Time's Michael Crowley deserves some credit for saying this about the Tea Party movement, in his piece about how they largely won the debt standoff:

The Tea Party movement has proved not only that people can have their own facts but also that they can use them to vast tactical advantage, crashing through the taboos of political convention and changing the game along the way.

But in explaining the political origins of the movement, he writes:

It is an article of faith in Tea Party circles that Washington and Wall Street are in bed together, colluding for power and profit at the expense of the little guy.

We've seen this before; that is, attempts to brand the Tea Party movement--which is in no small part bankrolled by wealthy corporate interests-- as anti-corporate populism. He writes:

Indeed, for some Tea Party activists, the summer of 2011 has been all too reminiscent of the fall of 2008, when the movement truly took root. After the financial world crashed, Washington insisted that a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street banks was necessary to avert a depression. To the Tea Party, however, this was yet another scare tactic to justify transferring taxpayer money to the bankers who helped cause the mess in the first place.

There are probably some Tea Party activists who opposed the TARP bailout, but it's a stretch to suggest this is where the movement "took root." Glenn Beck, as much as an intellectual godfather to the movement as there is, supported the bailout, only to later recant and wish he hadn't.

The Tea Party movement was really energized by a rant from CNBC host Rick Santelli--the one where he called for a Tea Party based on some class resentment directed at  people in expensive homes who were all getting bailed out while hard-earning stockbrokers were making their payments. Or something like that--read this piece from CJR to get a sense of what Santelli was upset about, which was a modest mortgage modification program directed at people who were, in Santell's words, "losers." His call for Tea Party protests led to, well, actual Tea Party protests.

This happened in February 2009, months after the TARP bailout. Very little of his rant was based on bashing Wall Street--it would have been rather remarkable for an anti-Wall Street movement to be birthed on CNBC, a network whose target audience is people who trade stocks. And, of course, the movement began to really find political success during the health care debate--when it was mostly concerned with portraying Obama's plan as some sort of Communist killing machine.

Crowley adds:

In Tea Party doctrine, both major parties are complicit with an elite Washington--New York establishment that lies to the public to cover for policies that enrich the wealthy and strengthen the powerful.

If this were really what was motivating Tea Party activists, you'd see more evidence to that effect--and it'd be more ideologically diverse than it is. The truth is that there are such activist mobilizations--US Uncut, the One Nation march on Washington--but they're hardly given the media platform granted to the Tea Party.

The New York Times' David Carr (9/20/10) compares involvement by media figures in politics--exemplified by CNBC's Rick Santelli and various Fox News figures fueling the Tea Party movement, and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's dueling answer rallies to said movement--to "a football game where the reporters and commentators, bored by the feckless proceedings on the field, suddenly poured out of the press box and took over the game." Writes Carr: "In politics, it seems as if the media is intent on not just keeping score but also calling plays."

Regardless of what one thinks of any particular media figure's political advocacy, it should be remembered--in a nation that was basically imagined into existence by a political commentator named Thomas Paine--that there is nothing at all unusual or alarming about people writing and talking about politics in the hopes of affecting the course of political life. Indeed, that's the most obvious reason to become a political journalist, and the assumed role of journalism that underlies the First Amendment. It's only the corporate media tradition of trying to conceal the political opinions of journalists in the hopes of marketing the broadest possible audience to advertisers that makes it seem natural to think of journalists as people who ought to confine themselves to "keeping score" rather than getting directly involved in the sport of politics.

Ryan Chittum of CJR.org holds up (2/19/09) Rick Santelli's recent CNBC tantrum as "an example of what's wrong with a certain kind of financial journalism, the kind where people of like backgrounds spend all day staring at tickers and interviewing each other. As such, Chittum says, "the segment couldn't more clearly illustrate the disconnect between the financial-services sector, certain financial journalists and, you know, 'reality'":

What sent Santelli, CNBC's hot-air, oops, "On-Air Editor," over the edge? The homeowner bailout. Of course, he didn't get himself into nearly this much of a lather over the trillions of dollars we’ve given to Wall Street welfare cases and the busted banks. Oh no. He's mad that non-financial-service-professionals, otherwise known as homeowners, or, according to Santelli "losers," are up now for help--to the tune of $275 billion, much of which would go to the banks anyway....

But then, this may be a symptom of a wider disease. We at [CJR's] the Audit have written repeatedly about the blame-the-homeowners meme that's been so popular in misdirecting people away from the real culprits in the crisis: the financial-services boiler rooms that created all those junk mortgages and bundled them into crap securities for sale to all-too-trusting rubes (aka "clients") around the world.

Looking at the "powerful undercurrent of outrage from some people who are paying their mortgages (or renting) who disdain those who aren't or can't," Chittum is compelled to explain exactly "what's going on here": "This homeowner bailout isn't really even aimed at easing people's suffering. It's aimed at the banks, whose downward spiral will not stop until the housing market stabilizes."

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Scapegoating Minorities for Failures of Banking: Blaming CRA Makes Little Sense, but Gets Finance Industry Off the Hook" (1/09) by Mary Kane