In a January 25 post on the Media Research Center's Newsbusters blog, Matthew Balan criticized CNN.com's write-up on the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., because it supposedly “downplayed the number of attendees as merely in the 'thousands.'” But Balan's colleague Clay Waters described the march's numbers in the exact same terms on MRC's own website. Waters wrote today that there were “thousands who marched in frigid weather” at the rally.

This isn't the first time Newsbusters has tried to criticize “liberal media bias” -- but instead inadvertently criticized their own website.

From Balan's post criticizing CNN.com for “downplay[ing]” the rally's numbers as “merely in the 'thousands.'”:

CNN.com's write-up on the annual event downplayed the number of attendees as merely in the “thousands.”

[...]

Eric Marrapodi's article about the pro-life walk on CNN.com on Monday evening mentioned how "thousands of abortion opponents joined Monday afternoon in a cold march on Capitol Hill," but as NewsBusters's Tom Blumer noted earlier on Tuesday, "around 10,000 Catholics...met to pray for an end to abortion at a pro-life vigil Mass in D.C. on the eve of the annual March for Life." Most, if not all of those, attended the following afternoon, and that morning, "more than 27,000 young people attended [a Mass at the Verizon Center and a “parallel event” at the D.C. Armory], which began after dawn and included readings by youths in hooded sweatshirts and jeans, contemporary praise music and dozens of priests hearing confessions in the sports arena's dining area," as the Washington Post reported on Monday. So just between those three events (with some possible overlap), tens of thousands of people attended, if not over 100,000, if you go by pictures of the event.

From Clay Waters' MRC.org post describing “the thousands who marched in frigid weather”:

Tuesday's [New York Times] print edition did not feature an actual news story of the thousands who marched in frigid weather, just two photos at the top of page A12 with the caption “Abortion Opponents Rally On the National Mall,” above a single three-sentence paragraph description that concluded with a link to eight photographs online. But that's actually a vast improvement; the Times in print absolutely ignored the March for Life in 2010 and 2009.

The Times is far more eager to publicize protests in support of liberal causes, no matter how puny. When four or five protesters march in support of the doomed Dream Act to grant amnesty to illegal immigrant students, the Times is there. [emphasis added]