Charlotte Observer Propaganda
When biased reporting crosses over to outright lying reporters and newspapers need to be held accountable. Last Monday night (January 30th) a rally against amnesty for illegal immigrants in the US was held in Charlotte and was dutifully covered the city's media. In the case of the Charlotte Observer's coverage by Jim Morrill however this dutiful coverage did not extend to telling the truth. This offense was magnified when his doctored version of reality was further embellished and sent out across the nation on the AP wire service.
Due to the death of his mother, the keynote speaker for the Charlotte rally Congressman Tom Tancredo, founder of Team America PAC was unable to attend. However, the show went on with the chairman of the organization Bay Buchanan going solo. Some organizers had backed out the day before claiming that they were scared off by the choice of location on Charlotte's Westside, the Phillip O. Berry Academy. The location may not have been optimum for them, but it was a plus for the lead sponsor of the rally, NC Education Reform Action Network. What better place than a school for an education group...particularly a school in Mel Watt's 12th district, when the leader of your organization, Vernon Robinson, also just happens to be running against Mr. Watt for his congressional seat?
In any case, the total turnout of supporters for the rally ended up being something over 40 people if you took the time to count heads on the pro-rally side. These supporters numbered "about 30" if you relied on the names listed on the sponsor's sign-in sheet as Mr. Morrill claims he did for arriving at the number he had published in the Charlotte Observer. Since I myself walked into the room with six other supporters in tow just a minute or two after the rally began (and Mr. Morrill had taken his seat) I believe I could get Mr. Morrill to agree on a total turnout (signed-in and otherwise) of "40 something." Whether the number of supporters was in the 30's, 40's or 50's is not the key point however.
What appears obvious is that the most important thing for reporter Morrill (and likely his paper) was promoting the number of protesters against the rally that had gathered outside an hour before its scheduled start. The third sentence of Mr. Morrill's report published the next day in the Charlotte Observer read, "More than 100 Latinos and other supporters of immigrants came to protest the rally, holding candles and signs..."
While I did not arrive in time to experience the peak of the candlelight vigil, I can personally attest as to how many of these "more than 100" protesters were still standing outside when the rally began - ZERO. There is a good reason for this. Half of them, 10-12 people, had come in to participate as the loyal opposition to the rally. The other half had snuffed out their candles and left. How do I know protesters numbered only in the dozens and not the "more than 100" number fabricated by Mr. Morrill; because that's what others, who had arrived an hour before the rally began, told me. But let's not trust the biased public of course. Here is how the count was worded on Charlotte's Channel 9 news report, "Outside the school dozens of people lined the streets in a silent candlelight vigil."
For anyone whose January 31st copy of the Charlotte Observer is not already on the garage floor or the bottom of bird cage, you can confirm this "dozens" versus "more than 100" fiction by simply looking at that photo of the protesters which ran in Mr. Morrill's own Charlotte Observer article. The field of view runs from a few people with signs in the foreground down a line of people ending in front of the school entrance. Total number of people in the photograph: 16-18. (Interestingly, the first three people in the foreground all were part of the 10-12 people who later joined the rally inside.) Further testimony to a "dozens" number ranging from 20-30 people is also confirmed in the photograph which appears in the rally article posted on the Channel 14 news site. (Yep, I'll take credit for the photo of the Birch "No to Amnesty" sign they posted in their article.)
I hope readers of my version of the truth, will agree that this is not conspiracy theory here, when I suggest the reason the Observer and Channel 14 photographs don't come anywhere close to backing up Mr. Morrill's "more than 100" protesters is because this impressive amount of protesters simply did not exist.
Now, ordinarily, I would not get so worked up on a reporter's professional prerogative to color the truth if that's the reputation his editor's allow him to establish for himself and his employer. What makes this particular case so egregious however is that Mr. Morrill's fabricated numbers creating the illusion of protesters far outnumbering supporters were subsequently used as the basis for the patently false lead sentence to the AP wire story that was sent to papers across North America: "CHARLOTTE, N.C. - An immigration reform rally turned into a debate as protesters, outnumbering participants by about three to one, challenged the main speaker over her position on U.S. border policies."
I will not speculate on Mr. Morrill's intentions or possible agenda in lying about the headcount for this rally. Nor, will I comment on North Carolina's largest paper being party to sexed up AP stories. I do stand ready to defend however my first hand experience of the truth in this matter.
If Mr. Morrill can produce a photograph (un-doctored of course) from one of the news crews at the rally that vindicates my charge of calling him a liar, I will be gracious in apologizing to him publicly.
