CNN Ad Hits Back At Fox News: "Fox News: Distorting, Not Reporting"

In this morning's Washington Post, on page A9, the Fox News Channel took out a full-page ad, chest-thumping about its coverage of this past weekend's Tea Party protests in Washington, DC (which were heavily promoted by Fox News). "How did, ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN miss this story?" the text reads. It makes one wonder: Did Fox's marketing department bother to check on its competitors' coverage before they made these claims?
The facts are these: It took me all of 30 seconds to open up TVEyes and search CNN and MSNBC for Tea Party coverage on Saturday, September 12. Here are the facts. By my rough count, on September 12, CNN ran no less than 14 reports on the Tea Party rally, beginning at approximately 7:00 a.m. During the same time period, MSNBC offered viewers four reports on the Tea Parties. This is substantially less coverage than that of Fox News, obviously, but they did provide one of the event's most iconic images: LinkHere

How I missed the 2 million man teabagging flash mob today
Back of the Mall during the 9/12 march. The real truth

I apparently missed the largest flash mob in American history today, and it took place just a few blocks from my house. Michelle Malkin and the redstaters have been abuzz about how there were more than two million people marching on Washington today, (that would make it bigger than even the inauguration) but all anyone who wasn't a right-winger saw today was 30,000 to 60,000 right-wingers bused in from around the country.
Here's what the organizers themselves told us to expect. Dick Armey told the right-wing Newsmax that they're generating hundreds of responses in interest to the 9/12 March. The tea party patriots told us that they were expecting as many as one million to turn out and that they had permits for a one million man march on Washington.
After reading breathlessly on the twitter feeds of several right-wingers that millions of people were descending on the capital, Michelle Malkin on her blog estimated two million people. I went up to take pictures of crazy signs, of which there were many, many, many, many samples.
Now, there were real people at the rally. At certain points organizers for different county Republican parties would use a bullhorn to try to round up their members back to the buses for the trip back to Pennsylvania and Virginia. But one would think that after six months of organizing by Fox News and local Republican parties, the 9/12 protests could get more than thirty to sixty thousand people to come out to D.C. After all, there's apparently a groundswell of anger at the President. If nothing else, there's got to be more than 30,000 Republicans who live around the DC area.
I wanted to provide some perspective about the difference between thirty thousand people and one million people. For reference, the teabaggers were mostly in front of the Capitol and around the Capitol's reflecting pool. For anyone not familiar with DC, they were directly to the east of 3rd Street in Washington.
For reference, I crossed 3rd Street and took a picture facing west from the Capitol at the Washington Monument, similar to some of the crowd shots we'd seen after the inauguration. Here's the difference between the teabaggers' protest today vs. President Obama's inaguration crowd, which included anywhere from 1 million to 1.5 million people. So, what happened to all that grassroots anger? LinkHere

Front of the mall