In FrontPage this morning I ask the question: if the media doesn’t cover a rally, did anyone attend?
The photographs don’t lie: at the 9/11 Rally of Remembrance against the Ground Zero mega-mosque, tens of thousands of people filled the streets. Flags were everywhere, along with numerous homemade signs. Meanwhile, two blocks away, at the counter-protest in favor of the mega-mosque, photographs show that the demonstration was much smaller, and printed signs were in abundance – an unmistakable indication of an astroturfed, professional protest, orchestrated by Communist and Socialist groups (whose printed signs abounded). Yet the mainstream media consistently portrayed these two demonstrations as “dueling rallies,” and even claimed that the pro-mosque ralliers outnumbered those against the mosque. It was yet another indication of how the ostensibly objective press tries to manipulate public opinion.
The Rally of Remembrance, which was organized by Pamela Geller and me as an effort of our Freedom Defense Initiative/Stop Islamization of America organization, featured a great deal that any truly objective reporter might have considered newsworthy. The foremost human interest story of the afternoon was the rousing speech given by Coptic Christian activist Joseph Nassralla. Nassralla garnered national attention last June at the first rally Geller and I hosted against the Ground Zero mosque, when Keith Olbermann and other hard-Left pseudo-journalists trumpeted and misrepresented a misunderstanding between Nassralla and some others in the crowd as a racial incident. Olbermann, Reason magazine’s Cathy Young, and other blinkered ideologues used this incident as proof that those who opposed the mosque were all racist, “Islamophobic” bigots. Indeed, many news outlets ignored the rally altogether except to note the alleged mistreatment of Nassralla.
But when Nassralla appeared at Saturday’s demonstration, declaring in impassioned terms his opposition to the mega-mosque, his love for America, and his grief at the persecution of Christians in Egypt, Olbermann and the others who had so earnestly publicized his alleged mistreatment at the June rally remained silent. Objective journalists, of course, would almost certainly have been interested in telling their audiences that Nassralla did not come away from the June incident believing that all mosque opponents were racists, and that he also was a featured speaker at Saturday’s rally against the mosque. But none of those mainstream media outlets that took note of the rally at all mentioned Nassralla’s presence….