Despite polls indicating that just 7% of Americans have a great deal of trust in the media, the denizens of the newsrooms among the legacy media outlets are apparently determined to see if they can drive that woeful number down even further.
Not only are they continuing to prostitute themselves to the Democrat Party, unabashedly lionize a vacuous Kamala Harris, and willfully obfuscate her and Tim Walz’s records, but their childishness when it comes to covering Donald Trump continues to sink to kindergarten levels.
The legacy media is having meltdown over something Trump said in his press conference on August 8th. He claimed the crowd attending the January 6, 2021 rally was larger than the one that gathered for Martin Luther King’s speech on August 28, 1963. He said:
If you look at Martin Luther King, when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours, the same real estate, same everything, same number of people. They said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people. But when you look at the exact same picture, and everything’s the same because it was the fountains, the whole thing all the way back to… from Lincoln to Washington. And you look at it, and you look at the picture of the crowd, my friend, we actually had more people.
Indicative of the coverage Trump has received since 2016, the so-called fact checkers and journalists in the legacy media immediately descended on this innocuous off-the-cuff remark like a swarm of locusts.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Hill, all claimed that he was either lying or grossly exaggerating. The self-styled “definitive fact-checker” Snopes and PolitiFact, another self-styled premier fact-checker, gleefully accused Trump of spreading falsehoods. Not to be outdone, NBC News, the Associated Press, Politico, CNN, Newsweek, MSNBC, and Yahoo News, among many other legacy outlets, all joined the chorus in condemning Trump’s blasphemy.
In many of these reports and articles these outlets could not resist the temptation to reprise the false “insurrection” narrative about Trump and the events at the Capitol building on that fateful afternoon. They gratuitously did so as a means of further denigrating Donald Trump whom they had already accused of lying about the relative crowd sizes.
However, they all conceded that there were no official or reliable crowd estimates for the January 6th event. Nonetheless, these supposed “journalists” freely quoted the absurd estimate of 53,000 attendees put out by the grossly partisan Congressional January 6th Committee.
National Park Service estimated that there was a crowd of approximately 250,000 at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.
As I am one of an infinitesimally small universe of people that attended both marches and since the legacy media insisted on creating an issue about the relative size of the two marches, perhaps I can answer who is telling the truth — the legacy media or Donald Trump.
I was about to start my freshman year in college in Washington, D.C., when I decided to participate in the August 28, 1963 march featuring Martin Luther King. It turned out to be an historic and truly remarkable day that has forever been seared in my memory.
At the last minute I decided to attend the January 6, 2021 rally as I wanted to not only see how many showed up but to talk to the attendees about their motives and outlook for the future of the country. What I witnessed was the awe-inspiring confluence of the inhabitants of Middle America of all races, ethnicities and creeds.
I have also participated in a number of other marches and one inauguration (Reagan in 1981). Thus, I am quite familiar with crowd sizes on the Mall in Washington D.C.
I do not quibble with the National Park Service (NPS) estimate for the August 28, 1963 crowd being 250,000. I have used that as the benchmark in other marches in which I have participated.
The largest march I ever attended was on November 15, 1969 (Moratorium Against the War in Vietnam) wherein the NPS estimated the crowd size to be in excess of 500,000 people.
On January 6, 2021 there was not only an ever-growing crowd congregating at the Capitol, primarily at the West Front, but there was a mammoth gathering at the Ellipse, about two miles away, listening to Trump’s speech.
When the speech was over the mass of humanity that was at the Ellipse began walking up the Mall and Constitution Avenue toward the Capitol. It was a surreal sight, as I was at the Capitol looking down the Mall.
As this massive crowd slowly arrived at the Capitol grounds, it stretched from the Grant Memorial in front of the Capitol to the Natural History Museum, slightly more than halfway between the Ellipse and the Capitol, a distance of perhaps a mile or so.
How many people were there? Considering the crowd already at the Capitol, those at the Ellipse, and on the Mall, there were at least as many and in all likelihood more than what I encountered on August 28, 1963.
But this reality would not have fit in with the insurrection narrative. If the legacy media had bothered to review the untold thousands of pictures taken by the march participants, they would have quickly seen that the overall crowd was enormous. But that would have effectively exonerated Donald Trump and 99.7+% of the attendees as having nothing to do with the deliberately fomented and set-up chaos at the Capitol.
The official narrative had to be that a substantial percentage of the marchers were “domestic terrorists” bent on overthrowing the government, thus, the need for the comically low crowd estimate by the illegitimate Congressional January 6 committee.
A ploy the unprincipled legacy media, in their accelerating downward spiral, still enthusiastically supports as their feverish overreaction to Trump’s correct assertion at his press conference confirms.
Image: Tyler Merbler
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