that espouses conspiratorial views. You need to study string theory to develop a conceptual way of describing where Larouchies fit on any political spectrum. They have always operated as grifters of a sort, stationing themselves at all places where large numbers of people pass by or congregate. They are a barnacle clinging to the side of the tea party ship, not a ticketed passenger on it, and an annoyance that must be tolerated in order to preserve the right of free speech for all people.

Having sewn the Larouchies, mythical racist signage, the fiction that tea parties are not diverse, and a host of other red herrings over the true complexion of the tea party, only daily jolts of electricity from the dynamo of the left-wing sympathetic faction in the media to keep the monstrous consolidation of smears and baseless accusations moving forward.

But even more damaging to the reporter’s esteem than being revealed as a fool is being proven to be a hypocrite. At the core of a journalist’s credibility is their ability to be consistent, to maintain a standard for judging all situations using a common ethical and moral baseline. Based on their actions during this historic period of American political unrest, modern news organizations are nailing their own coffin shut.

Take the case in point of mainstream media’s handling of widespread Bush Derangement Syndrome. The video below (NSFW) is a garden variety sampling of what could be found on most Saturday morning street corners during the Bush years. The tone and structure of what the extremists have to say in this video is not unlike the extreme speech being freely and incorrectly associated with the tea parties. It is also an example of what the media routinely characterized as free speech, not a clear and present danger as media elites have tended to characterize current vocal opposition to the policies of President Obama and Congressional Democrats.

Watch the video and judge for yourself if there is a deplorable hypocrisy in how the media treated Bush Derangement Syndrome and how it treats vehement disapproval of the current president’s agenda.

When nearly an entire industry doubles down in repeating the lie in order to protect its collective status it risks an all-out collapse of public faith in the institution. Based on polls showing reasonably broad support for tea party ideals, and historically low regard for the integrity of news providers, this potential cave-in of trust is a very real possibility.

Faith with the public can be restored by returning to solid standards of journalistic integrity, standards that really don’t deviate too much from the basic tenets of society in general. Tell the truth, seek the truth, challenge all facts, and always get an opposing viewpoint. In fact, those all happen to be values I have seen represented in the tea party itself, so if any journalists are looking for a close approximation to a Lazy Journalist’s twelve-step program, there’s always room at the next event.

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