NYT: “Thousands rally in Capitol to protest Big Government”
NYT: “Thousands rally in Minnesota behind health care reform.
Same as, right? 15,000 folks in Minnesota, so 15,000 in Washington. Nothing to see here, move along, move along. But then there’s this:
British Mail: “Two million at Tea Party protest in Washington”
Something is happening here,
and you don’t know what it is,
Do you, Mr. Jones Schulzberger?
And here’s this email from Clark Hoyt, NYT Public Editor, reponding to critics who felt the Times ignored the Van Jones story:
My own view is that the Jones story was overblown. While he clearly once described himself as a communist, by the time he wrote his best-selling book, “The Green Collar Economy,” he was a champion of entrepreneurial capitalism. But conservatives, particularly Glenn Beck, were making much of Jones’s past statements, Republicans in Congress were decrying the appointment of “czars” as a way around the Senate confirmation process, and all of it was a story worth noting. By passing on it as it was developing, The Times allowed its readers to be blindsided by a resignation seemingly from nowhere and reinforced the impression of conservatives that the newspaper is tone deaf to their concerns or, worse, deliberately ignores them.
Gee, Clark, ya think?
Good to see the secular decline in influence (and economic value) of mainstream, commie-leaning, analog media like NYT
Net and blogs have changed competitive dynamics of real-time info/data available for the masses….checks and balances
Thanks once again to the Drudge Report for linking the Daily Mail story on the 9/12 Washington Tea Party. Drudge is our Obama-era “Radio Free Europe”, is he not?
Check out Michelle Malkin’s site. The pictures are awsome. Next time perhaps more Greenwich folk will bear witness.
US Park service estimated 1.2mm people and DC police estimated 1.5mm attendees. Credible sources the MTM chose to ignore because it does not fit thier agenda.
70, 000 attendance impressive – phonying up the facts – STUPID – negates the effectiveness of the argument – everything is easily fact checked…join the information age, people
The story:
“Tea party” photo shows huge crowd — at different event
By Catharine Richert
Published on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 11:34 a.m.
Related rulings:
Pants on Fire!
Photo of “tea party” protests shows crowd sprawling from Capitol to Washington Monument
Bloggers, Saturday, September 12th, 2009.
Ruling: Pants on Fire! | Details
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Bloggers said this photo showed a gargantuan crowd at Saturday’s “tea party” protest. But it apparently was taken in 1997 at a Promise Keepers rally.
In the competitive world of Washington protests, crowd size is often a matter of dispute. Organizers usually boast of huge crowds, while police and the news media offer much smaller estimates.
So supporters of Saturday’s “tea party” protests against President Barack Obama were quick to highlight their big turnout. To bolster countless claims on blogs and Facebook, many posted a photograph that showed a gargantuan crowd sprawling from Capitol Hill down the National Mall to the Washington Monument.
But it turns out the photo is more than 10 years old, apparently taken during a 1997 Promise Keepers rally.
On Saturday, estimates about the crowd spread quickly through the conservative blogosphere. Many writers, including author Michelle Malkin, pegged the number of people between 1 million and 2 million. Those reports were largely based on information from people in the crowd.
Malkin, for example, updated her blog at 12:34 p.m. noting that, “Police estimate 1.2 million in attendance. ABC News reporting crowd at 2 million,” and she cited a Twitter post from Tabitha Hale, writer of Pink Elephant Pundit, who was in Washington for the protest.
Many bloggers said the media was unfairly reporting much smaller numbers, and many included the photo.
“I have no doubt that Washington Democrats are well aware of how many people turned out, even as their media outlets try to downplay the event,” said Power Line, a conservative blog that linked to the photograph from Say Anything, another conservative Web site.
“ ‘Media’ estimates range from 60,000 to 500,000 to around 2 million (yes, 2,000,000),” wrote John G. Winder for the conservative blog Cypress Times. “Those estimates, the language employed, and the visuals chosen for use in reporting the rally and representing the people gathered, vary greatly based solely on bias.”
In the mainstream media, crowd estimates varied.
The New York Times reported that “thousands” of protesters “filled the west lawn of the Capitol and spilled onto the National Mall,” while Fox News wrote that “tens of thousands” marched on Washington. CNN said “reporters at the scene described the massive crowd as reaching the tens of thousands.”
Pete Piringer, public affairs officer for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Department, said the local government no longer provides official crowd estimates because they can become politicized. But the day of the rally, Piringer unofficially told one reporter that he thought between 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up.
“It was in no way an official estimate,” he said.
We asked Piringer whether there were enough protesters to fill the National Mall, as depicted in the photograph.
“It was an impressive crowd,” he said. But after marching down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol, the crowd “only filled the Capitol grounds, maybe up to Third Street,” he said.
Yet the photograph so widely posted showed the crowd sprawling all the way to the Washington Monument, which is bordered by 15th and and 17th Streets.
There’s another problem with the photograph: It doesn’t include the National Museum of the American Indian, a building located at the corner of Fourth Street and Independence Avenue that opened on Sept. 14, 2004. (Looking at the photograph, the building should be in the upper right hand corner of the National Mall, next to the Air and Space Museum.) That means the picture was taken before the museum opened exactly five years ago. So clearly the photo doesn’t show the “tea party” crowd from the Sept. 12 protest.
Also worth noting are the cranes in front of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. According to Randall Kremer, the museum’s director of public affairs, “The last time cranes were in front was in the 1990s when the IMAX theater was being built.”
It appears that the photo was actually taken in 1997 at a rally for Promise Keepers, a group for Christian men. According to the group’s Web site, nearly 1 million people attended the event. Photos of the Oct. 4, 1997, event that were posted on various Web sites in 2003, 2008 and earlier this year show either the same picture or a similar photo that has identical tents and what appear to be TV screens in the same locations.
Conservative bloggers who originally posted the picture have backed down.
Malkin, like some of her conservative cohorts, retracted the number she had attributed to ABC when the network chastised FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe, whose organization arranged the event, for inaccurately telling the crowd that the news organization had reported the crowd at 1 million to 1.5 million people.
Malkin linked to the ABC story on her site, and changed her blog post headline to “Celebrating the 9/12 rallies; Turnout estimated at 2 million; Update: How many?; FreedomWorks in error.”
Say Anything updated its original post to say that the picture was “of the wrong rally.” An accurate photo “clearly shows that (the rally) didn’t take place on the mall nearly as extensively as the image I mistakenly posted does.” Power Line took the picture down all together.
But because mistakes can still live forever on the Internet and many people who saw the photo on Facebook were unaware it was found to be the wrong picture, we decided to still rate it on the Truth-O-Meter. And Pants on Fire it is.
UPDATED: We updated this item with new details about the Promise Keepers photos.
Without going as long as you, AnonyMouse, there were live web cams of the demonstration, plus dozens of pictures sent in from participants, all over the web. You can deny , claim that there’s nothing to see, that the marchers were all dupes of nefarious corporate bad guys, but you are just lulling yourself to sleep. Which is fine by me.