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.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!