How To Estimate A 9/12 Protest
In the passion of yesterday’s 9/12 protests against, um, something, Jay Rosen noticed that Michelle Malkin was crowing about attendance of 2 million at the protest in D.C. Also known as one out of every 130 people in America.
Sensing that perhaps that number was a little high, he traced the error back to a conservative Twitterer named @pinkelephantpun, who claimed to have gotten the figure from ABC News. (Which, faster than Joe Wilson can amend an apology, ABC News denied.) In fact, ABC estimated the crowd, on the high end, at about 70,000.
That’s a pretty big difference. How big? It’s two orders of magnitude. As King Kaufman notes, it’s like confusing Vermont with Texas. More concretely, it’s akin to confusing the number of pixels in the two images below.
That’s some error!
(N.B. This image, believe it or not, was condensed for size. For actual image showing visible pixels, please see the original post at pbump.net.)
Philip Bump is a technology and communications consultant in New York City who writes “The Wayback Machine,” an occasional column for Mediaite about the intersection of history and the Internet. Follow him on Twitter here.
11 comments
shootfromthehip says: Michelle Malkin is not a journalist. Why anyone would believe anything she says is beyond me.
CaptainAmerica says: The left never had a problem with making up numbers for liberals showing up on the mall.
Poor David Shuster wanted to diminish the crowd on his twitter account:
# I’ve covered rallies at dc capitol for 20 years. When the crowd goes only as far as 3rd st, it is 50,000 or less.4:57 PM Sep 12th from web
# Freedomworks says their dc demonstration attracted 30,000 people. Park police official says that is being “generous.”4:31 PM Sep 12th from web
Of course David also claims he is a journalist! LOL When will he realize he’s no different than Cafferty or Olbermann.
ImNotBlue says: Wait for David to send another Tweet. By the end of the day, there will have been 6 people, and they were just lost tourists. But then again, the guy has such a strong reputation for being wrong, why should we be surprised?
shootfromthehip says: The media hardly covered any of the massive multiple anti war protests during the early part of the Iraq War. So much for the Republican’s oft repeated “liberal media” meme. The MSM looked at them as nutjobs just as they look at this new (smaller) crowd of teabaggers at nutjobs, too.
And Captain America, I trust a guy who has covered protests for 20 years and actually lives in DC to estimate crowd sizes bsaed on experience and quotes from officials more than you (or those who stand to gain from inflating numbers of attendees).
ImNotBlue says: They didn’t cover them? Really?
And all this time, I had no idea Cindy Sheehan was on my television for reasons OTHER than a protest. BTW, what’s she doing now? Oh, she’s still protesting, but the MSM doesn’t cover her anymore… how interesting…
shootfromthehip says: They covered Shehan only to make her the “crazy” face of the movement. They never covered the actual big rallies in D.C.
ImNotBlue says: At what point did they say Shehan was “crazy?” What are you talking about?! She was a hero, and the news media camped out with her!
And the DID cover the DC rallies… that’s how Susan Roesgen of CNN got in trouble. She laughed at the “Bush is Hitler” signs at an anti-Bush rally, but started yelling at a tea-party protester for the SAME THING!
Yikes, what world were you living in 8 years ago?
ImNotBlue says: Wow… MediaMatters points to “bias in the media” with evidence from ONE newspaper. Wow.
Except for this “update” which perhaps you missed:
UPDATED: Credit goes to the NYT for being consistent. In 2002, the newspaper kept its article about the massive anti-war rally off Page One. Today, it kept its article (but not photo) about the much smaller 9/12 rally off Page One.
But really, lets find credible news sources to quote from, please… not advocacy organizations. They’re data is not to be trusted without independent verification.
CaptainAmerica says: The media only turned on Sheehan and began to portray her as being crazy when she began pondering running for Congress and challanging on the of the MSM’s favorite peeps.
Eshvish says: For the record, this fella has done an extensive study on the crowd estimate for this particular protest
http://deathbymedia.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/912-washington-dc-tea-party-rally-crowd-estimation/
It’s mind boggling how many hours he has put into this with all the data he managed to gather with mere photos and videos. Some people just have too much time on their hands. I don’t understand why his work has largely gone unnoticed. He estimates that roughly around 130k attended the protest.
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