Laboratory Update

Via Instapundit, David Adesnik at Oxblog is all over the real story of the demonstrators in NYC (see my comment # 1 below in today's first post). He has an interesting take on the way journalists covered yesterday's march which is even more damning than what I expected:

"What I can say with a good amount of confidence is that the stories already up in the NYT and WaPo give a very superficial and often misleading impression of what it was what like to be at today's protests."

Then: "The first thing wrong with these stories is their focus on the few inconsequential arrests and mishaps that took place. Many of the journalists I saw just seemed to be waiting for something to go wrong. Because things going wrong is news, whereas the actual ideas and policies favored by the protesters are supposedly boring. . . . At one point, a small commotion broke out when the police escorted a protester away with his arms pinned behind his back. About a dozen officers moved in swiftly to make sure the commotion didn't spread. Then suddenly, dozens and dozens of journalists swarmed toward the knot of police officers like locusts from some biblical plague."

The result among protesters: "If I were a protester, I'd probably feel that the NYT and WaPo did the marchers a disservice by failing to recognize just how orderly and peaceful the protest was and how the organizers successfully defused the most important potential conflict of the day, i.e. the disappointed hope that the protest march would culminate with a massive rally in Central Park."

And yet comment #1 was confirmed (not a difficult call, to be sure): "Now, if I didn't like the protesters, I would tell you that the NYT and WaPo did them a tremendous favor by downplaying the degree to which they represented the leftmost edge of the American political spectrum. I've posted before about what UFPJ stands for, so I won't repeat myself. Suffice it to say that neither the Times nor the Post tells you anything about UFPJ's history or what it stands for."

Misrepresenting the degree of violence in the crowd while whitewashing their ideological radicalism. That's pretty sorry journalism and makes the elite sound like little more than ambulance chasers. "If it bleeds, it leads" seems to apply to the production of news stories well beyond the purview of your local nightly news. Makes you wonder just how much is beyond the purview of the big boys, too.