Flipping through channels, I saw CNN promoting a piece on the anti-Sheehan protesters, and since I’d blogged on their coverage of Sheehan’s protest as a liberal-bigwig-sponsored PR stunt, in all fairness I should see how they covered the other side. They didn’t show much of the ranks of protesters, but they showed enough so that if you were looking and thinking, you could see that they were receiving big support as well–professionally made banners, PR coverage, the works.

So would CNN cover that just like they did for the Sheehan protest?

The answer: of course not. The story they did on Sheehan didn’t cover Sheehan or any single protester; the majority of the story was on the politics. But when covering the other side, they went for the soft-center sob story.

There was not a single mention of Republican-generated PR coverage, of media consultants, of donations by conservative backers–not a single word.

Instead, they focused on one protester, a neighbor in the area, a young woman whose father is serving in Iraq as a chaplain. They covered her home life, the family’s sacrifices, how reasonable and fair she was, and how she supported the president 100%.

Not a word about the other neighbors who fired shotgun blasts over the Sheehan protests while they were in a prayer vigil, or the one who ran over a long line of crosses with American flags memorializing the war dead.

It was about a cute girl with a military chaplain dad and a soccer mom and their personal sacrifice.

Damn that liberal media. They never give the other side a chance.