Crappy reporting sells but is it journalism?

I've seen this story making the rounds of the major media outlets. I specifically remember the Washington Post making this claim, and now Time magazine does as well. The claim: "Recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that 1 in 5 sexually active gay and bisexual men in America are HIV-positive but that 44% of them don't know it."

What's wrong with that claim? Simple: It isn't true. This is not what the CDC said. But once the media starts spreading a false story they all tend to jump in line and do the same thing. Time is repeating the falsehood that the Washington Post started: "One in five gay men in the United States has HIV and almost half of those who carry the virus are unaware that they are infected..."

In both articles, with the sensational false claim in the first paragraph, you have to start reading down the article to discover facts that dispute the lede of the story.

The original claim is that 20% of all gay men across the US are HIV positive. But farther down the story you discover that the CDC tested 8,000 gay men in 21 major cities only. In other words the demographics of the test population was skewed to the major cities only, thus excluding all the gay men who live in rural areas or the suburbs.

Quite honestly speaking the lifestyle of gay men in urban areas is vastly different than that of gay men living on a farm in Kansas—just as the lifestyle of young straights in the major cities is different from their counterparts in the rest of the country.

You simply can not draw nation-wide conclusions by only surveying a very specific subset of the population.

One of the major differences is that the average age of people living in major cities, among the gay population at least, would tend to be younger and thus more sexually active. Living in a major city is not unusually for gay men, but many tend to move out of the cities as they age. Many, contrary to popular assumptions, never move to a major urban area in the first place. In addition the risks are not spread equally among all races. HIV infections are higher in the black community than in the white community and blacks are more likely to live in major cities than are whites.

Everything about this study skews it toward the highest infection possible. But the CDC is not to blame, that is what they were studying. It is the sloppy reporting of the media that is creating a false meme that the Right will use in their anti-gay campaigns. The CDC actually warned readers of the report that "these findings are limited to men who frequented MSM-identified venues (most of which were bars [45%] and dance clubs [22%])...."

By MSM they mean men who have sex with other men. The CDC found that a lot of men who are sexually active with other men deny that they are gay—this has been especially true in the black community—just ask Bishop Long if you don't believe me.

That reveals that not only is the sample intentionally skewed toward urban settings, but it is also skewed to a specific subgroup of urban gay men—those who frequent bars and dance clubs. Again this skews in favor of younger, single, more sexually adventurous young men. Older gay men in relationships, who rarely visit the clubs, are left out.

This one in five infection rate isn't even indicative of gay men in 21 major cities. Don't bother reading the mainstream media to find that out. The articles I read left out the part of the survey being done in gay bars and dance clubs. So, while they did mention the survey was done in 21 major cities, they left out that only a very specific subgroup of gay men were approached for the study: younger men who frequent gay bars and dance clubs.

To say that what is true for young gay men who frequent gay bars is true, on average, for all gay men in the United States is not just sloppy journalism, it is gross misreporting of the facts. This would be similar to surveying a frat house keg party in order to determine the drinking habits of the average American. Yet you will find the major media outlets making the same mistake. Time and the Washington Post are not local rags produced by amateurs.

The CDC actually warned readers not to jump to the false conclusion that this reflects the entire gay population of America. They wrote, "the results are not representative of all MSM..." The CDC actually puts the infection rate of all gay men at around half of what this survey finds, but even that is problematic.

The problem with surveys of the gay population is that being gay isn't like being black, it is something people can hide, and do. There are huge numbers of gay people in the country who are completely unconnected with the larger gay population. They may live in isolated locations, or simply live socially isolated lives.

Any study of the gay community goes to where the surveyors can get answers with a minimum amount of effort. And that means in the concentrated gay "ghettos" in the major urban areas. Here are some facts:

1. We simply don't know for sure how many gay men there are in the United States.
2. We are not likely to know for a very long time, if ever.
3. It is almost impossible to do a representative survey of the gay population, if not impossible.
4. What surveys we can do are all skewed toward one end of the lifestyle spectrum while entirely excluding those on the other end.

This doesn't mean the study is useless. Understanding the limitations of the study allows us to make reasonable conclusions, but what the mainstream media is reporting are unreasonable conclusions. The study shows that educational efforts directed toward young, sexually active, gay men in urban settings are not as successful as they should be.

If we assume that the study shows where new efforts might be necessary, then it fills its purpose. But what we can't do is jump to conclusions about the gay population as a whole. In other words the worst thing you can get out of the study is precisely what the major media outlets were reporting. That is not an indictment of the CDC but of the mainstream media in the United States.

