Red Meat for Limbaugh and Beck - Courtesy of the New York Times
In their Sunday editions, the New York Times and other major dailies (my hometown Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, for example) gave Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Shawn Hannity huge hunks of red meat for their Monday shows.
Expect to hear repeatedly about how the New York Times in its national edition (which is the edition available in Chicago) stuck the story about Saturday's "Taypayer March on Washington," not on the front page and not even on the front page of the second ("National") section, but way back on page 33. In the Tribune it landed on page 41 under the headline, "Conservatives vent at Obama." (The Tribune's web site carried the head, "Massive crowd marches against Obama's Agenda." The story didn't make the print Sun-Times at all.
As the Washington Post reported -- on the front page of the print edition -- the rally outside the U.S. Capitol, mostly against "Obamacare," "appeared to number in the many tens of thousands."
The fact that so many people gathered from so many states deserved to be reported. And so did the fact that so many of the chants -- "Liar! Liar!" and so many of the placards -- Obama's likeness defaced with a Hitler mustache, "Liar in Chief," "Bury Universal Health Care -- Along with Senator Kennedy" -- were so extreme, so mean, so scary, also deserved to be reported. And yes, some of the marchers were still asking for the President's birth certificate.
Underplaying the story feeds into the Obama-haters' belief that the elite print media are seriously biased against the right of center, and that the story might have received better play had the crowds been sparser.
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Unlike Limbaugh and Beck, the newspapers don't feel that this 'movement' is real and so treat it as the non-story it really is. 50,000 birthers and assorted ignorami do not constitute a movement.
Hopefully, there will be some, reasonably objective report on the crowd size.
Are there any, verifiably valid areial photos that can be used to get some sort of ball park estimate?
Let's not forget the controversy over the Million Man March. Organizers claimed two million or more attended. I believe the DC police estimated 400, 000.
It's not just conservative protests that have these crowd estimate issues.
But say it is "only" 75,000.
When is the last time you saw a protest attended by 75,000 americans?
I think 75,000 attendees probably puts it, at least in the top 20 protests of the last decade, maybe the top 10.
Was it organized? Sure. Is any large protest in the US ever unorganized?
Ah, but organized by whom? Dick Armey and his FreedomWorks people and Glenn Beck. It was advertised hourly on Fox News.
Protestors against the war were anti-war. These people had only one thing in common: hate for the president. Their signs weren't even in sync.
DC Police did NOT put the crowd at 400,000. Where did you come up with that number? They said it was more like 70,000. That many people show up at an NFL game on any given week and we have local colleges that can easily draw 85,000. This is not even remotely close to being in "the top 10-20 protests" and you might want to do a little more research before you make such statements.
How many people were there at the pro health care reform rally in Washington DC on Sunday? I haven't heard any mention of it in print or tv media. Maybe there were so many libs there that they couldn't fit them in the pictures or count them ? The nyt and other lib left media just re-enforces what I've known all along. They will name call, smear and do anything in their power to slam anyone who disagrees with them. This is why nyt and other lib print media are going out of business.
Time line of the usual Big Lie:
1.0 Have event
2.0 Lie about event, exaggerate event, publish picture of 1997 Promise Keeper rally.
3.0 Liberal media fails to cover event for 1 news cycle (30 minutes), waiting for some semi-realistic version to appear.
4.0 FOX kicks in: apocalypse!!!, dogs sleeping with cats!!!, end of world as we know it!!!, weeping/gnashing of teeth!!!, Osama DustBin Laden/Sarah Palin Tweets!!!
5.0 Truth comes out.
6.0 Too, late, 2,000,000 Tea Partyers is now conventional wisdom.
7.0 Accumulate grievances, go back to step 1.0.
Change FOX news to "Mainstream Media", Tea Partyers to Bush Haters, and "liberal media" to "conxervative media", and your prescription has worked very well for the democrats.
No matter which side you think is right, it is not just all strategy and tactics.
The substance of these issues matters.
So, how shall we resolve these differences?
Well, our founders, after considering 2000 years ot the human experience, decided that free speech was the best way to determine the truth.
The citizens of our country, exercising their right to free speech, the the rights of others to free speech, will make the decision.
I quote liberals who have believed in this:
"We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people." ~John F. Kennedy
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all". ~Noam Chomsky
"Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent and debate." Hubert Humphrey
No liberal assassinated a president.
Should free speech cover flat out lies? You can be wrong but once proven wrong you should correct your statements or at least shut up but these guys keep pushing even when it has been reported and confirmed that they are lying.
That goes past freedom of speech and crosses into propaganda.
If it was on the front page they would complain, if it was buried in the back they would complain and if it was left out all together they would complain. Somehow the Right Wing Echo Chamber would put a bad spin on the coverage and a positive spin on those patriots that showed up to protest (what ever it was they were protesting
"Underplaying the story feeds into the Obama-haters' belief that the elite print media are seriously biased against the right of center,"
Not biased against the right of center, just the extreme far right of center. (AKA "the nutters", "them crazy folk", and "Beck watchers".
*EVERYTHING* feeds into the gops' persecution complex, and talk radio prospers by pandering to it with the anal-retentiveness of a semiotics major at PCU. Remember how they insisted that God sent Katrina to punish America for tolerating homosexuality and abortion because somehow the radar track of the storm looked like a prenatal sonogram? I even had a gop politicize geography on me once: after I repeated a joke praising LA at San Diego's expense, the gop said that LA was a leftist city because it was geographically west (literally to the left) of San Diego.
Alright, so there were only 50,000, but they were all very, large.
It's called "Working the Ref". If they cry "Liberal bias!" often enough it becomes part of the conventional wisdom.
what an apt image for the cannibals.
Your argument is unconvincing; if anything the march - by only 30,000 according to the police, possibily 60, 000 according to the fire department - was small potatoes that was way over-played; "many tens of thousands" is an enlarged indeterminant number a spin-descriptor carried in most major media, allowing FreedomWatch (a privatre sector PR firm dedicate to right-wing advocacy), which organized the march, to magnify its crowd numbers by out-right lie. No, catering to the looney right just makes them loonier. No thanks.
The officials and organizations reporting these numbers did not want to inflate them--the minimum number I found in lots of research I did on Sunday was 75,000.
I am a bit math challenged but even given the higher number of 75,000, using the wording of Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh and the other conservative talk show hosts promoting this event as a "nationwide anti-big government protest", wouldn't that translate to like a grand total of only 1,500 people from each of the 50 states who actually showed up at the 9/12 event in Washington? If their programs reach millions of people every day and this protest was advertised for months in advance, then what percentage of their audience actually attended the tea party?
No one but Luddites like Limbaugh & Hannity reads the print edition any more.
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