At about 3 p.m. Saturday, one version of the reportage from the Associated Press's Philip Elliott concerning the "One Nation" rally in Washington opened as follows (saved here at host for future reference, fair use and discussion purposes; bold is mine):
Tapping into the same anger that fuels the tea party movement, a coalition of progressive and civil rights groups marched Saturday on the Lincoln Memorial and pledged to support Democrats struggling to keep power on Capitol Hill.
Elliott must have realized he had gone way over the top with that one, as he watered it down a bit an hour later (also saved at host): "Tapping into anger as the tea party movement has done ..."
Even then, Phil, you've got to be kidding me.
This first iteration, which appeared at roughly 3 p.m., was the one used by MSNBC (also saved at host; HT Confederate Yankee), with a bit of sloppiness in the sub-headline, as seen at the top right. MSNBC's choice to carry this version is not surprising, considering that it didn't have anything to say about the event's crowd size, while almost all others did.
But even that version, in referring to the "Restoring Honor" rally held at the same site in late August, contained this little curveball:
Beck and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin gathered near the Lincoln Memorial on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech to urge a vast crowd to embrace traditional values. Though also billed as nonpolitical, the rally was widely viewed as a protest against the policies of President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats.
I didn't come across any AP references to Saturday's crowd as "vast."
Elliott's 4 p.m. rendition added this inconvenient verbiage:
Organizers claimed they had as many participants as Beck's rally. But Saturday's crowds were less dense and didn't reach as far to the edges as they did during Beck's rally. The National Park Service stopped providing official crowd estimates in the 1990s.
Too bad Phil Elliott isn't as good at observing different types of anger as he is at noticing different crowd sizes. Geez, just for starters, one group is upset that statist health care was enacted; the other is furious that it isn't going to be instant single-payer -- not exactly "the same anger."
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
