UPDATES at the bottom.
This is for those of you who never notice the bias of the press. Read this AP report. Then consider what report has to say about the Gathering of Eagles by the Vietnam Memorial.
Here is the mission statement for the Gathering of Eagles. The Gathering of Eagles vets were there to protect our memorials and their grounds from vandalism. These vets and the counter-protesters outnumbered the anti-war protesters (see here), but you would never know it from the AP report. Instead, the AP Report focuses on the larger number of ant-war protesters and the violence of the counter-protesters. Supposedly, when some poor fool gets her sign ripped up, that is national news.
The AP is nationally syndicated. Their biased report went out to >100 papers all over the country. If the AP can distort what is going on in DC this way, imagine how much inaccurate trash they can give us about a faraway place like Iraq.
By comparison, few papers made any serious effort to cover the Gathering of Eagles. Check for yourself. Do a google news search on “war,” “protests,” “washington,” and “dc” and see what you get. Then add the word eagles. By any stretch of the imagination, thousands of vets gathering together from across the country to protect the Vietnam War Memorial ought to be a big story. Yet most of the news media ignored this story. Why?
UPDATES:
- I repaired the broken link to the AP Report by going to another site with the same story.
- Today’s Washington Post covered the protests and counterprotests somewhat more accurately, but with no less bias (here, here, and here).
