On August 29, the Washington Post story on the Glenn Beck “Restoring Honor” rally began with the words “Conservative commentator Glenn Beck on Saturday drew a sea of activists...” The headline was quite neutral, but made Beck's massive rally and Al Sharpton's tiny counter-protest equal in newsworthiness: “Rallies for 'honor,' a 'dream.'”
On October 31, the Washington Post story on the liberal Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear drew the headline “Sanity and fear, meeting in the middle.” The story began “Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the founding fathers of fake news, drew throngs of exuberant supporters” that “flooded the Mall.” The Post invited mockery by using the conservative label twice in the “sanity” story, but never "liberal," then merely suggesting the October crowd was “distinct” from Beck's:
Stewart and Colbert built their stage on the opposite end of the Mall from the Lincoln Memorial steps, where conservative commentator Glenn Beck led a similarly vast and homogenous crowd two months ago. That rally, with its religious theme of "Restoring Honor," had conservative political undertones and prompted Saturday's satiric response.
The two rallies represented two distinct television audiences and self-identifying political constituencies.
"This is my comedy channel," read a sign emblazoned with the Fox News logo, hoisted by Steven Crawford of York, Pa. The other side of the sign, illustrated with a Comedy Central logo, read: "This is my news channel."
This sentiment is not “liberal,” but merely “distinct” from conservatism. Only once the story stepped off the front page did someone allow a simple P-word (progressive) to surface:
Young voters have increasingly turned to Comedy Central's "Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" for political news, but in the days before the rally, observers of the political-media complex sought the larger goal of this unusual gathering: Would visiting progressives of all ages actually take political marching orders from comedians?
The question turned out to be moot. In their closing remarks, neither Colbert nor Stewart was explicit in his demands. "Your presence is what I wanted," Stewart stated simply.
Labeling was also comical as the Post compared Stewart (unlabeled) to Colbert (warped right-wing):
The rally began as a variety show of shtick and song. The two Comedy Central anchors arrived onstage Saturday afternoon to present bits that pitted Stewart's wry rationalism against Colbert's warped right-wing bravado.
As for warped left-wing statements, the Post story made no room for them. The front page photo prominently featured the Westboro-Baptist-mocking sign “God Hates Snuggies.” They weren't going to identify the civility-ruiners -- the conservatives-as-Hitler photos, the Fox "News for dumb Fux” T-shirts, or the woman holding the poster that said “DEATH to Right-Wing Extremists (But In a Nice Way).”
The Post story made no attempt to compare the size of the rally compared to Beck's (they defensively noted “the National Park Service decided to open an extra section of the Mall that was not included on the initial 60,000-person rally permit”). They dismissed the comparison with Stewart jokes and then turned to the crowd's overwhelming whiteness:
Stewart took the stage first and immediately needled the media metrics of the rally's success, saying it would be judged by its "size and color." In a reference to some exaggerated estimates of attendance at Beck's rally, he said, "I can see we have over 10 million people." As for the diversity of the crowd - the lack of which was the source of much criticism of Beck's event - Stewart joked that it was absurd to read any motives of racism in a crowd's demographics. But despite "Daily Show" correspondents dispatched in the crowd to cheekily interview an ethnically diverse sample of rally-goers, the crowd appeared overwhelmingly white.
"It's very white," said Tahir Messam, a 25-year-old computer expert from Brooklyn, who is African American and came with Pakistani and Chinese friends. "But most of America is white."
In August, the Post reported merely tha t”Sharpton drew a mostly black crowd of union members, churchgoers, college students and civil rights activists." (But no liberals?) By contrast, “The Beck crowd, meanwhile, was overwhelmingly white, and many in the crowd described themselves as conservatives with deep concern about the country's political leadership and its direction.”
