The Item below is from the Media Research Center (MRC) newsletter for 4 February 2010.
3. CNN's Acosta: Tea Partiers are 'Recession-Raging Conservatives'CNN's Jim Acosta continued his network's bias against tea party protesters on Wednesday's American Morning by depicting them as "recession raging," and questioned one participant over her depiction of President Obama as the personification of death: "Do you think having the President dressed up as the Grim Reaper is a little over-the-top?" Acosta then asked, "You think it's appropriate?" The correspondent's report on Wednesday was the first in a series titled "Welcome to the Tea Party." During his presentation, which first aired 39 minutes into the 7 am hour, Acosta followed his network's model of focusing on the negative depictions of President Obama at tea party gatherings and painting the protests in a negative light. Over 5 months earlier, his colleague Jim Spellman followed the cross-country caravan of the Tea Party Express organization before the massive 9/12 rally in 2009, and zeroed-in on the protesters who labeled the President a Nazi, brought firearms to rallies, or held "outlandish conspiracy theories." He labeled all these "a dark undercurrent." Much more infamously, former CNN correspondent Susan Roesgen took personal offensive at a depiction of the chief executive with a Hitler mustache, while three years earlier, she thought a similar portrayal of President Bush was "comic."
