WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2023
How many do you want? The first number we heard today we heard on Fox & Friends.
Three hundred thousand people had attended yesterday's demonstration, the friends said again and again.
That was a very big number! Then we consulted the New York Times, and the Times bumped the number down:
Jewish Groups Rally for Israel on National Mall
[...]
The march was arranged in a matter of days by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Schools, synagogues and community centers sent buses of attendees. By the time speeches began, the Mall was crowded with people from Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, Boston, Philadelphia and other places around the country, waving American and Israeli flags and holding signs declaring support.
Over the course of the event, tens of thousands of people had converged on the Mall, the national park that sits between the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument. The U.S. Park Police, which has jurisdiction, does not provide official crowd estimates, nor does the city’s Metropolitan Police Department.
The Times put the number at "tens of thousands." And even that was only "over the course of the event!"
At least the Times had placed the report at the very top of its web site. (In print editions, the report appeared on page A21.) Then we went to the Washington Post, hoping for the final word on the actual size of the crowd.
For whatever reason, the report about the demonstration had been buried in the Post's local section. Online, that section, and with it that report, appeared a bit more than halfway down the paper's endless front page.
In fact, it appeared just below the Post's SPORTS section. In fact, that's where the report still sits as we type. To us, that placement seems strikingly odd.
Placement issues to the side, how many people were at the demonstration? "Thousands of demonstrators" were there, the Post report quickly said.
This made us think of a little-known joke which we learned long ago. The joke is known as Goldberg's Law, or at least so we were told:
The man with one watch always knows the time. The man with two watches is never quite sure.
We know that old joke as "Goldberg's Law." We learned it, four decades ago, from an extremely decent person—Paul Reiser.
It was a bit like that with respect to yesterday's demonstration. Fox was running a very large number, but reports went downhill from there.
What might the actual number have been? Because we consulted three separate sources, we're left with no clear idea!
Three hundred thousand is thirty tens of thousands.
ReplyDeleteWe’re number one.
ReplyDeletehttps://jabberwocking.com/america-is-the-envy-of-the-world/
It’s of no consequence the exact number of attendees, but it is of consequence to note a key speaker being John Hagee, an infamous antisemite that blamed Jews for Hitler and the Holocaust.
ReplyDeleteIt was a war rally supporting an ethnostate engaging in what is reasonably termed an ethnic cleansing genocide, killing a child every ten minutes; a bloodthirsty right wing rally for war while the majority of Americans support a ceasefire and a path to peace.
A peace that was developing in the 90’s until it’s architects, Rabin and Arafat, were assassinated by right wing religious fanatics.
Anyway, so funny, Somerby’s jokes!
ReplyDeleteI've read that they chanted "No Cease-Fire".
In a serious media review blog, this could be noted in passing, something we might like to see the press resolve in later comments. But, it's good to know Paul Reiser is a Nice guy.
ReplyDeleteI was officiating at the Ceremony of Innocence when Batya Ungar-Sargon was ejected for failing to wear suspenders. At first, I thought the security guard was Corby, but when I looked closely, I saw that I was wrong.
ReplyDelete