Imagine you’re a month-old political group that exists chiefly on Facebook. You’ve never mounted a protest of any size or significance. You’ve collected $500 in online donations. Your first meeting in the Seattle area generated less enthusiasm than a 2003 demonstration against a local latte tax.

Question: How much media coverage can you realistically expect?

A. A big story in your neighborhood shopper.

B. A little story in your metropolitan daily.

C. A 1,700-word feature story, three photos and an online chat session, all courtesy of the Washington Post.

Answer: C, provided you’re a left-leaning organization with a name and an aim that mock one of the mainstream media’s least-loved populist movements, the Tea Party.

How else to explain the news judgment behind the Post‘s February 26 article, “Coffee Party activists say their civic brew’s a tastier choice than Tea Party’s,” which gives bottles of free ink to a barely born group known as Coffee Party USA? As Post writer Dan Zak enthuses:

Furious at the tempest over the Tea Party–the scattershot citizen uprising against big government and wild spending–Annabel Park did what any American does when she feels her voice has been drowned out: She squeezed her anger into a Facebook status update.

In an apparent swipe at the Tea Party, Zak says the Coffee Party’s goals are to:

promote civility and inclusiveness in political discourse, engage the government not as an enemy but as the collective will of the people, push leaders to enact the progressive change for which 52.9 percent of the country voted in 2008.

Zak adds that “the Coffee Party is percolating in at least 30 states…Kind of like the Tea Party did this last year, spawning 1,200 chapters, a national conference and a march on Washington.”

Well, not much like the Tea Party did this last year. Its first event took place last February in Seattle, where 120 taxpayers answered 29-year-old conservative blogger Keli Carender’s call to “protest the porkulus bill.” Demonstrations in Colorado, Arizona and Kansas soon followed, and in March 2009 a throng of 5,000 assembled in Cincinnati for what some observers called the city’s largest protest since the Vietnam War.

In contrast, the Coffee Party drew 15 people to its initial Seattle meeting–deemed “a better turnout than expected”–and was lambasted by several attendees as disorganized and amateurish.

And while the Tea Party quickly coalesced around average Americans’ outrage at irresponsible and unresponsive government, the Coffee Party is still struggling to brew something stronger than Tea Party backlash and hosannas to progressivism. Its Web site features the vague Kumbaya declaration that “we will come together as a community to create collaborative environments for practicing democracy, online and offline.”

None of this, of course, is meant to imply that there’s anything wrong with citizens–liberal or otherwise–using a social networking site to unite in a common, peaceful interest. That’s as much freedom of speech as the Tea Party protests.

The issue is whether the Washington Post applies identical criteria in evaluating the newsworthiness of right- and left-wing citizen activist groups. Key evidence comes, surprisingly, from the newspaper itself.

Last April, the Post‘s own media critic, Howard Kurtz, pulled no punches in assessing national coverage of Tea Party rallies: “Most of the mainstream media fell down on the job, ignoring the growing movement or mocking it as a bunch of wingnuts.” Kurtz even zinged his own employer for journalistic dereliction:

The New York Times has run zero stories … The Washington Post has done zip until today, with a story on two planned D.C. parties on Page B-4 … The Boston Globe, published in the city famed for the original tea party: nothing. CNN ran its first news story on the protests Monday … MSNBC’s coverage had consisted of Rachel Maddow and Ana Marie Cox mocking the ‘teabagging.’

But it’s hardly the first time the mainstream media have ignored news that fillets their sacred cows (Climategate, Van Jones, the ACORN scandal) or have used not-ready-for-prime-time citizen activists as ventriloquists’ dummies to mouth their own views (The New York Times‘ 2003 hyping of Martha Burk during its quixotic crusade against the Augusta National Golf Club).

In spotlighting the Coffee Party, the Post has promoted another fledgling cause, which counted 9,000 Facebook fans before the article appeared and 37,000 three days later, compared to the nearly 100,000 fans of the Tea Party Patriots. But if cyber-support equaled newsworthiness, the Post would be devoting major space to Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies, which has garnered 1.5 million fans on Facebook.

The Tea Party grew from the grass roots like a lawn on steroids, yet didn’t catch the Post‘s eye until tens of thousands of its adherents were practically marching past the newspaper’s front window. Conversely, the Coffee Party received feature-story treatment without ever transcending Web sites and coffee houses.

Bias in The Washington Post‘s news coverage? It’s all there in black and white.