They made a superstar of lone Iraq War protester Cindy Sheehan. They cover every G-8 protest -- involving paid protesters, by the way -- like it's the second coming of the American Revolution.

Yet, when ordinary Americans are mad enough to take to the streets -- as they will tonight at the Augusta Tea Party and other tea parties across the nation -- the mainstream media are wholly unimpressed.

On Monday, as momentum began in earnest for today's tea parties to protest runaway federal spending, CNN.com's feature story was that women over 55 are flocking to Facebook.

The other big news of the day: The Obamas name their dog.

The mainstream media seem not to want this protest to happen -- while they gleefully report on any protest pushing left-wing notions.

In the alternative, they desperately want the tea party movement to be a passing fancy.

"I'd bet my Borsalino hat that five years from now the tea party of 2009 is going to be considered little more than a fad that flopped," writes blogger John Tantillo. "In fact, it shouldn't even be compared to the monumental event that kicked our great country off with a rebellious bang."

We'll see. But why declare the movement a failure before it's even been given a chance -- unless it doesn't fit with your agenda?

Not everyone is that close-minded. As the left-wing media snore and sniff their noses at the tea partiers, an online citizen-journalist site called Pajamas TV says it has more than 200 volunteer citizen-journalists covering the tea parties.

Media critic Howard Kurtz oddly chastised Fox News Channel for covering the tea party movement too much -- but added, "On the other hand, CNN and MSNBC may have dropped the ball by all-but-ignoring the protests."

Some think this is a partisan thing. It isn't, and it can't be. George W. Bush and his Republican co-dependents in Congress outspent everyone else in U.S. history, and the Democrats under Obama are doubling down on it.

They're all to blame.

Whether this grass roots anger is a fad or not is wholly up to the people involved. If they just want to vent, then the air will escape quickly.

If, on the other hand, people truly are concerned about and willing to work to fix our country's economic future, then it will indeed be a movement.

And much of the news media will have been caught by surprise.

(The Augusta Tea Party will be from 5 to 10 p.m. today at the Jessye Norman Amphitheater on the Augusta Riverwalk downtown. )