NY Times disses Portland
By Ted Gleichman of Portland, Oregon. Ted describes himself as a "Portland-based political, civic, and business consultant; arrived August 1, 2005, from Denver. (Fell in love & she's here.)"
Was Portland's peace rally Sunday the largest in the U.S.? Maybe so.
I haven't searched exhaustively, but my local arrogance leaves me annoyed that The New York Times ignored us in today's edition. Their lead story, "On Anniversary, Bush and Cheney See Iraq Success," includes this graph in the jump:
The administration could take heart this weekend from the relatively small antiwar protests around the country, compared with protests held on the previous two anniversaries of the Iraq invasion. Seven thousand people demonstrated in Chicago on Saturday and smaller protests were held over the weekend in Boston, San Francisco and othere cities. In Times Square, the figure was about 1,000.According to today's Oregonian, the official estimate by the Portland Police Bureau was "upwards of 9,000 to 10,000."
Portland's turnout clearly exceeded Chicago and the other bigger cities cited.
To be sure, Bush-Cheney-Rove-Rumsfeld can still "take heart," in The Times characterization, in the relative exhaustion of much of the public, but we can take pride here in our relative energy.
As for The Times, please, Blue Oregonians, help bust them on this. Letters to the editors and / or requests for a correction will help ensure they watch us more closely in next round.
|
March 20, 2006 |
guest column | Comments (14 so far)
| Share on Facebook |
Sponsored Advertising
Comments
Posted by: Sid Leader | Mar 20, 2006 5:38:52 PM
The NY Times ran a medium-sized photo of the huge Portland parade after the jump, but surprisingly, they did not show the four (out of 10,000) protestors who burned the American flag, a flag being pissed on daily in the Oval Office.
Guess who ran that image?
Self-proclaimed, Portland law professor BoJack, who judging by his traffic, has a blog that's on the tram to... Nowheresville.
Posted by: Kari Chisholm | Mar 20, 2006 5:50:34 PM
OK, Sid, talking about BoJack is off topic - but, judging by his traffic, his blog is skyrocketing. On track for 25% growth this month over last month.
And now, back to the protest and war chatter.
Posted by: Levon | Mar 20, 2006 6:04:51 PM
Ah, the infamous Oregon persecution complex.
Yes, the entire NY Times' staff spends every waking hour seeking ways to minimize the significance of anything happening in Portland, Oregon.
The photo was of the Portland protest...not good enough for you? I can't imagine how you'd feel if you lived anywhere in the entire continent of Africa where stories even more newsworthy than the Oscars or the newest fashion from Milan or Paris are ignored daily by the American press.
Don't worry.....people in NY know Oregon. That's where Tanya Harding lives and it rains 348 days a year.....and, don't they have a basketball team too?
Posted by: Ted Gleichman | Mar 20, 2006 7:57:05 PM
OK, Levon, I gotta be a little defensive here. Four points:
1) I didn't charge my beloved NYT with constant assault on our delicate sensibilities -- only with neglecting in this particular story to give us appropriate credit for the (apparently) largest U.S. march of the season.
Hey, in line with the general theme in the graph about the weakness of the protests, it could have been phrased "The administration could take heart that Li'l 'Ol Portland, Ore., somehow managed to put ten thousand malcontents on the street for the largest march, on a day when only 7K people marched in Chicago, 51 were arrested at the Pentagon with a fake coffin, and 3 non-combatants walked around downtown Boise..."
Yeah, the photo was sweet. But shouldn't its density make a copy editor wonder about the numbers just a little?
From what I've read so far, the largest march globally was in London, with a police estimate of 15,000. But
the AP story about global protests noted that 45,000 came out in London a year ago.
One AP story put the U.S. picture this way:
"During the weekend, demonstrators marking the third anniversary of the Iraq war made their voices heard worldwide, with the largest marches in London, Chicago and Portland, Ore., although in numbers that were often lower than in previous years.
"About 10,000 war protesters in Portland took nearly an hour to pass through downtown streets Sunday, some carrying signs that said "Impeach the Evildoer." More than 7,000 people marched through downtown Chicago on Saturday."
So probably my lead was wrong. Maybe the headline should be "Portland shines in a generally dim antiwar constellation."
2) And of course you're right about Africa. The ultimate pseudo-blog on that was the column in The Onion last June:
Well, I Guess That Genocide In Sudan Must've Worked Itself Out On Its Own.
But even cynicism can't protect us psychologically from the horror of Darfur. I haven't been in Africa in more than four years, but I sure wish I could be in Washington April 30 for the demonstration against the genocide.
3) Finally, please note that I am a recent immigrant, attempting to demonstrate the faith of the newly converted. If you think Portland has an inferiority complex, you should try Denver.
4) What's this about a basketball team?
Posted by: Jeff Bull | Mar 21, 2006 8:30:16 AM
This post kind of reinforces the point I'm making down below.
When people think Portland, they think "freaks." There's nothing wrong with that - less than nothing: the hurly-burly of our politics, the experimental tinge that informs it, is why I live here.
At the same time, it is what it is. When 10,000 people march in Portland, Oregon, the reaction goes something like "look, 10,000 barely-relevant hippies marched in Portland. Isn't that the place that stopped cooperating with the JTTF?" No offense meant, but it becomes something of a non-event. Get those numbers in, say, Sioux Falls, South Dakota...now that's news my friends.
