Sen. John Kerry: Media Should Not Give Equal Time to Tea Party

Speaking Friday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" talk show, U.S. Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said that the media has the duty to not give equal time or acceptance to the Tea Party's views.

"And I have to tell you, I say this 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," Kerry said.

"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?"

On Thursday, the Democratic Massachusetts senator lambasted the tea party for equating compromise to a "form of treason" and almost forcing the country to default by blocking efforts in Washington to raise the federal debt ceiling "that would have guaranteed a financial crisis more severe than anything since the Great Depression."

"We have to change the minds of those people in the House of Representative who have appropriately focused on the deficit but who have completely inappropriately left out any kind of plans whatsoever for how you create jobs and grow America," he said. "I mean, we've literally... I mean everybody's talked about it, yes. The Congress has taken hostage -- the country-the economy-it was taken hostage. You had people there who were literally read to cut the baby in half."

In response, the Greater Boston Tea Party issued a statement:

"Tea Party activists are proud of the Tea Party Caucus in Congress standing up for sane fiscal policy during the debt ceiling debate... If anyone is holding Americans hostage, it is ideologues on the left like Senator Kerry who continue to insist their vision of a big government nanny state will eventually solve all the world's ills, if only common sense would surrender."