by Steven D. Greydanus Monday, January 23, 2012 5:36 AM
A photo I took at the 2011 March.
Original post
Monday morning, 5:30am.
39 years after Roe v. Wade, the 39th annual March for Life is slated to make its way up Constitution Avenue later today. This will be my fifth year attending the March, and my third year live-blogging via iPhone. I’m about to get in my van with my father and my older kids and hit the road, picking up friends along the way.
Each year, always on a weekday, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators (of various faiths, and of none) converge on Washington, DC to protest the gravest moral evil of our times, a horror that ranks with the Holocaust and slavery in the annals of man’s inhumanity to man.
The March for Life is much more than a one-day event. It’s a multi-day rally that includes rallies, discussion panels, film screenings, Masses, and a reception and dinner after the March. Many demonstrators make a point of stopping at Capitol Hill to see their representatives.
Each year, the mainstream media ignores, downplays and spins the event. In particular, media reports seem to take pains to hide the sheer numbers of the participants.
Granted, crowd estimates are always contentious and subject to spin in both directions, but the 2009 Washington Times report that the March for Life consistently draws crowds of 250,000 is credible, and attendance for more recent rallies has been estimated even higher—as high as 400,000 for 2011.
Even for skeptics doubting these numbers, the media deflation of the rally numbers is staggering. Vague media references to mere “thousands” of demonstrators—not even “tens of thousands,” let alone “hundreds of thousands”—have appeared in numerous outlets over the years, including New York Times (2007, 2004), the Washington Post, USA Today andCNN.com’s Religion Blog. That’s when they report on the March at all.
Occasionally, a slightly franker order of magnitude slips through: “tens of thousands” was allowed by the Washington Post in 2010, USA Today in 2008 and the New York Times in 2006. Other times, no order of magnitude is mentioned at all, leaving readers unclear whether the event drew participants in double digits, three or more, etc. (e.g., AP).
Photo coverage is equally selective. Carefully chosen camera angles are used to depict only a few demonstrators at a time—or even, in the case of that CNN.com Religion Blog story, a single protester praying in front of the Supreme Court building. Seldom does a major media outlet offer a shot depicting the vast throng of marchers flooding Constitution Avenue.
Far and away the most blatant misreporting I’ve seen to date was a CNN.com story from two years ago.
The story began with the almost Orwellian sentence “Abortion rights supporters and opponents hit the streets of the nation’s capital Friday…”—not only suggesting a picture of two roughly comparable, opposed rallies, as opposed to one massive event with a handful of counter-demonstrators, but actually citing the pro-choice demonstrators first.
Accompanying the story was a two-photo slideshow leading with a photo of a few pro-choice demonstrators with “Keep Abortion Legal” signs. Only if you click to the second photo do you see a number of pro-life demonstrators (photographed, of course, from an angle that gives no hint of the size of the rally).
