Rightbloggers had a big project last week: A series of "tea parties" across the country to protest Obama and his stimulus bill, inspired by comments by CNBC's Rick Santelli (and, it has been suggested, by some rightwing pressure groups).
The results were not a great success, at least in the objective terms rightbloggers long ago abandoned. With some notable exceptions, the tea parties were very small, as even supporters' photos revealed. They ranged in attendance from healthy hundreds in St. Louis to four souls in Boise, Idaho. In contrast, even a wholly unrelated single pro-immigrant rally in Phoenix drew thousands of protesters this weekend without the assistance of a CNBC shouting head or the message discipline of rightwing bloggers.
The best you could say for them was that they happened. Rightbloggers were the main publicists for the 40-odd rallies, and may be encouraged to have gotten even a few thousand widely-spaced conservatives to make signs and stand outdoors for a hour or two.
But that doesn't matter: these rallies were not meant to sway ordinary citizens, who probably barely noticed them, but to assuage the hurt feelings of true believers out there in the blogosphere who will be delighted to hear that, in this Age of Obama, even a small number of people who believe the same things as they do stood in streets and parks and yelled in loud voices, as we reported from the New York tea party, to accuse Obama of socialism, communism, and fascism.
Rightbloggers could not, of course, just rest on these modest laurels. So they availed a few different kinds of spin to make their victory seem less Phyrric.
Some made extremely generous attendance claims for their protests. "They announced the crowd as being 600," said Kay Brooks of the Nashville TP -- though neither her photos ("I didn't have the vantage point of being able to confirm that") nor those of other citizen journalists supported this grand assertion, and the local TV news numbered the protesters in the "dozens." "There could've been as many as 500 to 1000 people there," said A Chicago Blog of their local event, though their own extensive photo gallery gives a more modest impression.
They were assisted in their fudging by strangely muddled mainstream media reports: St. Louis Today, for example, incuriously reported that "local conservatives... estimated the showing at more than 1,000 people" at their local TP; the St. Louis Fox News outlet (!) put the number around 400.
This left rightbloggers free to make outlandish attendance claims. "They said that conservatives don't organize! They said that a crowd wouldn't show!" cries an organizer in a Crystal Clear Conservative video of the D.C. tea party -- which, despite the presence of rightwing celebrities Joe the Plumber and Michelle Malkin, the video clearly shows to have drawn a particularly puny crowd of dozens. But Malkin says in the video, through a rather unnecessary bullhorn, that she is speaking to "hundreds of people."
continued>>>
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/archives/2009/03/rightbloggers_1.php
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