All that "non-partisan" posturing, and they couldn't even get CNN to buy it.
On Friday, CNN presented a segment on the 44th annual March for Life before it began. The press usually ignores the march's existence until after it has taken place, typically barely recognizes it afterwards, and almost invariably insists on describing crowd sizes which have often been in the hundreds of thousands as mere "thousands." The network's Brianna Keilar's acknowledged that the previous week's Women's March was really "the liberal Women's March."
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The video segment which follows begins with Keilar describing Vice President Mike Pence's upcoming speech at the event, and went on with a discussion of and comparison to the Women's March:
Transcript (HT The Blaze; bolds are mine throughout this post):
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN: Vice President Pence is going to be here and making the march a much bigger deal for participants this year. That is by far the highest ranking White House official to ever speak to this gathering.
And they're hoping to be a counterpoint to the liberal Women's March we saw this weekend done in conjunction with a number of groups, but very prominently with Planned Parenthood. So that is what folks here are hoping for, and certainly a little pressure to have some turnout, and having the Vice President attend is something that doesn't hurt.
We're here right by the Washington Monument, and what we're going to see is participants listening to speakers here and they'll be marching in a few hours to the Supreme Court after that program does begin. But they're hopeful this year, because President Trump has been elected, and he's now saying that next week he's going to announce his pick for the vacancy on the Supreme Court. That is something that folks who are against abortion rights think is going to work for them.
They're hoping for at least some sort of rollback of Roe vs. Wade, the landmark abortion decision. They're thinking this is something that can be delivered for them with President Trump being in the White House, Chris.
It is noteworthy that Keilar, dropping the pretense, correctly labeled the previous week's Women's March as "liberal." The press worked mightily to tag that event as non-partisan before the event, and some groups are even absurdly holding to that notion a week later.
The "non-partisan" label has no credibility. Groups with pro-life views were deliberately officially excluded. Some individuals with pro-life beliefs did heroically "make their presence felt," most notably Students For Life for America, which effectively crashed the march by prominently displaying a huge “Abortion Betrays Women” banner.
In an accompanying article, The Blaze's Leon Wolf gave President Trump probable credit for forcing the media to give this year's march more attention than usual by making an important point in a Wednesday White House interview with ABC's David Muir:
Credit where credit is due: President Trump is probably largely responsible for a bump in media coverage for the March for Life this year. In his widely watched interview with ABC’s David Muir on Wednesday, Trump scorched Muir and the rest of the media for their refusal to cover the annual protest in a stunningly effective reposte. (sic)
As seen at Nicholas Fondacaro's Thursday morning post at NewsBusters, Wolf is referring to Trump's statement, over Muir's apparent attempts to distract and change the subject, that "Pro-life people ... say the press doesn't cover them."
It was probably hoping for too much to expect Keilar to go against the irritating media insistence that prolife groups, who believe in the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, are only "against abortion rights." And she didn't.
As to the crowd size and the "pressure" to match the numbers of the Women's March, while these are matters that are almost never settled, one can say with absolute certainty that the media outlets describing yesterday's March for Life attendance as only in the "thousands" (Associated Press), "many thousands" (Washington Post), or even "at least tens of thousands" (Los Angeles Times), are lying.
A time-lapse video posted by Students For Life (seen here) makes an absolute mockery of those descriptions — even if one only begins estimating how many people were passing through at the 0:47 mark (0:40 remaining), when the official width-of-the-street "March for Life" banner appears.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