Photo 1: those who got surveyd. Photo 2: those who didn't, to illustrate the point.

New film attacks Darwin, evolution and Mencken.

The Religious Right is about to unleash a new drama, based loosely on the Scopes Trial. The purpose I suspect is to make Darwin and evolution look bad by weaving in a fictional story about eugenics and forced sterilization. Let us first cover the Scopes Trial.

Tennessee had passed an anti-evolution. The ACLU wanted to test the law and John T. Scopes, a teacher in Dayton, volunteered for the case. One of the great puffing baboons of that era, Williams Jennings Bryan, a man who was a socialist and a fundamentalist, rode into town like a tinhorn messiah to save the law. Clarence Darrow, a political ally of Bryan’s, but an opponent of his fundamentalism, defended Scopes.

The great libertarian writer, H.L. Mencken, came to Dayton to cover the story for the newspaper column that he wrote. A fantastic film was made of the story, Inherit the Wind, which also weaved in fictional characters but often used verbatim transcripts from the trial as script. The film, however, was clearly a dramatization of the story and not meant as history. Few people with a lick of sense take their history from such dramas. However, fundamentalists have hated the film since it first showed up on the movie screens their preachers forbade them to see. And it appears they are now getting even.

A new fictionalized account of the trial has been made. This version is written by Fred Foote, who also financed the film through a family-run foundation “which supports Christian-based artistic and educational endeavors. “

Foote says he wrote about “how the media gave the whole world the wrong story about the Scopes trial.” One paper says that Fundy Fred’s version of the story, Alleged, shows the “trial was actually a tool of the progressive elite of the time, to promote Darwinism for its own darker purpose.” The creationist web site answersingenesis says the film “reveals how the major media delivered a distorted view of the trial in an attempt to attack biblical Christianity.” Foote, shall we say, is a very right-wing character. He gave $2000 to the theocratically inclined Rick Santorum campaign. He also gave money to Keith Butler, a fundamentalist minister seeking the Republican nomination for Senator in Michigan, as well as to Rep. Dick Chrysler, one of the co-sponsors of the anti-gay “Defense of Marriage Act.”

Foote needs a villain, so he attacks the libertarian Mencken. “Mencken was the greatest reporter of the time, who almost singlehandedly shaped this story for public consumption. If he didn’t invent spin, he was an early master of the art. That became the core of my story: the kid who comes under his sway and how far he’ll go on that path if it conflicts with his own views of what’s right and wrong.”

Trailers for this film indicate that it is about dishonest bias in the media, with Mencken as the prime culprit. The fictional Charles Anderson comes under the evil influence of Mencken. As the film’s website portrays it, this is about how Anderson “is torn between his love for the more principled Rose, his fiancée, and the escalating moral compromises that he is asked to make as the eager protégé of H.L. Mencken.”

In addition to Rose and Charles, the script invents Abigail, the half-black, half-sister of Rose who is to be sterilized by the eugenicists who are the result of Darwinism, which the nasty, biased, dishonest Mencken supports. However, this could not have taken place in reality, at least not in Tennessee where Dayton is located. Many states had laws allowing forced sterilization, but Tennessee had no such law and no compulsory sterilizations were performed there.

Foote likes to talk about “truth” and getting at the facts, but he write a screenplay that intentionally distorts history. Foote says he decided “the best way to tell the real story is do another movie.” But, apparently the “real story” requires him to make false claims about Mencken in order to promote his own anti-Darwinian agenda.

Consider poor Mencken: he was a columnist and to say he was biased is like saying Billy Graham is theological. Mencken’s job was to write biased, one-sided takes on the issues of the day from his own libertarian viewpoint. He was not a historian. He was a columnist expressing personal opinions—opinions worth reading for the sheer amusement value alone. Of course he was biased, he was supposed to be.

From what Foote and his website say, the film portrays Mencken as pushing the fictional Anderson into making ethical compromises for the sake of Mencken’s progressive agenda. In reality there was no Anderson and Mencken did no such thing. But Mencken’s columns wounded fundamentalists and they have never forgiven him.

But Mencken was no eugenicist. His American Mercury magazine published one of the first major blasts on eugenics in an article by Raymond Pearl, entitled “The Biology of Superiority.” Conservative Jonah Goldberg notes that Clarence Darrow, the great defender in the Scopes trial, wrote “his anti-eugenics piece for HL Mencken’s American Mercury, hardly a journal that spoke authoritatively for elite progressive opinion…” The two major Darwinists in Foote’s film were both anti-eugenics with Mencken publishing articles attacking eugenics.

