The Big Lie or Check Your Facts, Part 2

If you read yesterday’s blog entry, you know that I’ve been investigating the facts behind the many reports of large numbers of people at the Taxpayer March of September 12 with the help of my assistant.

Virtually all the news media that chose to count got a total of 75,000 or less at the event, except for the British newspaper, Daily Mall, which reported that as many as 1.0 million may have been there.  Instead of reporting these numbers, many reports took advantage of the fact that other reports cited numbers that did not exist to state that a number of nameless media estimated the crowd at more than a million and some as high as 2.0 million.

What has never gotten out in the main stream news media, however, was the fact that an entirely separate event, the annual Black Family Reunion, filled two-thirds of Washington’s Mall that day.  The prevalence of this other group at the Mall was reported only by The Atlantic and then noted in an Associated Press story that got very little play.  In other words, the low numbers cited by most of the media that actually cared to chime in on the issue may have in fact been on the high side. 

Now if people knew about this other group, they would realize that the one and two million person counts thrown around on right-wing radio and hinted about in much of the mainstream media in fact boil down to one big lie.  But like all big lies, it’s one that many people want to believe.