A sense of scale. The Times seems to have an almost fastidious dislike of mass protest. Robin Toner's assemblage today ("Hundreds of Thousands March for Abortion Rights," which combines the work of four other reporters, all women, natch) is vague to the point of being disinformative about the size of the march. The article devotes a minimum of space to the question of how many people showed up—which is, when you get down to it, the crucial question for assessing the political accomplishment of a mass march—it refuses to assess numbers and refuses to place the numbers it won't assess in historical context. Here are the two grafs the piece devotes to the issue, the first near the beginning, the second near the end:

Organizers asserted that the marchers numbered more than a million, in what they said was a clear demonstration of political clout. There was no official estimate of the crowd size from law enforcement authorities; the United States Park Police stopped providing counts for rallies after bitter disputes over past estimates.

[big snip]

Organizers said they were elated by the size of the march, which took more than a year to arrange. But crowd estimates for Washington demonstrations are a source of enduring controversy, particularly since the park police stopped making its own estimates. One of the few hard numbers came from the city's subway, which registered 320,138 riders from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., compared with 133,448 during the same period last week. But many of the marchers did not use the subways.

In other words, the only "hard number" Toner reports—a number massively beneath organizer estimates—is one that she admits is essentially useless as a measure of crowd size.

Compare the (in almost all respects vastly better) WaPo article, which without especially wasting words manages to inform readers pretty clearly about how to rate not just the size but the importance of the crowd:

Organizers of the March for Women's Lives said they had drawn 1.15 million people, which would make it the largest abortion rights gathering in history. ... Police would not issue an official estimate, but some veteran commanders said the crowd was at least the biggest since the 1995 Million Man March, which independent researchers put at 870,000 people. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey would say only that he thought the march had met and perhaps exceeded its organizers' expectations. Their march permit was for as many as 750,000.

[also big snip]

Police would not make a formal estimate. Veteran officers who had been on hand for marches and demonstrations in years past said it was the biggest such gathering since the Million Man March in 1995, a gathering whose size was hotly disputed and that led to the discontinuation of crowd estimates by U.S. Park Police. ... Officers disagreed about whether the march matched or surpassed the number at the Million Man March, but many veterans of such gatherings put the figure at at least 500,000. Acting Park Police Chief Dwight Pettiford flew above the crowd in his agency's helicopter and said the "entire Mall was covered with people." "I don't know if they achieved their numbers or not, but there were lots and lots of people," Pettiford said.

Cameron Barr and Elizabeth Williamson, "Women's Rally Draws Vast Crowd"

Not so hard, is it? Let's just add that the "largest abortion rights gathering in history" topos has been featured routinely in coverage of the rally, but Toner can't bring herself to say such a thing anywhere in her piece. Her version, "first large-scale abortion rights demonstration here in 12 years," instead emphasizes the interval between rallies, implying a historical gap or failure of effort.

Read the WaPo article to get a sense of reporters taking an event, and their job of covering it, seriously. Toner's listless performance, by contrast, is fragmented, incapable of finding a through line, unable or unwilling to suggest the human scale of the march. She and the Times are just going through the motions here.

posted by michael  12:14:22 PM  
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