Melissa Hendricks wrote of Pearl’s article and Mencken in Johns Hopkins Magazine:

So when Pearl decided to expound the fallacies in eugenics, he turned to the Mercury. In 1924, he sent a letter to Mencken, proposing the critique. "It has seemed to me for a long time that there is a dreadful lot of bilge talked by the self-constituted leaders of the eugenics movement," he wrote. Mencken accepted the proposal, but first he would publish his own essay, "On Eugenics." In typical Mencken style, he uncloaked those who claimed to have inherited their superiority, informing his readers: "Beethoven was the grandson of a cook and the son of a drunkard, and Lincoln's forebears for many generations were nobodies.

Mencken was actually one of the first to ridicule the eugenics movement. He did so years before the Scopes Trial. His 1918 work Damn! A Book of Calumny ridiculed eugenicists for believing “that a physically healthy man is the best fitted to survive. This is true of rats and pediculae, but not of the higher animals… In these higher animals one looks for more subtle qualities chiefly of the spirit.” Edwin Black, who authored a major history of the eugenics movement, War Against the Weak, says that one major eugenicist, Harry Laughlin, was the subject of “a forty-seven-page lampoon written under the pseudonym Ezekiel Cheever, who in reality was either the irreverent Baltimore Sun commentator H.L. Mencken or one of his associates.”

The textbook used on evolution in the Tennessee schools did promote eugenics, but apparently Bryan didn’t find that disturbing. He never once pointed out the section on eugenics and never attacked it—just the teaching of evolution and how evolution leads to moral decay. The creationist Discovery Institute published a piece by conservative Benjamin Wiker, saying that that the text used in Tennessee was “offensively racist and blatantly eugenic” How offensive and blatant they were to Bryan we don’t know, but we know he either didn’t notice the remarks or, if he did, didn’t find them offensive.

This is not to say that people associated with the trial did not express sentiments akin to eugenics. But it wasn’t Scopes who did so, or Mencken or Darwin either. The guilty party was Bryan’s wife, Mary. Bryan’s biographer, Michael Kazin wrote that Mary called the “mountain people” who flocked to her husband “pathetic” and ridiculed how they dressed. Kazin writes: “The wife of America’s leading foe of Darwinism thought so little of the crowd, most of whom admired her husband, that she scribbled a phrase any eugenicist could applaud.” Mary Bryan wrote that ‘this mass of people… have no real part in American life” but “marry and intermarry until the stock is very much weakened.”

Bryan himself expressed sentiments not far from eugenics as well. He wrote that he was proud to be a “member of the greatest of all the races, the Caucasian race.” He called whites the “advanced race” and supported segregation and denying blacks the right to vote in areas where they lived in large numbers.

Certainly the idea that the Scopes Trial was a battle between Progressive elites with some dark agenda (eugenics) and good Christians is wrong. Bryan, not Mencken, was the progressive. Mencken, as Forbes.com noted “first rose to prominence as a Progressive Era dissenter.” Another writer says, “Mencken was a libertarian to the core. Nothing could be more absurd than the claim that he somehow resembled the ‘progressive’ liberals of today.”

While Mencken was an opponent of the progressive movement, the same can’t be said for Bryan, who was often the most prominent spokesman for the progressive agenda. Bryan and Darrow, another progressive, were old friends and allies who shared common political goals. They differed on the criminalization of teaching evolution. It is true that many of these progressives were racists and supported eugenics, but Bryan, not Mencken, was associated with progressivism.

Foote says his film is not a rebuttal to the classic 1960 film Inherit the Wind, with Spencer Tracy, Fredric March and Gene Kelly. That film was a fictionalized account of the Scopes Trial and not history. It invented dialogue, plot lines and created additional drama that actually didn’t exist —such as the relationship between Scopes and the daughter of a creationist minister. If Inherit the Wind could fictionalize, then why can’t Foote?

Obviously he can do it, but the question is whether he is being ethical. I think he isn’t. The major difference between the films is that Kramer’s was openly fictionalized while Foote pretends his is the “real story.” You won’t see a character named Clarence Darrow in the Kramer film. Neither will you see characters named Mencken, Bryan, or Scopes.

Foote’s fictionalized version, however, pretends to be the “real story,” not a dramatization based on a true story. Kramer’s 1960 film had the integrity to make its fictional elements clear, by given the characters fictional names. But the Foote screenplay is about Mencken, Darrow and Bryan.

