Blinded wit' Whiz: the Ron Paul Media Machinery Chopped and Served

Alrighty, so Bostodelphia's gained some attention via our coverage of the Ron Paul rally. Welcome to those of you who've dropped by and I hope a few of you stick around. We're still getting settled here, some of our furniture's not even been delivered, and we can't even agree on carpet or hardwood floors yet, let alone color of polish or fabric.

Now, I could have kept what follows in the commentary within the aforementioned Ron Paul thread, and it might sound redundant in parts to those who've been following that disucssion. However, it speaks to an issue bigger than just Ron Paul, and also outlines some general ground rules for productive discussion in this blog.

To begin, I said this earlier and I'll say it again, I could be well off with my 500. It's been over a decade since I had to perform crowd estimates with any sort of responsibility on the line, so yeah, I'm rusty at it. My number could have easily been inadvertently processed through a coefficient value reflecting the incredibly "underwhelmed" vibe the whole shindig had for me, the unconverted. For the record, I'm a registered Dem so have no stake in the Republican primary. I actually think a Ron Paul ticket would make the White House more of a cake walk for the Dems that it currently is. That said, I'm a fairly empathic person, and I can see why people are charged up by causes on the other side of the aisle. In this case, I wasn't feeling it. Not at all.

That said, I'm sticking with my number for the time being until someone else comes up with a more trustworthy figure for me to redact in favor of, a reputable source that also cites the means through which its number was derived. Both in these postings and on Digg Ron Paulists have offered this as contesting evidence:

Ron Paul Philadelphia Veterans' Rally Draws 5,000

Monday, Nov 12, 2007 - 11:19 AM
By NBC 13 Staff
PHILADELPHIA, PA.– Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul today addressed a crowd of over 5,000 enthusiastic supporters in Philadelphia. The Veteran's Day weekend rally took place from 1:00 to 3:00 PM at Independence Mall.

Hundreds of veterans and their friends and families heard country music superstar Rockie Lynne open for the Texas congressman and rising GOP contender, Dr. Paul. John Holland, the founder of Rolling Thunder, a leading advocacy organization for troops, veterans, and POW/MIAs, delivered an enthusiastic endorsement of Congressman Paul, before the congressman addressed the crowd.

The rally coincided with the launch of the Veterans for Paul Coalition, which is composed of several hundred war veterans.

"Dr. Paul's support among veterans is extremely high," said Paul campaign spokesman Joe Seehusen. "These great patriots who have fought for our country know that only Dr. Paul's foreign policy of peace and secure borders can guarantee true national security, and they want him fighting for our country's freedom."

I and Coddy have pointed out two things to our challengers providing this "evidence." 1.) In no way does this "show us" because it entirely lacks both the photographic perspective allowing for empirical evaluation and any explanation as to where the number 5000 came from. 2.) This item from Channel 13 - an NBC affiliate serving Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and Anniston Alabama noted for its crackerjack Philadelphia desk (do I have to say "not"?) - looks strangely like this:

Press Release: Ron Paul Philadelphia Veterans Rally Draws 5,000
November 10, 2007 7:00 pm EST PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA– Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul today addressed a crowd of over 5,000 enthusiastic supporters in Philadelphia. The Veteran's Day weekend rally took place from 1:00 to 3:00 PM at Independence Mall.

Hundreds of veterans and their friends and families heard country music superstar Rockie Lynne open for the Texas congressman and rising GOP contender, Dr. Paul. John Holland, the founder of Rolling Thunder, a leading advocacy organization for troops, veterans, and POW/MIAs, delivered an enthusiastic endorsement of Congressman Paul, before the congressman addressed the crowd.

The rally coincided with the launch of the Veterans for Paul Coalition, which is composed of several hundred war veterans.

"Dr. Paul's support among veterans is extremely high," said Paul campaign spokesman Joe Seehusen. "These great patriots who have fought for our country know that only Dr. Paul's foreign policy of peace and secure borders can guarantee true national security, and they want him fighting for our country's freedom."

This duplication isn't some Shakespeare's monkeys fluke. Rather, the good staff of NBC13 decided to take a press release from the Ron Paul campaign and run it on their website unvetted with no corroborative work by getting in touch with say, their affiliate counterparts at NBC 10 in Philadelphia who haven't even bothered to archive any coverage of the rally. This isn't journalism. This is a sad comment on the state of modern network affiliate television journalism, and I'll go further to say that this problem not limited to television either. A note to the staff of NBC13: if you're just recycling press releases as news content, you're not being journalists, you're just "tools" on a lot of levels.

Press being picked up by press outlets and disseminated as news aren't anything new. In fact, it's been worse:


Those who know the story know that nothing in the Negativland angle was true, for those who aren't familiar with the facts of the matter:


Now the Ron Paul grass roots could be thinking they've successfully infiltrated the factual consensus by getting a remote news provider to uncritically distribute the campaign's press releases, and in the Paulists postings here and on Digg were rubbing their deceitful epistemological triumph in our faces. In which case, shame on you and don't insult our intelligence in the future. I get the feeling though that what we're dealing with here are some people who honestly believe that if it's on an NBC affiliated website, it's got to be true, regardless of the source's remote relationship to the location of the event or uncanny resemblance of the news item's text to the exact language of official campaign literature. If that is the case, how is anyone supposed to take seriously a group claiming to have a reading of the Constitution at the heart of their beliefs when they demonstrate in this discussion a complete lack of media literacy beyond the Sesame Street level?

Again, if an intelligent Ron Paul supporter can back the campaign claim up, thus proving me 90% blind, please do so. We want to keep this blog accurate when need be; and I got good health care so my vision corrective prescription will be covered. More importantly we want to cultivate a reasonable discourse based on intelligent discussion of thoughts grounded in critical evaluation of evidence, not a standard of evidence that wouldn't pass mustard in a high school research paper. So far Paulists, I'm even less impressed with the movement than when I left your rally.

Ron Paul Run Down

I was there, with at most 500 people by my own generous estimate based on a rough average of people lining crowd ranks and files. Heard it was his biggest turn out yet, which pumped the crowd. As for his stump speech, it was basically a list of talking points familiar to anyone who’s gone over his website. The whole thing struck me as crowd cheering to a Powerpoint presentation, even though the overhead projector was busted so the presenter had to read off notes on his blackberry.

I don't see how you can really buy into anything he’s selling, unless you accept the dogma that pretty much everything since the ratification of the Constitution that has happened in U.S. history and resulted in federal action has been intrinsically misguided. I did walk away seeing Paul supporters as at best what one might call "Constitutional Fundamentalists" which seem to have the same sort of blindspots as Biblical Fundamentalists. Both camps have a refusal to acknowledge the organic nature of human thought, whether inked or put down in stone tablets. In the case of their “enshrined” Constitution (though I’d say their enshrinement is more a set of blinders than any sort of reverence for the document and its history), they fail to remember that it’s a human document, in human custodianship and yes, subject to conservation - but conservation within a nation and world that’s considerably changed since it was first drafted to determine the security and social position of a bunch of land and business owners. A good number of people in the audience, including the white men, likely wouldn’t have the vote had we maintained the sort of static Constitutional view they seem to be clamoring for. As I've said before, it's like they think government has a reset button, and not realizing in pressing it they'd delete the "cheat codes" that got them where they are in the game.

Otherwise, sorry, not much of a fringe show, only one guy with some neck tattoos that might have suggested skinhead and one guy in head to toe camo with mirrored sunglasses and some sort of earpiece. The crowd was mostly young, by that I mean under 30, and I'd say in that crowd mostly under 25. I blame an educational system that has failed to teach the majority of Americans civic engagement. That's not teachers’ fault necessarily. Rather I see this as the result of the entrenched ignorance and disempowering parochialism that amounts to the “interest” in education displayed by a very vocal segment within the national discourse determining the content and funding of education.

A telling moment as the crowd on Independence Mall disbursed, walking behind me were two college aged women who sounded “well traveled,” been to Paris, Prague, Amsterdam, Ibiza, etc. I picked up that their tours of these cultural hotspots were enabled by study-abroad programs. You know, those opportunities ostensibly to broaden one’s understanding of the world, but have pretty much become a training ground for folks wishing to come home with a broadened “sophisticated” understanding of partying. Any case, the worldly young women (whose broadened understanding seemed to boil down to “people in Europe are weird about politics and stuff”) paused in their review of the event (a review consisting basically of noting points in Paul’s speech that marked their series of progressive minded ex boyfriends as “weird” like the people in Paris) to wonder, “Wait, isn’t there like some historical things or stuff around here? Like the Liberty Bell and stuff?” For those needing some spatial orientation, Independence Mall is basically a football field sized space across the street from Independence Hall.

There were plenty of men their age within earshot too. Unfortunately, I couldn’t gather much from them for comment beyond their call and response chanting of “Who You Gonna Call? Ron Paul!”

And with that, Bostodelphia puts a lid over this week's panfire.