In a piece on this past weekend’s rally for the Washington Post, columnist Adam Serwer opens with a link to a story regarding attendance at the rally on September 12 of last year–not the the rally from this weekend. One has to wonder whether this was an error, or if was he intentionally trying to mislead his readers. Mr. Server goes on to quote figures of 200,000 and 450,000 from the New York Times for King’s March for Jobs and Freedom and the Farrakhan “Million-Man March” respectively but seems to be cherry-picking his numbers when he quotes the low-ball estimate of 87,000 from CBS News–the lowest figure reported by any of the major networks–instead of the Times’ endorsement of the NBC estimate of 300,000 attendees at the Beck rally this past weekend.
This columnist attended both rallies, and although the crowd was certainly less than 1.8 million at both events, media reports that the attendance was less than a hundred thousand people are shamefully dishonest. Readers should expect Mr. Serwer to actually attend the event that he is writing about, or even if he was too lazy to walk down to the National Mall, he could have at least looked at photos of the event showing a crowd stretching the entire length of the reflecting pool. Bear in mind that in the aerial pictures, he would not see the thousands of people under the trees near the Vietnam Memorial–basically the same number of people as are visible on the other side of the Mall on the JFK polo grounds. The picture also does not show the throng of people surrounding the base of the Washington Monument.
Mr. Serwer even jokes about comparing the Beck rally to the King march in “inflation adjusted terms.” Contrary to Serwer’s assertion that the rally received backing from the D.C.-based conservative political establishment, the vast majority of attendees were grassroots activists wearing homemade tee-shirts with creative slogans–not the paid “activists” holding pre-printed signs for the flavor-of the month of liberal grievance typical at so many protests here in the Nation’s Capital.
That said, Serwer sets up the Farrakhan rally as a measure of what King might have been able to achieve today, but then proceeds to refute his own argument by observing Farrakhan’s relative obscurity today. The reason Dr. King was successful was not because of the number of people who attended his speech, but because his words spoke to and awakened the whole nation–not just black people–to the need for justice and human equality. Mr. Serwer argues that liberals should ignore Beck because he couldn’t bring a bigger crowd, but ironically, in Serwer’s final paragraph, he admits that the Beck rally is a symptom of a larger groundswell of popular anger towards Democrats. Just as Martin Luther King’s march on Washington spoke to far more people than the hundreds of thousands who were physically present, liberals ignore the deeper meaning of Beck’s rally at their peril.
