Abstract
Research on the Tea Party emphasizes the role of Fox News in magnifying the movement’s early successes. Fox News is credited with legitimizing the Tea Party’s grievances, allowing the movement to make rapid inroads into the Republican Party. We argue that such depictions of the Tea Party’s relationship to the Republican Party are at least partially the product of an oversimplified media narrative emphasizing the seamless integration of the two. We analyze 201,678 media documents from blog posts from Tea Party organizations, Fox News, MSNBC, and 785 newspapers. Our results show marked differences between how the Tea Party frames itself compared with other media sources frame the movement. MSNBC and Fox News discuss the Tea Party strategically, respectively, treating the movement as representing the worst and best aspects of the Republican Party. This is in stark contrast to how the activists frame the movement as conservative, but not strictly Republican, and often in conflict with the goals of the Republican Party.
Keywords
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
