CNN’s Susan Roesgen Coverage Of Tea Party: An Object Lesson In Bias

Newsbusters was all over CNN’s FoxNews-bashing, Tea-Party-bashing, ordinary-American bashing “reporter” Susan Roesgen.

First, the video of her “reporting” – which was in the form of Roesgen attempting to undermine and refute the thousands of tea partiers rather than simply reporting on the event:

For all of her bashing of FoxNews as some “rightwing conservative” (and therefore presumably illegitimate) entity, Susan Roesgen had personally TWICE applied with Fox.  Maybe her issues with Fox are more psychological and personal than journalistic?

Now for some of the Newsbusters piece:

CNN’s Fox-Bashing/Fox-Job Applying Roesgen ‘Tak(ing) a Break’

By Seton Motley
April 17, 2009 – 16:48 ET

CNN’s Susan Roesgen has had a rough week, what with all the ordinary American/First Amendment practitioners bashing she so passionately and obnoxiously delivered in her TEA Party reporting.

Perhaps it was the sniping at the place she twice applied in 2005 – Rupert Murdoch’s House of Ratings, otherwise known as Fox News – that put her over the edge.

Or whether or not her email box was so overwhelmed with what was undoubtedly an endless stream of love letters and fan mail that it caused a server meltdown.

Whatever it was, CNN has announced that Miss Roesgen’s “tak(ing) a break.”

Two days after Susan Roesgen‘s much talked-about Chicago Tea Party live shots, we are learning more about what happened off-camera.

Sources close to the situation tell TVNewser as Roesgen was reporting her 2pmET live shot for CNN, she heard shouts from the crowd including “Damn CNN” and “Shut up, bitch.”

As we now know, Roesgen wrapped up the live shot, saying “I think you get the general tenor of this,” that it was “not really family viewing” from an “Anti-CNN” crowd.

Our source says Roesgen received an avalanche of email messages, some supportive, and some “vitriolic with crude insults.”

“Not family viewing?”  Okay, perhaps not.  We are certainly not a fan of the venal tongue, in private conversation or on the air.

But come, Miss Roesgen, have you watched your CNN colleague Anderson “Vanderbilt” Cooper lately?  He of the “It’s hard to talk when you’re tea-bagging” wild pitch on Tuesday?  THAT’s family viewing?

For all of liberals or Susan Roesgen’s “righteous indignation” regarding any harassment (I went to four youtube videos with the title, “CNN reporter gets harassed at Chicago tea party,” and none even contained any actual footage of the event) she was clearly so confrontational and so adversarial at this event that she literally welcomed the anger of the crowd.  They knew that she wasn’t there to report on the event, but to attack it.  And all the while on the evening coverage tea party attenders are referred to in a blatantly sexually-suggestive slur.

She is confronted in other Chicago tea party footage shortly after the posted video segment by other tea party attenders who point out that she is handpicking people with the most controversial signs – which did NOT represent the spirit of the event – and then getting in their faces to obtain an emotional reaction so she could claim it “wasn’t for family viewing.”  This amounts to my going to a liberal event and throwing feces at people and then claiming that “the liberals at the event stink.”

In the video cited above, Susan Reosgen was asked, “Did you look at THAT sign?” and pointed right next to Roesgen’s.   The sign said, “Republicans suck too!”  And of course she didn’t pay attention to it; it didn’t conform to her ideological leftwing narrative which portrayed this as a conservative hate-attack against Obama and Democrats.  In the background you can hear the participants chanting of Roesgen, “You spin!  You spin!  You spin!”

The same Susan Roesgen displays her kinder, gentler, supportive side when she interviews leftist demonstrators.  Which was precisely how she should have interviewed the tea party demonstrators if she was honest and objective.  Another youtube clip accessed via Beltsay Blips shows Susan Roesgen merely calmly reporting on a person wearing a Bush mask with devil horns while carrying a wad of cash at a leftist event, versus her opinionated confrontation of a man who had a sign at the tea party decrying Obama government fascism.  She asks, “Do you realize how offensive that is?”  Because while graphically representing Bush as the devil incarnate is apparently fine, holding a sign calling her Messiah a fascist is just way over the line.

The funny thing is that, all the while “journalists” such as Susan Roesgen or Anderson Cooper claim that the tea parties were a ginned-up event created by FoxNews, they somehow manage to completely ignore the description of what the event is about from the very people they claim are behind the event.

Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and just about everyone else who have reported or discussed the tea parties on FoxNews have claimed that the parties are NOT about political parties, and NOT about the current taxation climate; but rather about uncontrolled government spending that will necessarily result in higher taxes and a diminished American way of life in the near future and in the futures of their children.  They literally create and report as news mutually contradictory straw men.

Susan Roesgen is a disgrace to journalism, and so is CNN for airing that piece.  Unfortunately, such leftist ideological propaganda attacks now characterize the news media.  Journalism is dead; long live propaganda.

Let me finish with Anderson Cooper – clearly a much bigger fish than Susan Roesgen.  Cooper – in the guise of a journalist – said, “It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging on the air on CNN (link; youtube).

I didn’t know what “teabagging” was (beyond dunking a tea bag into a cup of hot water).  I had to google it.  Here’s what I found.  Now I understand the “hard to talk” part.  Thanks for the incredibly crude mental image, Anderson.  The world now knows where your mind – and your objectivity and integrity –  is.

To direct such a crude sexually suggestive reference to people merely for showing up at a legitimate public protest event has to be some kind of nadir for naked bias, rampant leftist ideology, and the worst kind of propaganda.

No free society can survive such propaganda.  It is little wonder we are descending into fascism.

Tags: Chicago, CNN, FoxNews, journalism, propaganda, Susan Roesgen, tea parties