Topic: NewsBusters
The front page is not enough for Tim Graham.
Despite conceding that the Washington Post put the anti-Obama tea party protest on the front page, Graham used a Sept. 13 NewsBusters post to complain that the Post's website referred to the protest in "teeny-weeny type."
Graham then complained that the Post didn't inflate the attendance figures like his fellow NewsBusters did:
The Post said "Authorities in the District do not give official crowd estimates, but Saturday's throng appeared to number in the many tens of thousands." How many tens? Enough for the Post to say "hundreds of thousands" were present? Their headlines on the front page and inside the paper stuck to "tens of thousands" – not even "many tens of thousands."
But there's no evidence there were "hundreds of thousands" -- only the "tens of thousands" cited.
Graham further complained that even the front-page coverage was insufficient because "the April 2006 rally promoting amnesty for illegal aliens" received much more thorough coverage from the Post. Graham fails to point out that the immigration protest was much larger, involving the "hundreds of thousands" of protesters Graham imagines were at the teabaggers' protest, as well as similarly large protests across the country.
Also unmentioned by Graham is the fact that, as Eric Boehlert has noted, the anti-Obama protest got better play in the Post than another similarly sized protest: a 2002 anti-war protest.
Similarly, a Sept. 13 NewsBusters post by Tom Blumer complains that the New York Times didn't give sufficient attention to the protest. But Boehlert points out that the 2002 anti-war rally got similar play in the Times.
