And yet, writes Baker, “major media outlets, both print and broadcast, ignored such realities which might have reduced empathy for the cause.”
Following are portions of Baker’s report (the full text of which can be viewed at www.mrc.org (Cyber Alert Vol. Eight, No. 11, Jan. 20, 2003):
Hardly a word from the stage got aired as the networks preferred to focus on the most normal looking people in the crowd. On stage, Ramsey Clark demanded Bush be impeached and one speaker even described convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal as “a political prisoner.”
“Braving frigid temperatures,” ABC’s Lisa Sylvester proclaimed on Saturday’s World News Tonight, “they traveled across the country – black and white, Democrat and Republican, young and old.” In a second January 18 story, ABC News reporter Geoff Morrell followed the trip to DC by a doctor and his “honor student” daughter: “So they rode a bus all night from Asheville, North Carolina. On board were businessmen, soccer moms and military veterans – all members of the same church.”
CNN, noon EST: [Correspondent] Kathleen Koch declared live from Washington’s Mall that “perhaps some of the people in the crowd, some of the Americans who have come from great distances who have the most poignant stories.”
Koch went to a pre-taped piece: “A Fort Lauderdale, Florida, home where peace protesters gather waiting to head to Washington. But only one truly understands war’s grim realities.”
Ava Cutler: “And I’m not afraid to speak out, because this is why I came to this country,
to speak my mind if I have to.”
Koch: “Seventy-six-year-old Ava Cutler was a Jewish teenager in Budapest, Hungary when her country was invaded by Nazi Germany in 1944.”
Cutler: “We’re being besieged day by day, night by night, constantly we were being bombarded. There are no winners in wars, there are only losers, and we have to find a different way of how to deal with differences….”
A 1,500-word article in Sunday’s Washington Post contained a single nine-word quote from an official speaker while a 1,000-word New York Times article failed to quote a syllable from the DC stage….[Washington Post] reporters Manny Fernandez and Justin Blum quoted a mere nine words uttered from the stage, an innocuous-sounding comment from Jesse Jackson: – “The world is cold, but our hearts are warm,” Jesse Jackson told the crowd to applause.”
That was…the totality of what Post readers learned about what the official speakers had to say as the reporters focused on what people in the crowd told them.