Interesting breakdown on how the "Times" figures crowd size. The writer thinks it is bias. Hmm. Ranting Profs.
PROTECTING THE "PEACE" MOVEMENT AGAIN
By Cori Dauber
I wasn't blogging during the run-up to the war or during the war itself, so y'all never saw some of my best arguments. But, interestingly, the anniversary is giving me a chance to bring some of them out since the media is replaying some of the coverage.
For example, their coverage of the anti-war marches yesterday replays exactly the same pattern as their coverage before the war. The principle seems to be: give them as much attention as possible, but protect them from themselves. Last year, for example, as is well known, the major marches were all organized by ANSWER, a truly odious group. And because they were the march organizers, they grabbed all the microphone time for themselves and their friends. Now, if you watched any of the march on C-SPAN what you saw were the speeches and whatever word would come to mind to describe that motley crew, "mainstream" would not be it. But because the networks were invested in the storyline that the marches were populated by a veritable "cross section of America," every bit of footage I saw focused on middle America: teachers, doctors, grandmothers, bankers, and I never once saw a word from the podium used in a network news piece.
It is interesting, given the principle is to nonetheless give these marches as much attention as possible, that this piece nytimes.com isn't in the dead tree Times. Now, I can only speak for the paper I get, which is the version of the National Edition that goes to the southeast. Not only is the National different from the Metro, there are slight differences between the regional editions, and because the Sunday edition goes out earlier, it's the paper with the most variation region to region. I'll bet it's in as many regionals as possible, because the Times got into some trouble with the movement by giving a lower head count to one of the earlier marches in the run-up to the war than the movement liked, and they've been very good boys and girls since.
Indeed, when it comes to providing a head count, they studiously avoid doing so:
It is virtually impossible to guess the size of crowds without wading into a swamp of politics. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said there were about 3,000 demonstrators on each city block. Since Madison Avenue from roughly 23rd to 34th Street was filled before the march, that would mean some 33,000 people. The march's organizers, on the other hand, said there were more than 100,000.
That's a difference of 70,000 people. Note the implication of their reporting: any number we provide would be political. No, any number you provide would lead to a charge of playing politics, but that doesn't mean that everyone providing a number has a political motive. Bloomberg's number isn't just pulled out of a hat, it comes from City police and park officials and is generated from numerical formula. But phrased this way, the Times creates the assumption that it comes from the Mayor a political official, rather than the professionals that work for him. So, given a spread of 70,000, a reader is likely to simply shrug, assuming there's no way to know, when in fact one of these numbers has been generated by apolitical professionals, one by marchers who really do have an agenda and a reason to drive the number up as high as possible.
Once again the groups supporting the marches are absent, as the marchers are for the most part aggressively mainstreamed.
The presence of counter-demonstrators in Fayetteville was left unmentioned.http://www.fayettevillenc.com/story.php?Template=news&Story=6243208 More interesting to me then the presence or absence of counter-demonstraters in Fayetteville is where those protesters came from. Every story I saw mentioned the protest outside Ft. Bragg. That is, of course, newsworthy -- peace protest outside military base! -- because the implication in every single story was that it was people from that community who were protesting. I was extraordinarily skeptical of that implication. Fayetteville is essentially an Army town and despite the escalating number of stories about military families turning against the war, those are stories about soldiers moms (in other words, family members who are not really "military families" in the sense of being totally absorbed in the military community, the military life, the military support system). I had big doubts that there would be a peace rally in Fayetteville made up mostly of people who live in Fayetteville. Surely enough: at least some of them were people who had driven to the base to protest at the base.
But you had to go to the local Fayetteville paper (a paper for people who probably already knew that) to find that out. |
