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[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
I won't argue with you all anymore on whether there is bias in the MSM. But if you have the ability to question, read this:
http://www.zombietime.com/sf_rally_s..._a_photograph/

Feh. I liked Jon Stewart's demolition of the protests much better.

For a written critique, even the liberals hated it, apparently. Says James Wolcott:

• I only lasted about ten minutes watching the rally on C-SPAN, which made Stepford Wives selling Christmas kitsch on QVC--no fooling, at QVC the "Christmas Countdown" has already begun--must-see viewing by comparison. Here are the problems with mass rallies and marches on TV.
  
  1) They all look alike. They're interchangeable pedestrian jams. If you didn't know what year it was, you wouldn't have known whether this demo was taking place in 2003 or 2004 or spring of 2005, because apart from Cindy Sheehan and a few others, it was the same cast of characters you always get at these protest smorgasbords, which remind me of WBAI at its most doctrinaire PC, where every faction and caucus has to be represented and heard no matter how boring or splintery or tangential to the event they are. What you get is an event that seems to have been exhumed from a time capsule buried in some aging ponytailed radical's back yard.
  
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  2) The scale is all wrong for TV.
  
  To be heard before thousands of gatherers, speakers feel they have to shout into the mike and every every phrase sound STENTORIAN. But for the larger audience at home, it's like being harangued, and who wants to be harangued, especially by speakers pounding you with played-out slogans? And no matter how large the crowd, on TV it looks like congested clutter, a sea of tiny, ugly billboards. It really doesn't help that so many of the signs are homemade and hackneyed. As the camera panned over the crowd yesterday, I saw placards featuring Mumia and Malcolm X, and I thought, What have they got to do with what's happening now in Iraq? The placards looked as dated as punk Mohawks in the East Village, and watching protesters wave them around as if they were in the studio audience trying to get Monty Hall's attention on Let's Make a Deal didn't help.