Last week at an event at the National Press Club, Media Matters for America's Ari Rabin-Havt asked News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch whether Fox News' extensive promotion of the tea party movement was appropriate. Murdoch replied that he didn't think Fox News “should be supporting the Tea Party” but would like to “investigate” “before condemning anyone.”
Media Matters subsequently offered to assist Murdoch's investigation, sending him extensive documentation of Fox's prior glowing coverage of the tea parties. But in case that seems for some reason insufficient, we've now identified what for Fox News must be an unimpeachable source: The Tea Party Express.
Earlier today, I mentioned that Politico had published the original proposal Republican consultant Joe Wierzbicki sent to his colleagues at his firm, Russo Marsh + Rogers, laying out the plan to create the Tea Party Express," which he said would “give a boost to our PAC.” Elsewhere in the memo, explaining why he believed they could “pull off a phenomenally successful tour” without the help of the "'tea party' establishment," Wierzbicki wrote:
[T]he April 15th tea parties may have been promoted by Fox News, Pajamas TV, Michelle Malkin, FreedomWorks, American Solutions, etc... however, almost all of the tea parties were organized and led by individual activists in local communities.
So there you have it. Even the guy that invented the Tea Party Express thinks that Fox has “promoted” the tea parties.