How convenient for those who wish to paint the entire Peace Movement with a single brush.
Ken, this isn't the 60's and Iraq isn't Vietnam. So far all I have seen is a "No War for Oil" movement.
Glenn Reynolds has a good piece on ANSWER vs. the marchers, with lots of links to the coverage in the media and the blogosphere (you'll have to go to the article to get the links):
OH, THAT LIBERAL MEDIA...
I’ve been reading an advance copy of fellow MSNBC-blogger Eric Alterman’s book, “What Liberal Media?” Alterman tries, sometimes successfully, to demonstrate that some claims of media bias are overblown, or reflect cultural assumptions among reporters rather than deliberate political distortion.
But what explains the treatment that major media gave the International A.N.S.W.E.R. group that organized this past weekend’s antiwar protests? David Corn has written critically about A.N.S.W.E.R. both in The Nation and in the L.A. Weekly, and points out that it is a front group (yes, they still have those!) for the Workers’ World Party, a “small revolutionary-socialist outfit with a fancy for North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il and the goal of abolishing private property.” To those decidedly non-mainstream views, add support for Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and, of course, Saddam Hussein. (Is there an anti-American dictator with bad hair and/or a mustache that they don’t like? Not as far as I can tell.) When such charges come from David Corn and appear in The Nation, it’s hard to dismiss them as right-wing propaganda. And it’s hard for journalists to claim ignorance. But most mainstream coverage of the protests makes no mention of A.N.S.W.E.R.’s unsavory connections, or minimizes them drastically.
A.N.S.W.E.R. figured prominently in this Saturday Washington Post story on the protests, but its connection to the Workers’ World Party, and its general anti-Americanism go unmentioned. The same is true for this Post story. Similarly, this New York Times story mentions A.N.S.W.E.R. but without reference to its controversial views. (An earlier Post story, reproduced on A.N.S.W.E.R.’s Web site, mentions, but dismisses, a few of A.N.S.W.E.R.’s dubious connections).
The latter story quotes one antiwar activist as saying “I’m told they’re some kind of radicals, but I don’t care. Good organizers are worth their weight in gold.” It’s understandable, of course, that some antiwar protesters might feel that way, but it’s rather odd that the press should take such accounts at face value. And this is where the charges of liberal bias start to stick. If it were a pro-war rally organized by a group that was really controlled by the Ku Klux Klan, I somehow think the press accounts would make more mention of who was behind it, and what their agenda was. Just look at how reporters ferreted out white supremacist connections to groups that Trent Lott spoke to, or to Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign.
This has become quite a source of discussion in the blogosphere, with bloggers Tacitus and Megan McArdle challenging anti-war bloggers to renounce A.N.S.W.E.R., and bloggers Radley Balko, Oliver Willis, and Jim Henley responding. (Henley’s response is the briefest: “Tacitus wonders, incredulously, if I’m saying that ‘It’s okay to march at a Stalinist-sponsored event so long as they’re inefficient and inept Stalinists?’ Actually, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”)
The conversation within the blogosphere has been interesting and thoughtful (see the literally hundreds of comments accompanying Tacitus’s post). But it’s a conversation that has been almost completely absent from the mainstream coverage of the protests — coverage that, so far from looking behind the story as journalists are supposed to, tends to take participants’ statements at face value even when that’s absurd. As blogger Mitch Berg points out, news stories tend to portray activists as ordinary, concerned Americans when a simple Google search will reveal a rather different background.
Does this mean that journalists are closet Stalinists, covering for their comrades in furtherance of the Revolution? Of course not. I think it stems more from a combination of laziness (“Don’t these people use Google?” professor-blogger Brad DeLong is fond of asking) and a feeling that there’s something vaguely retro and McCarthyite about calling someone a “communist front group” — even if they are. But whatever the reason, this sort of behavior does the same kind of work that a biased media would do, and thus lends support to charges of bias.
For some interesting blogosphere coverage of the protests in D.C. and San Francisco, click here and — here, and don’t miss this exclusive, if brief, blogger interview with Ralph Nader. There’s even a photo.
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