On Friday, Metro columnist Clyde Haberman penned a tribute to the anti-war "grannies" protesting and handing out leaflets in Manhattan. "On 5th Ave., a Grandmothers' Protest as Endless as the Wars [1]."
Also endless: The Times' adoration of the hard-left '60s-era protesters in the guise of harmless "grannies."
Back in April 2006, reporter Anemona Hartocollis wrote several articles [2] on the lefty group after 18 of the "grannies" were accused of blocking an entrance to a military recruitment center in Times Square. Hartocollis unloaded many nauseatingly sweet paragraphs swallowing the group's canny PR (many of the "grannies" are neither women nor grandmothers): "Essentially, Judge Ross had found himself with grandmotherhood on trial in his courtroom."
Even the left-wing Village Voice [3]was more probing about the group's ideology.
Haberman wrote Friday:
The late-afternoon sun was beginning a slow retreat on Wednesday when the grannies took up their positions on Fifth Avenue at the eastern entrance to Rockefeller Center.
As ever, they lined up at curbside. As ever, they unfurled banners and dangled placards from their necks, messages of opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As ever, they stood mostly in silence. Now and again, though, they broke into a chant. "Bring our troops home now," they cried, pausing before adding, "Alive!"
This was the 330th consecutive Wednesday, going back to Jan. 14, 2004, that the grannies gathered for an hour's demonstration against America's wars. Agree with their cause or not, theirs is an unusual record of persistence in an age when attention spans are often measured in seconds.
....
Not all of the 21 people who showed up this past Wednesday were actually grannies. Five were men. A few of the women were relatively young, in their 50s. But most were women of years who belonged to antiwar groups with "grannies" and "grandmothers" in their titles. They wore those words proudly.
That inconvenient fact has never stopped Times headline writers from saluting the "grandmothers' protests." So much for the journalistic pursuit of cold hard facts.
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