WaPo's Bacon defends coverage of 9/12 rally by pointing to coverage of 2002 anti-war rallies

Washington Post reporter Perry Bacon, defending the paper's front-page coverage of Saturday's right-wing rally in Washington, DC:

We covered extensively the huge crowds Obama drew at events last year, where I assumed everyone was voting for him and we also covered anti-war protests back in 2002, where I'm guessing there were few Bush voters. The rally was important in that it was the one of the bigger shows of this anti-Obama movement that seems, interestingly, to be in some ways outside of the official Republican Party.

Incredible.

As Eric noted yesterday, The Post put Saturday's roughly 30,000-person rally on the front page. In 2002, the Post buried a 100,000-person anti-war rally in the Metro section.

The inconsistency in coverage is bad enough. But it borders on the offensive to see a Post reporter justify the paper's front-page coverage of last weekend's gathering of conservatives by pointing to their coverage of anti-war rallies.