The extent of hypocrisy in the Christian producers of Alleged can be seen in their using the film’s website to encourage readers to compare Kramer’s fictionalized account “with the facts of the actual Scopes trial.” But why? Kramer didn’t claim to give the “real story.” Where does the film site send people for the “truth” about the Scopes trial? Try a site called TheMonkeyTrial.com. And the registration contact for that site just happens to be Frederick C. Foote—the same Fred Foote who wrote this screenplay.

Mencken wrote his scathing accounts of the fundamentalist mind set and now some adherents of the faith he ridiculed are finally getting even through a time-honored method of Christian apologetics: faking history.

Newspapers admits their mountain was just a molehill

Recently I discussed the controversy at the University of Hawaii over a student who had used an empty classroom to film himself in a rather explicit episode of self-pleasuring. The newspaper had published an absurd paragraph in their "crime" section making unsubstantiated claims.

This blog looked at those claims and showed how absurd they were. I won't take credit for it but apparently the university newspaper now agrees fully with my analysis. They have apologized and retracted their claims completely.

About the claim that Tim, or Speedostudent, was endangering others, they now write: "There has been no such finding by the UH administration that there has been any endangerment..." Of course, even if the administration said their was, that wouldn't make it the case.

In regards to the exaggeration of this taking place in "many classrooms" they now concede that is "an inaccurate conflation of the material found on the blog, where a clear distinction between photos and a single video in one classroom is made." That is badly worded and confusing. To be precise there was one explicit video made in one classroom. There were photos of Speedostudent in a Speedo posing in other classrooms but nothing sexual was taking place.

As for their warning to not approach the student, they now admit this "represents a physical danger to other students, a claim for which the paper provided no evidence.

As for their use of terms like "sexually deviant" and "psychotic behavior" they said that they have "no medical qualifications to make such a judgment." Even if they did have the qualifications, the facts don't fit the terms.

They also apologize for something I did not realize, not being familiar with their paper. The material appeared in a section of their paper dealing entirely with criminal incidents on campus—the mere existence of such a column would clue me to avoid that campus. I was a copy editor at my university paper and we never had enough incidents of crime to warrant a regular column. The paper admits that by including this in the crime section they "suggested that a crime was committed." They now admit that is no investigation based on a criminal action involved.

In general, they have conceded all the points I made. Of course, I'm not sure that the apology is sufficient for the student they smeared.

Anatomy of how to bias a news report.

The New York Times has an article about opposition to a municipal bus service that the city of Johannesburg wants to open, that will run from Soweto to Sandton. The article presents opposition to the bus service as racist. In my opinion the article is a bit biased and presents a distorted picture of the situation.

First, the story they run focuses on a black woman who lives in Soweto and travels daily to the Sandton area. The article refers to Sandton as the business center. This is now true since the former business center is central Johannesburg was destroyed by crime. Sandton, which had primarily been the shopping center of the northern suburbs took on greater importance as the government allowed Johannesburg to slip into chaos. Even the Johannesburg Stock Exchange left Johannesburg for the safer climate of Sandton.

The article refers to the long trip that Susan Hanong takes from Soweto. Depending on where in Soweto she lives she could be as close as 15 miles away from Sandton. Soweto is a massive township so, if she lived on the extreme south eastern side of the side she would be a long distance away. The article refers to how apartheid is responsible for causing "millions of blacks" to to "still live in townships far from centers of commerce and employment."

That is only partially true and in this case not true at all. Remember that while Sandton is now the business center of the Johannesburg area this simply wasn't the case that many years ago. The business center used to be central Johannesburg, which is as close as 7 miles from areas of Soweto. Out-of-control crime, under the African National Congress drove the business center of Johannesburg out of the city center. That doubled the distance to the business center for Sowetans. Quite truthfully, one reason that Sowetans have to travel so far to the business center can't be blamed on apartheid.

There is another important point missing from the article entirely. While the whole scenario they present is of blacks from the townships having to travel so far to get to Sandton they neglect to mention that another, very large black township, is literally minutes from Sandton, that is Alexandra. It is only 3 miles from Sandton. I have been to both Alexandra and to Soweto and have some idea of the distances from both to Sandton.

The article implies that Susan Honang is forced by the legacy of apartheid to live in Soweto and travel long distances to Sandton. This simply is not the case, not with Alexandra just a short distance away. But, more importantly, all the so-called "white suburbs" have large numbers of black residents even if we exclude the wealthy ANC elite who got rich through politics and bought homes there.

And, since the end of apartheid some years ago the entire central part of Johannesburg is now mainly black. When I first stayed in the Hillbrow section of Johannesburg it was about 60% black at the time. It is only about 4 or 5 miles from Sandton.

