Beck ignores Time's untruths list to complain that it ignored the tea parties

One day after freaking out because Time magazine did not include the tea party protests in its memorable moments of the past year, Glenn Beck complained on his Fox News show that "Time magazine didn't even recognize them in any way, shape, or form of even existing this year."

But Beck's claim ignores the fact that Time did recognize the tea parties - one week earlier in its year-end list of the Top 10 Untruths.

Checking in at No. 7 on Time's list was the effort by tea party rally organizers to inflate the attendance level at its 9-12 rally in Washington, D.C:

When all was said and done, the point of the tea-party march on Washington on Sept. 12 was not to compare estimates on the number of attendees but to show that grass-roots anger about government spending could lead to a full-on demonstration in the nation's capital. But there were a few snags along the way. One problem was that a group that helped organize the protest, FreedomWorks (slogan: "Lower Taxes, Less Government, More Freedom"), vastly overestimated the number of participants. FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe stated onstage at the rally that ABC News had reported that 1.5 million were in attendance. Later, when the network said it had made no such claim, Kibbe apologized on his blog for the erroneous attribution, which by then had been repeated in other reports. "With a dead iPhone, I had been shown tweets from a number of different folks behind the stage citing the ABC estimate," he said. "They didn't say it. I regret misrepresenting the network." Most other mainstream news outlets had been sticking to estimates of "tens of thousands" or "between 60,000 and 70,000." (To avoid political battles like the one that occurred in this case, Washington officials do not release estimates.) Meanwhile, the thornier issue was whether the grass-roots tea-party protests should be characterized as AstroTurf, i.e., a sophisticated campaign orchestrated by lobbyists. Tea-party participants denied the allegation.

Then again, if Beck were to acknowledge that Time called out the event organizers for vastly overestimating attendance at 1.5 million, he'd probably need to address his own dubious claim -- citing a university he could not recall -- that 1.7 million attended.