No Liberals Behind Mass Anti-War Rallies, Just a "Grass-Roots Organization"
Illinois-based reporter Libby Sander does a little mainstreaming of liberal protest groups in her Tuesday story on the small, spread-out anti-war rallies that occurred on Monday to mark the fourth anniversary of the Iraq War.
Her opening paragraph did its best to pump up the numbers: "More than 37,000 people in all 50 states took part in some 1,188 vigils, according to the grass-roots organization MoveOn.org, which helped to publicize the events. An unknown number of people joined other protests and rallies not affiliated with MoveOn.org."
(Those evasive "other protests" doubtless involved the hard-left Stalinist group ANSWER, which the Times has usually, but not always been, reluctant to accurately label.)
The Times did a better job labeling MoveOn.org and ANSWER on Sunday, twice calling MoveOn.org a liberal group and noting that ANSWER "was initially associated with the Workers World Party and now affiliated with a breakaway faction of that party called the Party for Socialism and Liberation." The short article was bulked up with two large photos from San Francisco and Chicago protests, neither of which showed any of the more extreme anti-Bush signs or banners.
