During the April 15 tax day tea parties, CNN reporter Susan Roesgen did more than report the news.Roesgen proved her skill not just as a veteran media practitioner but also as an expert contortionist as she managed to simultaneously put her foot in her mouth and her head up her rear.News anchor Anderson Cooper declined to speculate why Roesgen expected one unidentified participant to articulate the collective mood of hundreds of thousands of other people or why, if she sincerely sought answers, the unashamedly livid Roesgen persistently interrupted the protestor.Those persistent interruptions fell somewhere between outright intimidation and downright censorship.Cooper, Roesgen and CNN all declined to offer an apology or an explanation in the face of massive bipartisan criticism. There’s even a Web site — FireSusan.com — dedicated to getting Roesgen pulled.Roesgen has a history of making herself the story – from her flawed coverage of the Jena 6 fiasco to her embarrassingly narcissistic coverage of the flood in Fargo, North Dakota.No one with a legitimate claim to neutrality can say with certainty that Roesgen reported rather than opined. Why should viewers believe anything Roesgen, and by extension CNN, has to say anymore?To add to the dismay, CNN and MSNBC anchors, reporters and guests opted to kill the same joke that wasn’t funny the first time instead of investigating why these protestors had gathered.Many asked where Roesgen’s outrage was when a leftist protestor in 2006 compared former President George W. Bush to Hitler and Satan. Comparisons of short-lived right-wing protestors and constant hysterical left-wing protestors quickly sprouted up across the Internet as a result of Roesgen’s coverage.It’s been common during the past two weeks, at least in my experience, for most on the left to assume all tea party participants were incapable of articulating the purpose of their protests – and because they knew of no one who could offer a response that satisfied them, all tea party protestors must have lacked a legitimate cause.Andrew Breitbart opined that while white supremacist groups decried the Iraq War, there was no apparent guilt by association present in the mainstream media toward leftist protestors. MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann, however, had no problem giving a platform to political scientist and Nobel Prize laureate Janeane Garofalo, who claimed all tea-baggers were redneck racists.Perhaps Greg Gutfeld, FOX News funnyman and host of late-night talk show Red Eye, best explained the reasons for the double standard:First, the mainstream media haven’t actually met any protestors, who are average folks rather than professional protestors. Second, media bias allowed the protestors to do the reporting the media refused to do. Third, mainstream reporters like Roesgen want to control their stories, and because they couldn’t find a way to spin it to advance their agenda, they resorted to making jokes rather than offering in-depth investigative reporting.But, as the National Review stated, Roesgen’s lack of reporting paled in comparison to her lack of comprehension of those she “covered.” This same logic could be applied to those on the left who admittedly don’t understand what the protests were about.This ignorance is vast and widespread: even the president, the morning of the protests, claimed he knew nothing of the tea parties. To ignore an estimated 100,000 angry people is malicious at worst and negligent at best.Perhaps the protests were meant to express a general and legitimate frustration with national leadership. Perhaps, as the National Review said, resistance to big government is still a driving force behind the political motivations of many Americans.And perhaps, as a shrinking minority of Americans pays a tax rate that grows faster than its income does, the constituency for tax reform has shrunk. But perhaps a population’s dwindling isn’t a legitimate reason to ignore it. Perhaps conservatives fear a tyranny of the majority as much as they fear irresponsible spending and unfair taxes.Let us not forget how Roesgen’s example is emblematic of the myth of objectivity in today’s mainstream media, regardless of which side of the aisle is the culprit.—-Contact Daniel Lumetta@[email protected] Lumetta is a 22-year-old mass communication senior from Metairie.