This year's March for Life in Canada had a record attendance of just under 7000 people. The organisers have meticulously counted numbers during the past few years because of routinely inaccurate media reporting. This year most media reports "estimated" numbers at about 3500. CBC National News said “about 1,500 demonstrators” gathered on the Hill. CTV News affiliate Ottawa's CJOH said "Hundreds of people from across the country marched from Ottawa's St. Patrick's Basilica and then gathered on Parliament Hill." (They got the route wrong too.) Many other major national and local papers just ignored the march all together. Here's a LifeSite photo of the crowd:
I remember as a teenager first being angered at the media coverage after a major pro-Life rally in Hyde Park - they did the same, "estimating" numbers at about a fifth of the genuine total. Until recently, there has been little we could do to counteract this bias...But with the advent of so-called ‘citizen journalism’ and such popular websites as YouTube, bloggers are pushing news media towards greater accountability. This year, the mostly under-thirty crowd of 7000 was filmed with hand-held cameras and cell phones and the digital videos were posted to the internet, making it impossible even for such diehard pro-abortion mainstream news outlets as the CBC to ignore.The quotation is from Hilary White's article:
Bloggers Trump Mainstream Media With YouTube Videos of Canadian March for Life.
This follows up a previous article by Gudrun Schultz and Steve Jalsevac
Mainstream Media Ignores, Falsifies Canadian March for Life Attendance
The LifeSite article has a list of videos on YouTube. Here is one:
And here is a powerful speech by a pro-life Canadian MP
One thing that strikes me is the importance of getting a video camera to carry to events that are likely to be misreported. Off to Amazon...
4 comments:
We need something like a March for Life in this country....
Fr. Pavone was speaking at this event too. You just need to come to Canada Fr. Tim. ;-)
But yes, the blogs are powerful. Unfortunately, the battle is not won yet.
Thanks for reporting this. I was one of the people who created a video. We are really starting to fight back in Canada due to the internet. It's about blogging, getting the message out and getting connected so we can mobilized.
One year at the March in Ottawa, we rounded a corner and found Jim Hughes, the National President of Campaign Life Coalition and a very nice and down-to-earth chap, calmly standing at the corner counting heads with his little clicker-counter thingy. It became a game every year after that to try to tease him into losing count. Never worked.
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