Is the Tea Party movement actually more politically diverse than the "liberal media" would have you believe?  Andrew Malcolm, a blogger for the L.A. Times who used to be Laura Bush's press secretary, thinks so. He wrote yesterday (4/5/10) about a pair of polls that came out about the Tea Party movement:

For upwards of 12 months now members of the so-called Tea Party protest movement have been stereotyped, derogated and often dismissed by some politicians and media outlets.

They've been portrayed variously as angry fringe elements, often inarticulate, potentially violent and merely Republicans in sheep's clothing or disgruntled pockets of conservatives blindly lashing out at a left-handed President Obama....

Alas for stereotypes, they're convenient, often catchy. But not necessarily true.

Now, comes a pair of polls, including Gallup, that paint a revealing detailed portrait of Tea Party supporters in most ways as pretty average Americans.

Oddly, though, the polls cited by Malcolm don't say anything about whether the Tea Party activists are angry, inarticulate or violent--or whether they're motivated by racial resentment, which is another criticism frequently leveled at the movement. Instead, the polls mostly provide basic demographic information that is largely irrelevant to the "stereotypes" Malcolm cites about the Tea Party movement.

The polls do give some information about partisan and ideological identification--and on these measures Malcolm's account is quite misleading.   He cites a survey by the Winston Group, a Republican polling firm, that found that 17 percent of Tea Party supporters identify as Democrats as an indication that the movement has a "bipartisan breakdown"--and are therefore the "commonsense Americans" they are portrayed to be by Sarah Palin.  But at 17 percent percent, the Tea Parties would have about half as many Democrats as in the general population--and at 57 percent Republican, it would have more than twice as many Republicans.  That's actually not very "bipartisan."

And while the one poll got 17 percent Democrats, the other poll, by Gallup, found the Tea Party base was only 8 percent Democratic--one-quarter of the party's proportion in the general population.  That's less than the 12 percent of Tea Party supporters who told Gallup they support the new healthcare law--a proportion Gallup calls "a uniformly negative reaction."

As for ideology, both polls show Tea Party supporters are much more likely to describe themselves as "conservative" and much less likely to identify as "liberal" than Americans as a whole.

Most of these distortions can be laid at Malcolm's feet, but there's one misrepresentation of the polling data that Gallup has to be held responsible for. Malcolm accurately quotes Gallup's Lydia Saad as saying that "Tea Partiers are quite representative of the public at large" in terms of "race," among other demographic qualities.  But Gallup's chart indicates that 6 percent of  Tea Party supporters identified as non-Hispanic blacks--versus 11 percent for respondents in general.  Would a group that was 28 percent female be considered "quite representative of the public at large" in terms of gender? That's the claim that Gallup is making about the Tea Party movement and race.

(For more on these Tea Party polls, see Political Animal, 4/5/10, and Plum Line, 4/5/10.)

Over on Media Matters' County Fair blog (3/12/09), Jamison Foser asks, "Is there any major-newspaper reporter who is more consistently wrong than Andrew Malcolm?" The latest gaffe by the Laura Bush flak-turned-L.A. Times writer comes in response to filmmaker Michael Moore's explaining what he sees as the difference between Democratic framing of Rush Limbaugh as the GOP's real leader and Republicans' similar claim about Moore and the Democratic Party:

But some commentators (Richard Wolffe of Newsweek, Chuck Todd of NBC News, etc.) have likened this to "what Republicans tried to do to the Democrats with Michael Moore." Perhaps. But there is one central difference: What I have believed in, and what I have stood for in these past eight years--an end to the war, establishing universal healthcare, closing Guantánamo and banning torture, making the rich pay more taxes and aggressively going after the corporate chiefs on Wall Street--these are all things which the majority of Americans believe in too.

Malcolm's LATimes.com piece, attempting to summarize this passage, said:

Moore lists numerous ways that Republican strategists went after him in past years--books, ads, funny photos and how he was booed off the Oscar stage even in liberal Hollywood for his early opposition to the Iraq War, Guantánamo, torture and other things. Did that help Democratic Senator Kerry not get elected in 2004? "Perhaps," Moore admits.

Foser points out that

if you read what Moore wrote, you'll notice that Malcolm is simply not telling the truth. Moore's "perhaps" was not an admission that Republican attacks on him helped to defeat John Kerry; not even close. Moore said "perhaps" there is some similarity between what Democrats are currently doing and what Republicans tried to do to him; he is not saying Republicans were successful. Malcolm simply made that up, and ripped Moore's comment out of context in order to hide the fabrication.

Actually, Foser's citation of the quote's actual context shows that, "In fact, Moore said the GOP's attacks on him backfired."