The idea that the legacy of apartheid is somehow responsible for forcing black South Africans to live a great distance from Sandton simply is not true. If Susan Honang's salary is sufficient for her to live in Soweto it is more than enough for her to live in Alexandra which is a a few minutes from Sandton. Apartheid was an evil system, that did many horrible things. It deserved to die. But Honang's travel problems are not a result of apartheid, not in this case.

The article focuses on a few residents of the northern suburbs who opposed the bus system. In fact the main opposition won't be from whites. It will be from the black taxi industry which is a large, thriving business. These are not taxis as we know them, but more like shuttle buses. They are minivans that crisscross South Africa offering a relatively inexpensive form of transportation. There was a municipal transit system which was boycotted by blacks. These municipal services were terribly run and the reason the taxi industry burst into existence was precisely because such government services did not meet the needs of black South Africans.

A friend of mine took the municipal service to work in downtown Johannesburg every day. And without fail I would get phone calls from him asking me to pick him up because the bus driver for that route simply didn't turn up for work that day. On pay days the drivers showed up in the morning, got their pay, and they took off for the weekend to spend the money, leaving riders stranded. This was not unusual with government transit in South Africa.

The taxi industry, however, has been rife with violence, as the Times accurately portrayed. But that violence is the direct result of the collapse of policing since the ANC took power. Law enforcement doesn't exist to a large degree so taxi drivers will fight for territory because there is nothing to prevent it from happening. If the Johannesburg metro worked on policing more it would make transit much safer for everyone involved.

The other thing that struck me as strange is that the salary listed for Honang seems to be on the low side. They say she makes $160 per month. If she worked six day weeks, as a domestic cleaner, that comes to about R50 per day. That is less than what was paid domestic workers over a decade ago. When I left Hillbrow, due to the crime, for the eastern suburbs I rented a property near Rhodes Park and within minutes of moving in had a woman at the door asking for a job. I paid her the salary that is mentioned in this article, but then it was almost two decades ago and in addition she had living quarters on the property, rent free.

I also checked the rates being requested, and offered, for domestic workers in the norther suburbs of Johannesburg. And they are well above R50 per day. One job offered R90 per day. One domestic cleaner was asking R160 per day. A houseman, who was working for an American family was looking for a new live-in position at R2500 to R3000 per month. The lowest salary I saw offered was R850 per month but that include housing and food. Another asked for someone for 25 hours per week for R1800 per month, about 33% higher than Honang supposedly gets for her full time job. I couldn't find a single domestic job, where salary is mentioned, that paid as low as what Honang was receiving.

It simply seems to me that the New York Times reporter used an atypical situation to illustrate the story, thus distorting the facts. Honang lives much farther from the business center than would have been the case during apartheid, because the business center moved northward under ANC control. The article made it sound as if there were no "black townships" near the Sandton area when one of the largest, unmentioned in the story, is literally adjacent to Sandton. And the article picked a woman who seems to be earning unusually low wages as a domestic worker, a salary that is literally two decades out of date. What is surprising is that Honang salary, supposedly after 25 years of employment for the same family, is barely above South Africa's minimum wage. And, if you want some politically incorrect information, a researcher with the University of the Witswatersrand, herself black, spent two months interviewing domestic workers in Soweto and found that most preferred white employers over black employers. (There is a large, wealthy class in Soweto who hire domestic servants.)

And, for a very funny comic strip, which looks at the relationship between domestic in South Africa and their madams (the lady of the house), see Madam & Eve. I always found the strip humorous and somewhere ought to have an autographed collection of some of the book versions of the strip. The archives are great.

Illustration: A cartoon from the Madam & Eve strip humorously looks at the plight of downtown Joburg as crime chased business away. Below is another, just because it's so true, and so funny. Clicking should enlarge the images.

A particularly loathsome creature

I am not fond of politicians in general. I have a natural aversion to anyone who feels they ought to be in a position of power over others. Anyone who wants power can't be trusted with it. Now and then a new life form emerges from the political cesspool, one so low and loathsome that it deserves special mention. One such entity is Martha Coakley who wants to be a Senator from Massachusetts, replacing Ted Kennedy.

Like Kennedy, Coakley is a Democrat. But don't assume she's soft on crime. No sir! Not Martha. She so hard on crime she doesn't mind incarcerating innocent people. No wonder the police chiefs in Massachusetts have endorsed her.

