Monday, May 18, 2009

Some Protests Are More Newsworthy Than Others

It appears New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has plagiarized liberal blogger Josh Marshall. Count me not shocked. It’s about what we’ve come to expect from the mainstream media these days. They are on life support, and they are doing their damnedest to make it hard for us to care.

Meanwhile, the rest of the MSM has covered anti-choice protests of President Obama’s Notre Dame commencement address ad nauseum. To be precise:
Since the announcement on March 20 that Obama would speak, The Washington Post alone has addressed the controversy in 11 articles and columns. The New York Times has dealt with it in eight columns and articles. And as for television news segments, there have been too many to count.

Even all three of our local TV news networks had to jump into the game last night. Which is, like, so funny because in all the times I showed up to protest President Bush the media only bothered to show up once. That was when Bush attended a fundraiser at Loew’s Vanderbilt Plaza; there were 200 protesters and five College Republicans. The College Republicans got as much air time as the protesters.

It wasn’t just Nashville. From the memory hole:

Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country protested the Iraq War on the weekend of September 24-25, with the largest demonstration bringing between 100,000 and 300,000 to Washington, D.C. on Saturday.

But if you relied on television for your news, you'd hardly know the protests happened at all. According to the Nexis news database, the only mention on the network newscasts that Saturday came on the NBC Nightly News, where the massive march received all of 87 words. (ABC World News Tonight transcripts were not available for September 24, possibly due to pre-emption by college football.)

Cable coverage wasn't much better. CNN, for example, made only passing references to the weekend protests.

Again, count me not shocked. When liberals protest a president, it isn’t news, because we all know that’s what DFH’s do: they protest. Always have, at least from the ’60s, right? We protest presidents, we protest wars. It’s such old news. *Yawn.* Dog bites man. But for some reason when conservatives protest a liberal president, it’s man bites dog. Suddenly, it’s “Backlash.” Thank you, CNN.

Even at the White House Correspondents Dinner last week, with all of the journalists in attendance, the only thing we heard was that Wanda Sykes offended Rush Limbaugh. Oh, boo fucking hoo. What, you can’t take it, tough guy?

Was that the only story from that night? No it was not. Seems a couple of DFH’s protested former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Not that you’d have known about it from watching CNN or reading the New York Times or Washington Post. Maybe they should have announced a "Protest With Arrests” on their website beforehand.

So in case you missed it, here it is: