Mark (H.), I actually thought the New York Times did a decent job Sunday morning (considering), except for one glaring reality: the issue of tone and signs. The third paragraph of the report explains:

But as they sang verse after verse of patriotic hymns like “God Bless America,” sharp words of profane and political criticism were aimed at Mr. Obama and Congress.

And before you click onto page two on the web version, you also learn:

The atmosphere was rowdy at times, with signs and images casting Mr. Obama in a demeaning light. One sign called him the “parasite in chief.” Others likened him to Hitler. Several people held up preprinted signs saying, “Bury Obama Care with Kennedy,” a reference to the Massachusetts senator whose body passed by the Capitol two weeks earlier to be memorialized.|

You get the picture.

I have no objection to reporting on the profanity. What happened happened. Report it. But can you do that consistently? When pro-abortion feminists held a “March for Women’s Lives” in April 2004 (because George W. Bush couldn’t keep his rosaries or David Souter off my ovaries?), the coverage the New York Times gave it was a wee bit different than the coverage it gave this weekend’s march.

I was there in April 2004 and so I can tell you that the tone there was overwhelmingly profane. There, too, there were many pre-printed signs, but many more homemade signs and freelance t-shirts. Never mind conversations. On stage, in crowds, on chests: The f-word was the word of the day, and I don’t mean “Feinstein.”

But the worst the New York Times could find there were some Bowdoin College students carrying “a giant uterus made of red clothing and stuffing, bearing the slogan ‘My Body, My Choice.’” The New York Times piece would go on to report on the counter-protesters with “blown-up photographs of aborted fetuses.”

In 2004, try though I did, I couldn’t get myself away from “I wish Barbara Bush had had choice available to her” (I sat down on a train to New York later in the day, and when we were near Trenton, the women across from me were still talking about how the president didn’t deserve to be born). And, well, I’ll leave to your imagination what was done on signs and t-shirts and slogans with the then-president’s last name. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft were portrayed as “the four horsemen of the apocalypse.” “Pro-life is to Christianity as al-Qaeda is to Islam.” Whoopi Goldberg began the main rally with a coat hanger. Actress Kathy Najimy flashed the audience the night before in protest of Bush-administration oppression. Maxine Waters told the president to “go to hell.” The list goes on. But the crassness of the day was lost on the Times in that instance.

There were angry and nutty signs at the march on Saturday. More often than not, this will be the case at a political protest. And you would have known about them at the right-wing march by reading the New York Times, but not at the Bush-kills-women march in 2004. They had the right ideology and Hollywood presence, I guess. It’s an old point, but we see it time and again. Which is why the likes of the Media Research Center is not going away anytime soon.