Coakley is one of those left-wing authoritarian types who "protects children" even if it means incarcerating innocent people for imaginary crimes. For purposes of this article let us ignore her odious role in fighting the abolition of the victimless crime of smoking pot and instead concentrate on her role in pushing the day care center scare of the 1980s. You may remember that large numbers of panicky parents were convinced by law enforcement that their little darlings were being attacked by Satanists in day care centers across the country. It was all bullshit, but bullshit makes good fertilizer and many a political career has been nurtured by scaremongering and lies. Coakley's career was one of them.

Coakley was involved in the bogus Fells Acre Day Care case where prosecutors "interrogated" children until they made absurd and impossible accusations. Then the prosecutors used those claims to convict the owners of the day care center of these impossible accusations. For instance, one accusation was that a wide butcher knife was plunged into a 4-year-old's anus, where it got stuck. But, call the Vatican on this because its a miracle, there were no cuts, no blood, no damage of any kind. Don't try that at home, the results won't be as miraculous.

Three innocent people were convicted in this panic-driven case and Coakley was up to her reptilian neck in it. She slithered about the case like a cobra seeking out a terrified rabbit for dinner. She hissed, struck and sank her fangs into the case with relish. It was great for her career—after all look at her now, running for the U.S. Senate. Two of the women who were convicted eventually got out of prison with "time served" when the evidence mounted that they were innocent. One woman had her conviction overturned while the other died waiting for justice.

But Gerald Amirault was not so lucky because he was man. Coakley argued that the women could be let out because women only "molest" (not that any such thing happened here) because of the presence of a male predator—imagine if someone said that about blacks and whites: "White criminals are only criminals because of the presence of black predators." The public would scream if such a claim was made on racial grounds, and rightfully so. But in Coakley's world of left-wing feminism such claims about men are perfectly acceptable.

The Massachusetts state's parole board was convinced that Amirault shouldn't be in prison. They unanimously voted for him to be released from prison. But that would put a question mark over Coakley's political career and hamper her ambitions. Like most real predators she is quite happy to advance herself over the bones of those she has destroyed along the way. So Coakley then lobbied acting Governor Jane Swift to deny the commutation of sentence. Coakley didn't want an innocent man walking the streets telling the world how she had destroyed his life.

Eventually Gerald Amirault finished his sentence for the imaginary crimes. Coakley had the option of trying to declare him "sexually dangerous" which would mean he remains incarcerated for the rest of his life, even though his sentence had been filled. (The state uses paid witnesses who declare anyone the state wants incarcerated as "sexually dangerous" allowing a life sentence to be imposed on the basis that the paid witness pretends to know that the convict is likely to reoffend.)

Coakley didn't do that, but not because she was getting soft. She was trying to avoid having the bogus evidence she used brought up in court again. She had ambitions and she didn't want that to happen. As the Wall Street Journal noted, if such a ruling were sought, "there would have to a virtual re-trial of the entire Amirault case. The DA had to have been deterred by the prospect of parading into a courtroom with the incredible fantasies extracted from Mr. Amirault's alleged victims--about secret rooms, magic drinks, animal butchery, assaults by a bad clown." The excuse used by Coakley and Swift, for denying release for Amirault was that he refused to admit his guilt.

It should be noted that these cases were prosecuted by left-wing ideologues not by right-wing Christians, like the case in Bakersfield. Coakley is a left-wing Democrat. She came into the Amirault case as prosecutor toward the end of the trial. The original prosecutor was Scott Harshbarger who now runs the left-wing lobby Common Cause. In the infamous McMartin Day Care Center case the prosecutor was Lael Rubin, Rubin is a left-wing Democrat as well and a supporter of Obama. Her husband, David Rosenzweig, another lefty, helped whipped up the hysteria over the case through his reporting for the LA Times. As Edgar Butler, in Anatomy of the McMartin Child Molestation Case wrote that Rosenzweig, was having a relationship with Rubin, that began before the McMartin trial so he published articles favorable to Rubin's case, while ignoring all the red flags.

Similarly another journalist from the left, Edward Lempinen, of the San Francisco Chronicle, published a series of breathless claims about Satanists attacking children in some concerted conspiracy. Lempinen basically acted as a hack for two obsessed police officers in that case. He has now gone on to promote global warming hysteria instead, not that this is a big improvement. At the time, the uncritical, very unscientific Lempinen, claimed that Satanists were involved in "scores" of child abuse cases—cases which fell apart due to lack of evidence. Apparently he hasn't changed his standards for his crisis d'jour.

While it is true that politically-driven conservatives may push hysteria as well, and have. We can't ignore that in the prosecution of innocent people as "child abusers" that many committed leftists were involved, aided by the uncritical journalism of biased journalists like Rosenzweig and Lempinen.

