Fudging the figures? - Australian ABC shamelessly editorialises American protests and parades and distorts the figures
Opinion
The No Kings protest was a fizzle…
https://x.com/doug_mainwaring/status/1933929546623111575
Doug Mainwaring took a photo of it, click on the photo for the twitter link:
Australian Bias meanwhile
Meanwhile, this was the Australian ABC’s rather biased by-line:
As the US state of Minnesota grapples with the political assassination of one of its most popular legislators, in Washington D.C, the patriotic fanfare of President Trump’s military parade was met by cries of ‘No King’s’ with hundreds of thousands coming out to protest across the nation.
Is this what Donald Trump meant when he spoke of American Carnage?
Yet in the attached Radio National interview by Fran Kelly (who presumably wrote the summary above), the interviewee admits at 12:59 that they do not know how many No Kings people came out to protest, and says the figure of 2 million for the entire nation’s protest (not just the DC march which is only one of 2000 locations) is probably an exaggeration.
In fact it seems the No Kings protest at DC was a complete fizzle. And it seems to me it wasn’t ‘on the opposite side of the street’ from the parade as Fran Kelly claimed.
The BBC is no better
The BBC, meanwhile, was even worse. When one searches in Duck Duck Go for a photo of Trump supporters on one side of the street and No Kings on the other side, one gets a Reuters photograph in which the signs are out of focus and it is completely impossible to tell if they are Trump supporters or No Kings protesters filling the streets, with a happy girl waving a Trump flag above. Would she have been so happy if all the people below were No Kings shouting disgraceful slogans? The attached article says the train system was flooded but doesn’t tell you that this was actually Trump supporters going to the DC parade, and none of the photos in the article show more than a hundred clearly identifiable No Kings protesters. Look for yourself: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38705586 https://web.archive.org/web/20250528195649/https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38705586
The bias is palpable propaganda and is disgusting and disgraceful. I remember when the BBC was a beacon of light in the world, for unbiased journalism and democracy. What a shameful day we live in.
LifeSite News — from Doug Mainwaring, who was actually at both events
LifeSite news had the opposite take on it, from Doug Mainwaring, a man who was actually present at both events in Washington DC:
WASHINGTON, D.C., (LifeSiteNews) — Two events occurred on Saturday in the nation’s capital: the “Refuse Fascism” march to the White House in the early afternoon and the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary celebratory parade on Constitution Avenue in the evening.
I attended both.
While there were perhaps just 500 people, most of them older and white, at the Refuse Fascism rally and march, with some presumably bussed in from New York City, a diverse crowd of 250,000 gathered for the Army parade – 500 times as many people.
A better name for the “Refuse Fascism” march would’ve been the “Anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, anti-American values” march.
One speaker shouted, “We can’t wait until 2026 or 2028 to take back the House, the Senate and the White House!”
It was an unmistakable call for revolution, insurrection.
A masked attendee brought a crude homemade sign which read, “8647 Tough on ORANGE STAINS.”
Meanwhile there was around 250,000 gathered for Trump’s military parade:
The article by Doug Mainwaring in LifeSite news is well worth looking at.
The ABC news analysis on “the Radio National Hour”? The BBC article? Not so much.
Thanks for covering this! Having worked for many international news organisations and every major broadcast network in Australia – except the ABC (apparently I was never quite woke enough) – it's very clear that the insidious agenda to control the narrative using mainstream media is still very much alive and well. It began many decades ago, of course, when you had 20-something-year-old chiefs of staff in newsrooms making important editorial decisions that were once the purview of seasoned veteran news directors.
More recently, the general public has wised up somewhat – but has jumped from the frying pan into the fire: switching from mainstream to social media. Bad actors soon figured out that this could be manipulated as well, and they're having a field day! All the more reason for people to curate their input more thoughtfully.
Thank God for voices of reason and fact-checking such as yours!