Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) is still seething from the recent debt ceiling battle in Congress and told MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough that the media shouldn’t be giving people (Tea Party) with absurd notions equal time.

Everybody’s talked about it, yes. That Congress was taken hostage, the country, the economy was taken hostage. You had people there that who were literally ready to cut the baby in half. I’ve heard a lot of criticism of the president. Frankly the president had no choice here. Congress had no choice here. We did the same thing the president had to do which is save America from a default. Because a default would have been far more disastrous.

And what we had was a group of people who are completely unaware or didn’t care about the consequences of their actions.  They were actually arguing for a default, which would have been ever more catastrophic with respect to what’s happening in Europe and what’s happening here at home now.

So we have to break that. And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it’s exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.

It doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what’s real, of who’s accountable, of who is not accountable, of who’s real, who isn’t, who’s serious, who isn’t?

While he didn’t mention the Tea Party by name it’s obvious who his target is.

It’s not the Tea Party ideas though that are absurd. What’s absurd is the very idea that just because they fought both Democrats and Republicans alike over what they felt was the fiscally responsible thing to do on the debt ceiling, that they don’t deserve any media coverage, just because John Kerry doesn’t agree with them.

Kerry shouldn’t be complaining in the first place because by and large, the mainstream media have done what they can to portray the Republicans and Tea Party members as the evil doers in the debt fight as they tried to stick to their principles regardless of the political cost.

What Kerry really wants the media to do is to censor or ignore the news because he saw how the Tea Party message of fiscal responsibility resonated with the American public. And that is a threat to liberals like Kerry who can’t see their way to cut spending and prefer to kick the debt can down the road for future generations to solve.

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About the author

Don Irvine
Don Irvine is Chairman of Accuracy in Media. He is active on Facebook and Twitter. You can follow him @donirvine to read his latest thoughts.

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