Taking a stand for sanity

Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" drew one of the largest crowds in the recent history of Washington–packing 11 city blocks of the National Mall and spilling over into side streets that were nearly impassable–yet it was treated by the mainstream U.S. news media as something of an annoying joke. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times opted for front-page pictures of a handful of rally-goers pressed up against a fence, photos that could have been taken of a crowd numbering in the dozens rather than the hundreds of thousands. There also was a great hesitancy to admit that Saturday's rally was much larger than Glenn Beck's highly touted event in August. Crowd estimates commissioned by CBS News and conducted by AirPhotosLive.com put Stewart's rally at 215,000, compared to Beck's 87,000. However, the CBS estimate of Beck's rally drew angry claims from the Right that Beck's rally was many times larger than that. So, rather than face accusations of "liberal bias," the mainstream media folded its tent and went along with the Right's inflated estimates. The opposite dynamic was at play for Stewart's rally. Though it appeared to be at least several times larger than Beck's, the U.S. news media shied away from any clear comparison. An NPR correspondent on Saturday timidly suggested that Stewart's rally was perhaps "a bit" larger than Beck's.