Drudge links to this story from the San Francisco Chronicle about a town hall meeting in Oakland, California, where Sean Penn and Rep. Barbara Lee gathered with “hundreds of people . . . to denounce the war in Iraq and call for an immediate withdrawal of American troops.” Staff writers Carolyn Jones and Cecilia M. Vega set the scene in the second paragraph:
Then, toward the bottom of the piece:
How the heck do they get 800 and then, three hundred words later, report that even the organizers wouldn’t claim such a turnout? Maybe the Chronicle just has a soft spot for one of their own. After all, the paper credentialed Penn and sent him to Iraq in 2003. The writing was terrible–“The fatigue of the trip hits me in the back of the head like a rocket-propelled grenade”–but the paper sent him to Iran to cover the election there two years later. And now the paper not only inflates the crowd numbers, but does him the favor of ignoring what he actually said:
If that doesn’t make a crowd of any size “enthusiastic and occasionally boisterous,” I don’t know what would.