When politics determines crowd size.

When the major media outlets fundamentally ignored the massive rally against Obama they were sure to ignite a controversy. But when they started bullshitting the public about how many people attended they poured fuel on the controversy they lit.

Earlier this week we provided some fairly convincing video evidence that the crowd was much larger than what biased publications like the New York Times reported. The only honest estimate was from MSNBC which estimated a few hundred thousand. And that number really does make the most sense.

I wondered how the media treated the beatification of St. Barack. So I checked. Certainly aerial photos indicate crowds of similar sizes at both events.

The LA Times claimed that 1 million attended Obama's elevation to sainthood. CNN said it was 1.8 million. The Chicago Sun-Times was touting 5 million as a possibility. The Miami Herald said it was 1.5 million. The crowd size was widely reported and seemed to grow with each retelling of the story.

I'm trying to figure out how crowds that are a far more similar in size than different could be 30,000 in one case and 2 million in another. It is 2 million when it comes to an Obama worship session but only 30,000 when it is evil protesters committing the sin of heresy and questioning the divine status of the political messiah. To quote the Church Lady: How convennnnient!

But draw your own conclusions. Here is a satellite photo of the Obama beatification. Blow it up to full size by clicking on it. What look like brown collections of ants are the crowd. You have a large group immediately in front of the Capitol. On the other side of the pool you see a much smaller crowd. The mall is made up of eight squares leading to the Washington Monument. The crowds are clustered in the centers of the squares which are where video monitors were placed. But if you look at the crowd from the Capital to the Washington Monument it is large clusters of people. It is not filled with people. (Click to enlarge.)


Note: There was a photo here that various news sources said were the DC rally but which appears to be a photo of a different rally. I have removed it. What I am including is the video which is undeniably taken of the crowd as they are marching to the rally. I will include some analysis below.



Notice the size of the crowd for a photo which is clearly of this rally and not any other. That is the Washington Monument off in the distance.

The second photo shows people arriving at the rally. Please note that off to the right is Pennsylvania Ave. The march came down Pennsylvania and then emptied into the National Mall. If you check this photo you will see the crowd still extending toward the White House.
At this point, without everyone having arrived we see that the area between the reflecting pool and the Capitol steps is full. We also see that the area in front of the American Indian museum is almost full. That museum can be seen on the left. At this point the lawn in front of the Capitol is basically full and between the Reflecting Pool and 4th St., the Mall is almost full with a large number still coming down Pennsylvania. It also appears that a large number of people are walking up Madison Dr. the road directly to the right of the Mall.

If you are not familiar with the area here is a satellite map from Google of the area along with street names included.


View Larger Map

Last year, during Obama's elevation to sainthood, USA Today published this schematic of the area. It said that the Park Service estimated crowd size based on areas that were filled. Here is what they published long before this rally was even conceived.
Notice the area that is highlighted with an estimate of 240,000 people. That is the area the above photos indicate were filled by the rally. Even if we assume they aren't tightly packed or that some areas are not completely full, we still have that huge crowd on Pennsylvania (and perhaps Madison) who have yet to reach the rally. According to this schematic, prepared for Obama's inauguration, it would appear that a reasonable estimate for the crowd size was in the range of 200,000. MSNBC said a few hundred thousand. Matt Welch at REASON, said the crowd was in the healthy "six digits." I argued that based on what was available the size was surely somewhere between 150,000 and 400,000. My low estimate was 150,000. It appears more reasonable to say the low estimate was off. I think it safe to narrow the range even further. The crowd size seems to be between 200,000 and 300,000, depending on how many people are still marching to the site, when the one photo was taken. My most limited gueestimate would be between 200,000 and 250,000.

Nothing supports the claims of the Left that the audience wasn't above 70,000 and could be as low as 30,000. All the clear evidence indicates a crowd much larger than that. Clearly the estimates from the Right, that is was over 1 million is wrong. But equally as clear is that the Left is also intentionally ignoring the evidence in order to dismiss what they don't want to face.

An honest account of the DC rallies

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Some major media outlets were touting the absurd figure of 30,000 anti-government protesters in Washington. The video evidence of the rally clearly shows numbers far in excess of this deceptive number. Most the media gave the rally very short mention, most well underestimated its size and most used the tactics I spoke about to deceive their readers or viewers. So when one major outlet is honest they should be mentioned and praised. In this case that outlet is MSNBC. I have placed their report above for your scrutiny.

