By The Numbers… How the Media Has Attempted to Minimize the March

Before the September 12 March on Washington, Democrat strategists predicted that between 50,000 and 2 million protesters would demonstrate.  After the event, the State Media, predictably, has made their attempt to minimize the impact of the backlash against their messiah.

by Michael Naragon

For those of you who are conservative and have long known that the State Media is biased against those who oppose their philosophy, the tone of the reporting is exactly what you would expect.  I myself try to avoid the American counterparts of Tass and Pravda as much as humanly possible, preferring news to commentary.  However, when I heard the report from ABC News Radio on Sunday morning, I had to do the audio version of a double-take.

“As many as 75,000 protesters marched down Pennsylvania Avenue,” the report began.  “75,000?” I wondered aloud.  “How are they going to pull off that number, given the wide angle shots?”

Curious, I perused other “mainstream” media sources to see if they had all coordinated their misinformation as completely as usual.  Sure enough, here was the informal result:

ABC News Online:  “Thousands of conservative protesters from across the country converged on the Capitol Saturday morning to demonstrate against President Obama’s proposals for health care reform and voicing opposition to big government, what they say is over-the-top spending.  Carrying signs depicting President Obama as Adolf Hitler and the Joker, and chanting slogans such as ‘No big government’ and ‘Obamacare makes me sick,’ approximately 60,000 to 70,000 people flooded Pennsylvania Ave, according to the Washington DC Fire Department.”  ABC followed the lead of many of the other agencies, choosing to focus on some protesters’ equating Obama with Hitler or making statements about the Second Amendment.  In this way, they not only minimize the numbers, but reduce the demonstrators to some sort of cartoonish fringe.

Associated Press:  “Thousands marched on Washington…”  Not even tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, which also would have been downplaying the numbers.  “Thousands” could have been used to describe the crowd at Roswell, Georgia’s Tea Party as well.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution:  Tea Party organizers “estimated the size of the crowd, which stretched for blocks and spilled over to the National Mall, at 1.5 million, but that was unlikely based on the size of crowds at previous events in the capital. The Associated Press estimated the crowd’s size in the tens of thousands.”  The hyper-liberal Atlanta rag continues its foray through failure by alienating much of its potential readership in the state of Georgia.  This sort of commentary explains why I receive calls from the newspaper on an almost daily basis, begging for subscriptions.  But at least they’re going down with guns blazing.

Washington Post: “With the gathering of tens of thousands of conservative protesters in Washington for a ‘Taxpayer March on D.C.,’ Republican officials are attempting to capitalize on a movement that lately has galvanized anti-Obama activists more effectively than the party’s elected leaders in Washington.”  This Post commentary tried to characterize the event as being personal against the president, a theme that was echoed by other organizations, such as National Public Radio.

New York Daily News:  “Tens of thousands of people thronged to the National Mall Saturday, propelled by the belief that President Obama will do evil, deny care to the elderly and destroy the Constitution and country.”  In one of the more over-the-top leads, the Daily News attempted to caricature the movement into one made up of crazies who are either misinformed or misinforming.  Notice the sly use of “evil,” undoubtedly to try to link the Tea Parties with the Christian Right, the hated, habitual target of Leftist philosophes.

NPR Online: “Tens of thousands of people marched through Washington Saturday to protest President Obama’s proposed health care plans. The rowdy pilgrimage capped a series of conservative “Tea Party” rallies across the country.”  Again, tens of thousands.  Again, “rowdy.”

Robert Gibbs, when asked on September 11 about the March:  “I don’t know who the group is.”  ‘Nuff said.  By denying knowledge of the event or those sponsoring it, the White House Press Secretary paints himself as either an egregious liar or an uninformed fool.  When you’re the media representative for arguably the most powerful man in the world, which is worse?

Daily Mail (UK) Online:  “Up to two million people marched to the U.S. Capitol today, carrying signs with slogans such as “Obamacare makes me sick” as they protested the president’s health care plan and what they say is out-of-control spending.”  Does it strike anyone else as sad that the one media organization that placed the number anywhere close to reality was a foreign service?  This is a sad commentary on the state of our country’s journalistic integrity, though at this juncture, the American Media’s lack of scruples is no longer surprising.  Interestingly, the Daily Mail was also one of the only media sites to publish a wide-angle shot of the crowds on the Mall, giving visual credence to their estimate.

For those who would defend our lackluster reporters, I understand the fact that they gave themselves an out: Pennsylvania Avenue.  The Associated Press was very careful to give the estimate that the Fire Department made on that street alone.  No reference was made to the National Mall or to the thousands who were turned away because of traffic concerns.  They simply ran with “tens of thousands,” ignoring other official estimates that put the number around 1.2 million.

We obviously are not surprised by our State Media’s persective on events.  They invested a good deal of money and effort to get Barack Obama elected, and they, therefore, would like to see him succeed.  They would like to see his policies succeed.  They would rather demonize Joe Wilson for yelling at the president than do the necessary journalistic analysis on H.R. 3200 to show he was right.  And they would rather leave the real investigative reporting to a couple of amateurs who exposed the ACORN organization.

Is it getting repetitive to show the biases of our Media giants?  Yes.  But we cannot be reminded enough who opposes our efforts to see that the Constitution be maintained as the law of the land in the United States, and, sadly, the members of our Fourth Estate have placed themselves squarely in the camp of fascism and control.