Liberal media advocacy organization Media Matters has a message for everyone in the media: "The Tea Party movement has collapsed." The watchdog's Eric Boehlert explains why, beginning with an anecdote about how a recent Tea Party rally in Philadelphia, heavily promoted and featuring Andrew Breitbart, enjoyed only ten percent of their anticipated audience of 3,000.

Memo to the media: The Tea Party movement has collapsed. And its collapse means it’s time for the press to rethink the way it covers the political equivalent of the Pet Rock, a fad that appears to be in its waning days of popularity.

I’d suggest that for more than a year the Beltway press has spent far too many man-hours obsessively chronicling the conservative Tea Partiers. Part of that overindulgence has been fueled by the bullying GOP Noise Machine, which has demanded around-the-clock Tea Party coverage as proof that journalists aren’t liberally biased. And part of it has simply been the media’s attraction to a political story that was new and rather unorthodox.

But it’s time to pull the plug, or at least it’s time for the press to tell the truth about the Tea Party’s rather sad state of affairs.

Media Matters is joined in this position by MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who said last night on his show, "The views of the Tea Party may not even reflect the views of most Republics. In race after race, the Tea Party wing of the Republican party was unable to even win the Republican wing of the Republican party."

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