The “grassroots” groups that grew up around the tea party movement were generally funded by industry-backed groups. The tea parties were heavily promoted by Fox News with some of their biggest stars, like Glenn Beck, reporting from the protests. One of the PACs raised money from the tea party protestors, but most of the money went to paying themselves.
TPM Media’s Zachary Roth reported earlier in the week that the political action committee that organized the Tea Party Express — Our Country Deserves Better PAC — funneled almost two-thirds of its spending from July to November back to the political consulting firm from which it was spawned, Russo, Marsh, and Associates. More than $850,000 of the money the supposedly grassroots PAC collected went to the firm of GOP political operatives who ran it.
For those who may have forgotten, the Tea Party Express was the faux-grassroots operation that Fox News hopped aboard in late August, after the network’s promotion of the health care town hall meeting disruptions but before they started flogging the 9-12 protest. (It’s so hard to keep Fox’s political activism straight!) It was a nationwide bus tour organized by a political action committee whose mission is to oppose President Obama and other Democrats; with a pedigree like that, how could Fox resist?
Fox News heavily promoted the Tea Party Express; the Our Country Deserves Better PAC even used Fox’s promotion in a fundraising email. Then Fox’s Griff Jenkins hit the trail with the Express, following that bus around the country, throwing journalistic integrity aside as he declared its riders “the America that Washington forgot.”
Did Fox News know that Republican consulting firms were using these tea parties to raise money for themselves?