During TPX III's 20-day tour last Spring, I wrote about the Americans we met at every stop. With the help of my radio show producer Dave Logan, we sent the information to hundreds of other bloggers, many of whom wrote about it at their own sites.
They helped us get out the message that the Tea Party was advancing. We weren't digging foxholes. That our army of patriots was growing with every turn of the tires. We wanted to push out the news of what was going on inside the metaphorical wire, because the conventional left media was hyping it as a confrontational movement.
That's not to say the Tea Party Express didn't get some great coverage -- we did. But we didn't want the media to set the meme or control the narrative. All too often, their reports were antagonistic and veered toward the negative, as in TV news programs that opened with the tease, “Are the Tea Parties inciting violence?”
So it was vital that we had our message out there, thanks to everyone who blogged about the Tea Party Express III national tour, especially Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit; Teressa Monroe Hamilton at The Noisy Room; John Ruberry at Marathon Pundit; Melanie Morgan; The Bookworm; and Dave Logan.
Their posts were grabbed by others who moved the message forward and retained the true and positive nature and purpose of the tea party movement.
Since it began, the tea party has been driving the Left crazy because they can't stop it. They’ve tried tying it to militias, “birthers”, anything to discredit what Americans are doing to push back against an encroaching socialistic governmental behemoth. Even president Barack Obama acknowledged the Tea Party movement, before deliberately mischaracterizing it.
We were boots on the ground on the TPXIII tour, meeting Americans like you who are worried, anxious, angry, and apprehensive about what they see happening in Washington. This is a groundswell movement that has becoming a tsunami, with the LEFT doing whatever it can to discredit and destroy it.
So it was critical to our success in beating them back in the November election that we control the narrative. We urged our fellow bloggers to "Get the message out!"
As Levi Russell, TPX III Communications Director wrote in an email update to the TPX III team:
All last week and this week the Tea Party Express has been a major news story, and has been mentioned on TV more than 1,000 times over the past 4 days on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, and C-SPAN, as well as international news teams from Germany, France, Belgium, Japan, Australia, Canada, and Denmark. We have also recently had a flood of requests from liberal media outlets like Salon, Gawker, Wonkette, GQ, and most recently, a columnist from the Wall Street Journal, all requesting to ‘embed’ with the tour.
The point is literally EVERY news outlet has been covering the tour… So you should know that all of your hard work is being noticed around the world. Keep up the fantastic work, because as Sarah Palin said, the Tea Party Express rolls on!
Though they weren't with us physically on tour, bloggers were virtually with us, an army of Davids fighting the Goliath Left media.
