Numbers Don't Lie

On September 12th there was a conservative march in Washington D.C. Numbers estimates for that march were all over the map with the MSM generally using "tens of thousands", which appears to translate to around 70 thousand in this case, and some supporters using "2 million". Charlie Martin over at Pajamas Media took a critical look at the estimates and came up with a ballpark figure of 850 thousand. What I found amazing was the lack of media coverage for that march given it's size and the fact that it occurred the day after September 11th. In fact what little coverage there was seemed to be more about the wide variance in crowd estimates than any of the subjects of the demonstration.

Fast forward to this weekend. There was a gay rights march this weekend that the MSM is saying was attended by "tens of thousands"; note the use of the same phrase as above. It's gotten wide coverage in the MSM yet if one looks at the estimates by the Daily Kos, not exactly an unbiased source, one will see that 20-30 thousand is what they estimate. So in this case "tens of thousands" equals 20-30 thousand.

So, given two marches, one of which was most likely at least an order of magnitude larger than the other, with the relative MSM coverage of those two marches being the inverse of their size, why would anyone assume the MSM is unbiased in it's news coverage?