Not to belittle the organizing effort that got 10,000 people to march around downtown on a beautiful Sunday, but Portland may be a lot of things, but a barometer of national opinion is emphatically not one of them. Anyway, the other cities were cited because they are the major cities of the country. The paltry turn-out in each says something. To me, it says people don't see much value in protest marches. But those modest numbers also sure as hell aren't representative of some "silent majority" that still thinks the war is a bang-up idea.
Posted by: Sid Leader | Mar 21, 2006 8:49:41 AM
Today's math lesson for people who want to skew the news:
Six people outta 10,000 burned a flag, the same one being desecrated daily in the Oval Office by Gomer Pyle Republicans ("Surprise, surprise, surprise").
Is that 1 percent of protestors?
1/10 percent of protestors?
1/100 percent of protestors?
You would think a Lewis and Clark TAX professor would have passed math and ethics classes before getting the job.
Posted by: Scott McLean | Mar 21, 2006 9:18:49 AM
Why do you think there are so many journalist bloggers these days?
The larger newspaper miss many of the big news stories. With so many people online, my advice would be for more people to start their own websites, weblogs, podcasts or whatever. Don't let the voice of the people be silenced by bad reporting.
Let me add that Blue Oregon is doing an outstanding job of providing a forum where news and commentary can be read.
Posted by: Jenni Simonis | Mar 21, 2006 9:27:11 AM
The fact is this march wasn't just the "freaks." It included family members of those killed in Iraq, soldiers who have served in Iraq, and many church organizations. I'd say these are far from being the usual "freaks" who do the marches in Portland.
However, the news overlooks the long list of groups who participated in the event and just focuses on a handful of people. I don't think it matters how much time and energy is spent on the image of the event, this is still going to happen.
Posted by: Anne | Mar 21, 2006 11:50:03 AM
To echo Jeff Bull, a big peace rally in Portland, Oregon is not interesting. It's expected.
Posted by: Sid Leader | Mar 21, 2006 12:26:08 PM
I looked up "freaks" on Wikipedia and they define it as a blogger who skews stories by running stupid or fake images about things they don't really know much about, like, war.
Posted by: Chess | Mar 23, 2006 9:39:34 AM
This (by which I mean whining because big cities don't notice us) makes me crazy. Let's stop giving other cities permission to make us significant and start caring what we think about ourselves.
No one I know of in NY, LA, SF or anywhere is thinking about us except, perhaps, to muse that Oregon might be nice to visit someday. Meanwhile we're like the adolescent boy in love with the hot science teacher - we think about other cities with naked need. We read their newspapers (well, who could blame us given our alternative) and fantasize that we will somehow get involved....
Yick.
Chess
Posted by: Chris Lowe | Jun 16, 2006 9:27:47 PM
Missed this one when it was timely, but for what it's worth, in case anyone returns, the much bigger problem with the NYTimes is their refusal to give due coverage to anti-war demonstrations *in their own city*. Most recently, a national rally April 29 of several hundreds of thousands of people from all over the U.S. was barely covered in the "regional" section. Now admittedly the organizers of the big rallies have had bad luck in timing (the previous really big rally, in D.C. happened to fall in the shadow of Hurricane Katrina, and the April 29 event fell in the shadow of the sudden emergence of mass protests against the reactionary House immigration bill (protests which the main national anti-war group, United for Peace and Jusice, supported and urged participation in, btw).
There is a parallel problem to a degree with the national anti-war movement. For various reasons, partly resource driven, but not exclusively, the movement has tended to focus on trying to create monster rallies in NYC, DC, and San Francisco. The demos around the country on the anniversary were partly an experiment, not very successful unfortunately, in trying to great a deeper, more locally grounded national presence. The problem was that there was little of the kind of central support (themes, talking points, pdf lit templates, event ideas) to help people get local things going & built up. (This has some parallel btw to the Dem debate over Howard Dean's 50 state approach, although Dean has his resources act together better than UFPJ I think, let's hope so).
From this perspective, the discussion above misses what's interesting about Portland. It's not that we're weird or more extremely liberal leftist (harping on this theme is some inferiority-complex overcompensation that I've never understood, we're actually quite like any number of cities, from Seattle on one side to Louisville KY on another). It may be that Portland events get dismissed by the media because they are expected, as suggested, but that's nor really the interesting thing either. (I would put it that such an approach represents bad journalism and prejudice not so much against Portland as the peace movement -- a lot of the press is gun-shy over the rightwing accusation that they were the ones who lost Vietnam, and don't want to lose access in Republican-controlled DC).
What is interesting is why Portland regularly *does* turn people out in numbers. This is not just spontaneous expression of some nebulous culture or social-psychology. It is organized. There is a huge network of groups who get the word out and turn people out. A lot of people in those groups know one another. They've got skills about how to make it happen. There may be other factors -- I am not sure for instance how important KBOO may be, although I think it is relatively unusual as a type of entity nationally.
But what ought to be interesting, at least for those who would like to see a stronger national anti-war movement, and also maybe for those who want to strengthen grass-roots progressive mobilizations about other issues, is the question of what people are doing and how they do it to cause this to happen.
Note: The presence of any individual above does not imply an endorsement by BlueOregon. The selection of faces shown is done by Facebook. Visit BlueOregon on Facebook.
Post a comment
Posted by: DelawareDave | Mar 20, 2006 1:49:50 PM
I don't have the print edition - but the Portland Photo appears on the web site prominently: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/politics/20cnd-war.html?hp&ex=1142917200&en=ad798bf32b56c89b&ei=5094&partner=homepage