ABC’s Diane Sawyer: ‘Protests Have Spread to 1,000 Countries’… Ooops, there’s only 195 Countries

-By Warner Todd Huston

Showing that the people that sit in front of the cameras at the Networks aren’t really journalists, but are merely pleasant looking readers of Teleprompters, Diane Sawyer of ABC News sonorously informed readers that the Occupy-Whatever protests have now “spread to 1,000 countries.”

Speaking of Wall Street, we thought we’d bring you up to date on those protesters, the Occupy Wall Street movement. As of tonight, it has spread to more than 250 American cities, more than a thousand countries — every continent but Antarctica.

Only there’s a small problem with that claim. There’s only 195 countries in the world.

The coverage of these disjointed, hollow, and pointless Occupy-Whatever protests have received is far more positive and extensive than the Tea Party protests ever got. This particular report is a perfect example of this bias.

While Diane Sawyer pumps up the viewers into imagining that “1,000 countries” are now supporting the Occupy-Whatevers, her report goes on to indulge in class warfare meant to make anyone that doesn’t earn a million dollars hate everyone that does.

Notice that the report does not note how much the top income earners in the U.S. pay in taxes. The Heritage Foundation has a great graphic to inform us of that.

Diane Sawyer doesn’t want to report facts like that, though. After all, those facts tend to soften her class warfare message.

ABC isn’t the only one, though. As Newsbusters notes, a report by NBC even stooped to the depths of exploiting kids to push the Occupy-Whatever message. Mara Schiavocampo of NBC Nightly News showed a little girl who pleaded, “I want to make the world to be a better place.”

Oh, how cute. But what does that mean? How do these protestors want to make a better world?

Let’s face it, it is impossible to call these protests a “movement.” The Tea Party movement was a movement. While not centrally controlled, the Tea Partiers had goals and the bulk of them have solidified into organizations with actual political goals and interests. These Occupy-Whatevers have no goals, no coherent idea of what they want… in short there’s no there, there.

Worse, we are finding that many of these protesters are being paid to protest by left-wing ACORN affiliated groups. No Tea Parties were ever astroturffed like this.

One final note about Sawyer’s bad report. It’s a small point, but amusing for the fact that she is supposed to be an ace communicator. If you’ll listen carefully you’ll notice that she can’t even pronounce the word Antarctica correctly. She calls it Ant-art-ica. So much for professionalism, eh?

Also see All American Blogger for some good points.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.


Comments are closed.

Copyright Publius Forum 2001