The front page of my local "news"paper today has the headline "Thousands" protest Obama health care plan in Washington.
Many diaries yesterday hit upon the dishonesty about crowd estimates. The fact is you couldn't print "tens of thousands rally" because there's no evidence it was more than a couple of thousand of the cranks out there, including who knows how many GOP staffers manning the astroturf rolls.
In the meantime, President Obama spoke before 15,000 people in Minnesota. Documented. This story was buried at the back of the front section in my paper.
Remember Nixon yakking on about the "silent majority"? Sarah Palin talking about the hidden hordes of Real Americans? Or perhaps the statistically and ethically challenged Rep. Joe Wilson discussing the '85%' of people opposed to the Obama plan? Simply asserting that a vast army of people support something, in the face of actual evidence to the contrary, ranging from national polling data to the count of butts-on-the-ground at the competing rally (one of them in "real" America, i.e. not Washington DC), does not make it so.
Even NPR lead yesterday with stories about the Washington "protests". This lazy form of journalism is itself a disease in our republic.
It's time to stand up to the corporate media, who are willfully distorting this story. I'm writing to my paper, and will be calling them Monday morning asking why their editors didn't put the President on the front page and the teabaggers on the back page. I've already written to NPR. If you've seen something similar in the coverage you've been following, please do the same.