Where the major newspapers were pretending the rally attracted 30,000 people, or at most "tens of thousands" only two sources said the attendance was higher. Reason magazine's Matt Welch said he was absolutely convinced the rally had more than 100,000 there. MSNBC put the number in the hundreds of thousands and they had the film footage to substantiate it. They show the entire sea of people instead of using close-ups of small groups. Welch said his guess would have been in the "healthy" six digit range, meaning well over 100,000. I would say it is safe to say that the crowd was somewhere between 150,000 and 400,000.

By the way the White House, when asked about the massive rally taking place outside, said they had no idea it was going on. Exactly how insulated from reality are these people?

Obama protests hit DC: what are the numbers?

Matt Welch at Reason covered the protest against the Obama campaigns. Welch says the crowd was easily over 100,000 protesters. The media seems intent on playing down the protest. For instance, if you want to make a large protest look small, only show people close up and don't mention numbers. That seems to be what CNN did.



I was wondering if they would show any shots which would give an indication of the size of the protest. They quite scrupulously avoided doing so. I went to the New York Times, which leans so far left I'm surprised they haven't fallen over. Their headline on the rally only says "thousands." Farther down they say it numbered "well into the tens of thousands." The police monitoring the event refused to release a crowd size estimate. All the photos I saw there were relatively close-up shots which also never depicted what the article called "a sea of protesters."

The Washington Post said "tens of thousands of conservative protesters," apparently the Post believes one either supports Obama or is a conservative. No other option exists in their universe. Buried in the middle of a slide shows of photo is one that gives an inkling of the size of the protest.

Google news shows there are 10,427 stories on line about a rally Obama held in favor of government control of more areas of health care. On newspaper says that 15,000 appeared at the rally Obama orchestrated. While that rally got 10,427 mentions the counterprotest, which was multiples larger, got a total of 147 mentions. And most those mentions are not from mainstream media.

Someone did remember that there are traffic cams on line and here is a picture showing the protest marching down the street. It appears pretty massive to me.


The British press, however is a bit more interesting, though they may exaggerate in the other direction. The Daily Mail says: "Up to two million people marched to the U.S. Capitol today..." They showed the following photo which gives some crowd size indications.



Allow me to show you what the traffic cam showed. This is a time delayed sequence, meaning it only takes a shot every so often. From the indications of the timelapse video of the crowd marching past this intersection then Matt Welch is far closer to the mark than the mainstream media. Some press are pretending only 30,000 showed up. Some will estimate 70,000. But it sure looks like more to me.

Conflicting stereotypes

The above video is of interest only because I was amused by the announcer's clear problem with stereotyping people. Worse for him, he had two conflicting stereotypes and didn't know how to resolve it. When you watch the video notice what happens.

A man shows up at a protest to Obama's attempts to grab more control over medicine in America. The man is carrying a rifle. Immediately at play with the media's mind is "right-wing crazy who hates Jesus Obama for wanting to heal the sick and raise the dead." Easy-peasy except for one conflicting stereotype. The man in question in black and the media just knows that black people all support Jesus Obama and worship the water he walks upon.

So, with both stereotypes running around in his little brain the announcer is trying to ask questions and make sense of it all. At one point the gun indicates to him that the man must be protesting Obama but then he focuses on the fact the man is black so he assumes he must be a "counter-protester" doing it because the anti-Obama crowd can carry weapons in Arizona.

I have no idea who the man is. I don't know what side he was on. I wouldn't hazard a guess. He could well be a black man who opposes Obama or a gun-owner who likes Obama. I neither know, nor care to know. But, since the media preaches against stereotyping (although only of some people) they certainly engage in it frequently, especially of anyone who they can't pigeon-hole into neat categories: us versus the evil.

By the way, while open carry doesn't offend me or worry me I do think showing up outside presidential rallies armed and showing is just stupid. It doesn't actually win anyone over to whatever viewpoint they are promoting. It just makes people look wacko. If I see people carrying a handgun I don't worry, certainly 99.999 per cent of the time I'm safer because they are nearby especially since I don't own a handgun myself. I benefit by the presence of peaceful citizens who are armed in my vicinity.

But this kind of thing doesn't carry out well when carried out in this sort of setting. It focuses the media which will engage in the usual stereotyping. And it doubly annoys me when libertarians engage in these sorts of stunts (and I have no information that the man is a libertarian but these days it doesn't appear to take much to qualify.) Such stunts generally make libertarians appear like buffoons. And I suspect the opponents of liberty enjoy every such image as it makes it easier for them to convince people to ignore liberty. That said, I was totally amused by a befuddled media clown tripping over his conflicting stereotypes.