A Tea Party Note
I was watching Keith Olbermann tonight. He and a guest were discussing what would happen if not very many people turned out for the Great Tea Parties tomorrow. They thought it would be a huge humiliation for the right wing.
Sorry to disagree with you, Keith. To make my point, I want to show some pictures.
The first two are from the famous toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad after our invasion. The first picture is typical of the views of this event that made it into the American press, and seems to show a sizable crowd around the statue. The other photo, taken during this event, and which was readily available at the time, is a view of the entire plaza, showing the truth about this virtually nonexistent event. The whole thing was nothing but propaganda, but our press did
n't bother to let us know this.
The next two pictures are of the famous demonstrations at Terry Schiavo's hospice some years ago. Do you remember those? They were featured almost nonstop on cable news for weeks. As you see, neither of these pictures shows more than a couple of dozen people. This is consistent with what I remember from that time. I looked at dozens of pictures of these demonstrations for this post, and none of them shows significantly more people than this. There is no evidence that there were ever more than a few dozen people participating in these demonstrations, and yet the news media played them up as though they represented some gigantic outpouring of popular concern.
A final story: I happened to be in Washington during the last Iraq march a few years ago. I have been to a number of these large demonstrations, dating back to the Vietnam war, and based on that experience, I would estimate that there were in the neighborhood of 350,000 people there. The right wingers scheduled a "counterdemonstration" on the mall at the same time. I wandered over to see it out of curiosity. I would say I was being generous to suggest that there were 200 people at that event. And yet, what coverage there was in the national media gave virtually equal coverage to each event.
Thanks to Republican deregulation of the media, TV and radio stations and newspapers are now owned by huge corporations. Like any other corporation, they are interested in nothing but their own profits, and will consequently report anything in a manner that favors their friends the Republicans. So don't expect anything like accurate reporting of this in the media.
As an aside, I will mention that I am going to a couple of tea parties tomorrow. I'll report back about what I see.
Sorry to disagree with you, Keith. To make my point, I want to show some pictures.
The first two are from the famous toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad after our invasion. The first picture is typical of the views of this event that made it into the American press, and seems to show a sizable crowd around the statue. The other photo, taken during this event, and which was readily available at the time, is a view of the entire plaza, showing the truth about this virtually nonexistent event. The whole thing was nothing but propaganda, but our press did
n't bother to let us know this.
The next two pictures are of the famous demonstrations at Terry Schiavo's hospice some years ago. Do you remember those? They were featured almost nonstop on cable news for weeks. As you see, neither of these pictures shows more than a couple of dozen people. This is consistent with what I remember from that time. I looked at dozens of pictures of these demonstrations for this post, and none of them shows significantly more people than this. There is no evidence that there were ever more than a few dozen people participating in these demonstrations, and yet the news media played them up as though they represented some gigantic outpouring of popular concern.
A final story: I happened to be in Washington during the last Iraq march a few years ago. I have been to a number of these large demonstrations, dating back to the Vietnam war, and based on that experience, I would estimate that there were in the neighborhood of 350,000 people there. The right wingers scheduled a "counterdemonstration" on the mall at the same time. I wandered over to see it out of curiosity. I would say I was being generous to suggest that there were 200 people at that event. And yet, what coverage there was in the national media gave virtually equal coverage to each event.
Thanks to Republican deregulation of the media, TV and radio stations and newspapers are now owned by huge corporations. Like any other corporation, they are interested in nothing but their own profits, and will consequently report anything in a manner that favors their friends the Republicans. So don't expect anything like accurate reporting of this in the media.
As an aside, I will mention that I am going to a couple of tea parties tomorrow. I'll report back about what I see.
Comments
I remember at the time of the statue of Sadaam coming down seeing the same clip of the fat guy in Arab dress dancing being played over and over again endlessly
I remember thinking to myself at the time I haven't seen anyone interview this guy.
We have no idea who this guy is or what his story is.
For all we know he could be Crazy Ali, the village crazy who's been dancing non-stop ever since he got kicked in the head by that camel.