The Associated Press is Lying to You About Madison Protests
[Hey guys, this is Jenny the Artistic Director, Technical Director, and Whatever Title I've Been Awarded This Week, with an edit as of 2/22/2011 -- several of the quotes below have mysteriously disappeared from the AP article online. This rewrite is not admitted to on the page, leading us to question even further the AP's basic journalistic integrity. Our post continues below as originally written.]
This is a really blatantly biased article from the AP, whose reporters (Todd Richmond and Jason Smathers) go out of their way to lie to you about what’s happening here in Madison.
Take a look at some of this:
After nearly a week of political chaos in Madison, during which tens of thousands of pro-labor protesters turned the Capitol into a campsite that had started to smell like a locker room, supporters of Gov. Scott Walker came out in force Saturday.
…
Madison police estimated that 60,000 or more people were outside the Capitol on Saturday, with up to 8,000 more inside. The normally an immaculate building had become a mess of mud-coated floors that reeked from days of protesters standing shoulder-to-shoulder.
I didn’t get inside the Capitol building today, so I can’t attest to whether it’s muddy; however, I’d note that in Wisconsin when winter’s thawing out, *everywhere* gets a little muddy. In fact, we use lots of sand here in Madison to make the streets driveable because we also reduce salt use to protect our lakes, which suffer from the runoff when the ice melts. So we’re muddy by choice, and by sound environmental policy. Which you might know, if you did basic research.
Oh, and nice grammar there guys, btw. ‘The normally an immaculate building’? You got paid for that? Wow. The AP’s standards are really slipping.
I was *all* around the Square today, however, and I can tell you for a fact that it is not a reeking ‘campsite’. Things are, considering the enormous crowds, very neat and tidy. It’s far messier during Freakfest or Art Fair on the Square, which anyone who’s lived in or covered Madison competently would know, but that’s not the game here from these two AP clowns. They’re here to paint the overwhelming majority of protesters as dirty, unwashed, uncivilized spoiled children, and if that means making up phantom odors, so be it.
Again, in fact, if they had been paying any attention, they probably would have noticed the volunteers amongst the protesters picking up trash and tidying things up. Then again, that wouldn’t have been on message, would it? They also fail to mention the large number of out of state protesters on the Union side; I personally saw contingents from Nebraska and Ohio today, while the art director spotted some Iowans.
Then you have their absolutely pathetic attempts to pass off the pro-Walker protesters (what few there were) as being remotely comparable to the pro-Union side, in numbers, intensity or legitimacy:
MADISON, Wis. – Sometimes they cursed each other, sometimes they shook hands, sometimes they walked away from each other in disgust.
None of it — not the ear-splitting chants, the pounding drums or the back-and-forth debate between 70,000 protesters — changed the minds of Wisconsin lawmakers dug into a stalemate over Republican efforts to scrap union rights for almost all public workers.
…
After nearly a week of political chaos in Madison, during which tens of thousands of pro-labor protesters turned the Capitol into a campsite that had started to smell like a locker room, supporters of Gov. Scott Walker came out in force Saturday.
They gathered on the muddy east lawn of the Capitol and were soon surrounded by a much larger group of union supporters who countered their chants of “Pass the bill! Pass the bill!” with chants of “Kill the bill! Kill the bill!”
Note how they conflate the groups in the 70k headcount, and how they talk about Walker’s supporters coming out ‘in force’, even if they mention that the pro-Union forces were a much larger group.
It’s also funny how when they’re talking about overall numbers they use actual, you know, *numbers*, and when they want to pump up the Walker contingent, they use airy-fairy language, and talk about ‘throngs’.
Here, I’ll show you how those two sides stacked up.
These are the Pro-Union people, who filled all four sides of the square much of the day:
And here are the Walker supporters, who managed, with effort, to cover one half of one walkway up to the Capitol*:
By my admittedly unscientific estimate, I’d say the Walker supporters were outnumbered at least 25-1 today. Minimum.
Not that the AP wants you to know that, either.
*They also had a few smatterings near Brocach on the East side of the square. It’s a bit of a landmark, but since these AP ‘reporters’ obviously aren’t familiar with the area, here’s how to find it on Google Maps.
Twits.
Update: I dropped an ‘f’ in ‘funny’ and thus invented a new word, which I have now returned to the ether from whence it came.
Update 2: I also dropped a ‘d’ in ‘sound’. I may need to check out this keyboard, which is unfortunate as it’s a laptop.
Update 3: It’s been pointed out to me that the whole ‘campsite’ thing might refer not to people actually camping out downtown but to people inside the building. In which case they referred to the Capitol interior as a campsite that smells like a locker room AND it’s muddy.
A campsite… that smells.. like a locker room… that’s muddy. That is some fantastic writing. All we need now is a reference to gym socks and I’d win this round of Cliche Bingo.
Update 4: AP moved their article, probably because it had the wrong date in the URL, implying it was published in the future when it went up yesterday. So I fixed the URL.
They’re a well-oiled machine, aren’t they?
About The Author
Comments